 Awesome. Get to be up here on stage and say silly things. Maybe talk about fire, or how to shave a yak. Who here has heard of the term yak shaving? Yeah, that's most of you. Who here has done some yak shaving this week? Ah, that's a fair number of hands, not as many as I'd expected. For those who don't understand the term and are confused, yak shaving refers to the series of seemingly endless tasks that you have to do. For example, you have to do task A, but in order to first do task A, you have to do task B, but you realize there's a prerequisite for that and you have to do task C. And when I mentioned this term yak shaving to my girlfriend's knitting group, they were mortified. And they yelled at me, you don't shave yaks. And I was like, okay, this is just what we do when we're in the DevOps world. I'd like to introduce you to someone. This is Sophia Weiss. Sophia is an actual yak farmer. She has this wonderful farm down in Ashland, Oregon, which is on the California border. And she graciously shared some tips about raising yaks with me. I'd also like to introduce you to JF Carcada B136. Yeah, cute yak, amazing name, right? Just rolls right off the tongue there. So I asked Sophia about the names, right? Like that's a ridiculous name. And she explained that the first two letters are actually a farm code. It's where the yak was born. And then it's the yak's name. And then there's an ID number. And the ID number actually encodes the year that the yak was born. She also explained that yak farmers track the sire and the dam. That's the father and the mother of the yak. Because tracking the lineage of a yak explains why a yak is the way it is. Not just the physical appearance, like what the fur is like, but also how it behaves. So when you're actually going about your yak shaving, you should track your tasks, not just what it is, but where it came from. What is the higher level goal that this is supposed to unblock, right? When was this made? Who made it? Because without this information, you lose the context of why you're doing that task to begin with. How many times have you done that? You've started on yak shaving and you're doing a thing and why was I doing this? You never know when to stop going down that chain if you don't have the context. Now the group was right. The knitting group was right. You don't shave yaks because yaks grow this thing called down fiber. Down fiber is the super soft hair that's close to their bodies that keeps them warm for the winter. And they use a special tool called an undercoat rake, which is essentially a brush and that helps separate that fur out from the outer guard hair, which is the coarse hair on the outside of the yak. And so when you separate it out, it allows you to make the super soft yarn that knitters love. So you don't shave yaks because when you shave a yak, well then all of the hair comes off. You get that coarse outer hair mixed with the soft hair and you can no longer make that really nice yarn. It can be super enticing when you're working on tasks to build that perfect solution, architect that perfectly well-built application, but you don't need that to unblock your tasks. You need to learn to start to brush your yaks just like real yaks, only do enough to unblock what you were originally working on. Otherwise, you're just gonna end up creating more yaks as you try to build these perfect solutions. So I was talking with Sophia and she did mention that farms, just like technical organizations, there's always way too much to do. Way too much to do, not enough people to do it. They have incidents just like we do, unplanned incidents that cause extra work. And doing capacity planning, to have workers on hand really helps. Having the right infrastructure really helps. But even with all that, it all boiled down to she said that if you're dealing with fancy yaks, when you're dealing with complex systems, sometimes you just end up having to shave yaks. But the one thing that's notable about this is that shaving yaks does not mean what we think it means. It does not refer to the endless chain of tasks. It's this, it's flipping that table over, burning everything down and starting over. It's what I call extreme refactoring. Just do it again. Because you end up with naked yaks. Naked yaks have to grow hair. So as you start thinking about yak shaving, number one, track your yaks, track your tasks, understand when you should stop. Brush them, only do enough and then really avoid that shaving because shaving does not mean what we think it means. I'm Jason, I work at Datadog. We build observability tools. We have a ton of yaks that need some brushing. So if you're looking for new opportunities, if you like yaks, come talk to me later. Thanks.