Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Yak

Yak shaving day/Yak shaving week is a quarterly deep work mini offsite for the release engineering team.

yak 2 the future

🇩🇰 Skald's Yak Shaving Lore

Hwæt the Release Engineering team in days gone by
and the managers that coached them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of their brave campaigns…

📖 Definitions

Yak Shaving

"yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task."

Yak Shaving Day/Week/Month/Year

A mini developer-driven quarterly offsite where we cancel meetings and focus on deep (and often neglected) work as a team

🐃 Yaktributes

Yaktributes

Portmanteau "Yak" and "Attributes"

A good yak (task for a yak shaving day/week/month/year). See our Yak shaving workboard on phab.

1. Is obtainable within the allotted yak shaving window
2. Has few external dependencies; i.e., if it's obvious you'd be blocked waiting for another team or individual not participating in the yak shave: probably best to avoid (unless that's the scope -- get to the blocker point)
3. Is not a quarterly goal, necessarily -- don't feel obligated to work on quarterly goals unless that's what your heart most desires
4. Is Self contained. If it's a small idea with a big potential impact that you're excited to work on: perfect

BONUS: Work with each other if you're into that. Shared hacking time is fun (for some...I hope 🥺)