‘Iacta alea est’

Death of a Yak-Shaver

Poots Prevails over Procrastinatory Perfectionism

A lot of yaks are celebrating tonight; the perennial shaving season is finally over. And it’s probably about time, given my balding herd have endured the incessant, vigorous stroke of my razor on their backs for more than a decade.

Ten years means a lot of yaks, and to hasten publication, some of them go unapologetically and unashamedly unshaven. Consider this inaugural post as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the blogosphere—the very least before launch.

For getting to this stage, I have several people to thank; both for lampooning my lethargy and having a pop at my paralysing perfectionism. In no particular order:

• Eric Ries, @ericries: : for making MVPs fashionable. You should read his book about lean startup for a new way of looking at product development.
• Philip Lee, @asmega: for being the force of logic and incontrovertibly stating that starting a blog is as simple as purchasing a domain name and pointing it to a static file on GitHub Pages.
• Alastair Roberts, @zugzwanged: for impulsively forming a pact with me to each start a blog and have our first posts written by 2359 on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011. He promptly demoralised me by anouncing his first blog post within the hour.
• James Dean Shepherd, @jamesds89: for having a gentlemen’s agreement similar to the above which I inexplicably reneged on. His post was about his first week in my old job.
• Ryan Singer, @rjs: for his tweet, “Can’t say it enough: Shipping means shipping something you don’t like. Cruel truths!”
• The GitHub Ship It Squirrel: for telling me to shi… follow the link.
• Antonio Cangiano, @acangiano: for writing a book about technical blogging, providing timely, practical impetus.

So thank you guys, that was a lot more straightforward than I had built it up to be. Starting isn’t the problem anymore… I’ve given myself a whole new herd of yak to shave.

—2359, Sunday 23rd October 2011.