yak-shaving.txt

Once upon a time there was a junior developer who had a simple ticket
assigned to him to make a new checkbox. The straightforward implementation
required a schema change to implement. Being a fastidious fellow, he wanted to
follow the proper procedure and searched the wiki.

The wiki described a procedure that required he run a particular script against
the qa database server and add the output to his ticket. He looked over the
script and found that it would not run on his OSX box.

After editing the script so that it would run on his laptop, he submitted the
changes as a diff, but since he had recently joined a new engineering team he
had never been given a login to the qa database server, so he asked for help in
#ops.

In #ops he was told that the process described in the wiki was out of date and
he needed to bring an offering of a home brewed IPA made from the Schema
Migration IPA recipe on file at the local home brew store. Though this seemed
oddly demanding for a simple schema migration, the developer sighed and drove
to the home brew store.

The home brew store employee helped the developer with the malt and the wheat,
but told the exhausted developer "The hops this brew calls for are no longer in
stock, they are rare as they are only grown on the southern foothills of the
Himalayas". The developer sighed and went home to pack.

Three weeks later, in Tibet, the developer stood, shivering, before an ancient
monk who asked him "What do you seek?" The developer said "The hops that grow
on the south side of the mountain". The monk replied "Bring me the beard of the
yak that roams the hills and I will give you what you seek."

Later still, the developer wrestled the yak, struggling mightily to immobilize
the head with one hand while trimming the beard with scissors in his other
hand. A small girl walked up on the scene and asked the developer "Why are you
shaving that yak?" the developer replied "So that I can migrate the schema".

The developer became senior.