The Yak Shave

By Sean Griffin/PenelopePhippen

What's The Yak Shave about?

Each week our hosts will discuss their development experiences. We'll talk about Ruby, Rust, Go, and anything else that has drawn our interest this week. Subscribe below to be notified when new episodes are published!

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The Yak Shave episodes:

04.01.2019
14: TIL database connections aren't cheap
A background job should be a function. So, putting more things in it is always a good idea! Sean announced that he shipped background jobs for crates.io. It's been in production for more than two weeks, and no issues have...
03.25.2019
13: "As much time as I can without reading C" with James Coglan
Do you use Git practically every day, but have no idea how to implement it? Need a more accessible and easier way than reading original source code to understand how it works? Want to know how to rebuild Git in...
03.18.2019
12: A new cat named Merb!
Sean and Sam talk about debugging a memory leak with Crates.io when upgrading to Rust 1.32 that could only be reproduced in production.
02.26.2019
The Parse.y Hole
Derek Prior, engineering manager at GitHub, joins Sam to talk about what they’ve been working on these days. Derek’s doing GitHub projects that can’t talk about. But, he did mention that GitHub recently shipped small-scope changes to its issue templates....
02.18.2019
10: Deleting all of a user's comments is probably a bug
Ruby's language development is off the charts. Also: we talk about programming. Sam and Sean discuss Ruby, auto-formatting, and whether Hash Rockets are good. They bring other languages, such as Go, Rust, and Elixir, into their formatting discussion. Also, Sam...
02.11.2019
9: Tools That are Well Built Will do it for us!
We’re still time travelling, Sam has since left DigitalOcean, but in this episode, he talks about his experiences there. Sean talks about his experiences managing the crates.io team, and incidents on an open source project with volunteer time. Sam talks about...
02.04.2019
8: Vulnerability
This episode was recorded on October 21st 2018. We thought it best to get this to you, even though it's a little stale :) Remember that dark, scary time in October 2018 when GitHub went down? Sean is joined by Derek...
12.04.2018
It's not a Pyramid, it's a Diamond
Sean and Sam talk all about testing. Sam created an ideal testing pyramid based on personal experience and from talking with test thought leaders, such as Justin Searls.
10.23.2018
6: The Podcast After the Last Podcast
This week Sean is joined by former cohost Derek Prior. After a brief reflection on the end of The Bike Shed, we discuss WebAssembly and what it means for the future of the web as well as native sandboxing. Finally,...
10.11.2018
5: A Series of Anecdotes
In this episode, Sean and Sam discuss the challenges of feedback cycles in organizations, how we could benefit from more feedback in open source, and some idiosyncrasies regarding libcurl and the HTTP/1.1 specification.
10.05.2018
4: Folks are in a Stink
In this episode of The Yak Shave, Sean gets Sam's opinion on dealing with documentation. They share tips, tricks, and workarounds regarding queryable structures, databases, APIs, languages, documentation, and more to address these users. Then, Sean offers Sam advice on...
09.28.2018
3: Almost 0% Chance it's a Bug
In this episode of The Yak Shave, Sean shares the most nightmarish debugging experience he has had in a long ...
09.20.2018
2: This is Fine
In this episode of The Yak Shave, Sean and Sam discuss their experiences with incident management, the difficulties of getting an on-call rotation right.
09.05.2018
1: A Brave New World
In the inaugural episode of The Yak Shave, Sam and Sean discuss the complexities of asynchronous background jobs, when it's appropriate for an application, and the challenges involved with building a job queue from scratch.

What's The Yak Shave about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Yak Shave episodes:

14: TIL database connections aren't cheap

13: "As much time as I can without reading C" with James Coglan

12: A new cat named Merb!

The Parse.y Hole

10: Deleting all of a user's comments is probably a bug

9: Tools That are Well Built Will do it for us!

8: Vulnerability

It's not a Pyramid, it's a Diamond

6: The Podcast After the Last Podcast

5: A Series of Anecdotes

4: Folks are in a Stink

3: Almost 0% Chance it's a Bug

2: This is Fine

1: A Brave New World