June 16, 2026
Shave now, ship later
But yak shaving is fun
He built a simple blog the hard way—and the internet is weirdly cheering him on
TLDR: A blogger tried to make a simple site and accidentally built his own publishing system from scratch, a perfect example of “yak shaving” — getting sidetracked by endless side tasks. Commenters loved the joke but also turned it into a bigger debate about whether making things is about enjoying the process or just finishing fast.
A blogger set out to make a personal website and, in the most gloriously relatable twist possible, ended up building almost the entire thing from scratch. What began as writing posts by hand turned into creating his own system to turn plain text into web pages, then a tool to package and publish them. In other words: the classic internet spiral known as yak shaving—starting with one small task and somehow ending up miles away, covered in metaphorical fur.
But the real spectacle is in the comments, where readers turned this into a mini culture war about how people make things. One camp was instantly nostalgic and delighted, with one commenter thrilled to finally connect the phrase “yak shaving” to the old Ren & Stimpy gag that inspired it. Another dropped the big hot take: this is basically the split in programming now—people who love the messy journey versus people who just want results right now. That’s less a comment and more a declaration of civil war.
Then came the self-dragging. One reader confessed they now have endless freedom to do this on personal projects… and still haven’t finished anything. Ouch. Others steered straight into meme territory, posting a random yak clip from Malcolm in the Middle and joking that shaved yak hair is actually expensive luxury wool, so maybe this whole thing is secretly profitable. The mood? Half earnest philosophy, half chaotic yak fandom, with everyone recognizing one painful truth: sometimes doing it the hard way is inefficient, unnecessary, and absurdly fun.
Key Points
- •Simon Park built his blog without using established static site generators and eventually created his own static site generator from scratch.
- •The article defines “yak shaving” as a chain of related tasks that drifts away from the original goal.
- •Park cites examples of yak shaving from LangDev IRC and Seth Godin to illustrate the term.
- •According to the article, the phrase was coined by Carlin Vieri at the MIT AI Lab after he saw the Yak Shaving Day episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show.
- •The article links yak shaving to software teams’ tendency to build systems from scratch instead of using existing tools, especially under limited time and budget.