Bike Shaving #

An open source enterprise by Brian Kim.

bikeshedding /ˈbaɪkˌʃɛdɪŋ/ n.: The disproportionate allocation of time and attention to trivial details. From Parkinson’s Law of Triviality: a committee approves a nuclear reactor without comment but argues for hours over what color to paint the bike shed.
yak shaving /ˈjækˌʃeɪvɪŋ/ n.: The performance of a sequence of seemingly unrelated small prerequisite tasks to accomplish a larger goal. Coined by Carlin Vieri at the MIT AI Lab after an episode of Ren & Stimpy. You need to deploy your application, but first you need to fix the build script, but the build script depends on a package that requires a newer runtime, but upgrading the runtime breaks another dependency, and before you know it you're reading a three-year-old GitHub issue at 2 AM.
bikeshaving /ˈbaɪkˌʃeɪvɪŋ/ n.: The pursuit of elegant technology through obsessive attention to prerequisites and material conditions. While the safety bicycle required metallurgy, rubber vulcanization, and precision machining, it also required ingenuity and an intuitive understanding of human kinematics and gyroscopic motion. So too does this process play out in the development of new software.

Projects #