Frist psot

2025-06-11 | tags: meta

(Note: this post has since been subsumed into the about page.)

This blog is a place to put various “notes to self”. Partly as a record of things I’ve found while digging into a topic, partly as a form of rubberducking to clarify my thoughts, and partly as a way to exorcise them from my head when, as is generally the case, they were a distraction from whatever I was supposed to be doing. They’ll generally be byproducts of the learning process, and so aim to be informative rather than groundbreaking. Initially the subject matter will be mostly Rust, but who knows what else may creep in later.

For anyone confused by the name of the blog, it’s a reference to yak shaving with a side allusion to a promotional slogan (“Never Knowingly Undersold”) used by a UK retail chain. Yak shaving is very much going to be the theme here; being free to pursue those temptingly hirsute bovines wherever they may roam, razor glinting keenly in the crisp clean air of the open steppe.

The format is going to be fairly minimalistic. I love the concept and values of the quiet web, and my ideal design for a webpage looks suspiciously like Reader View but with slightly more yaks. There will be absolutely no ads, trackers, analytics, cookies, or JavaScript. Anything that’s not subject matter should stay out of the way as far as possible.

I do like HTML’s newish <details> element as a way to capture optional digressions without breaking the flow of the main topic. I think of these as sub-yaks, fractally budding from the Great Universal Mandelyak.

The header image had as its starting point this fine photograph by Alexandr Frolov, whose user page has a badge to show that he owns a camel. The rest of us are wasting our lives.

It’s been through a lot of changes though. (The image, not the camel.) That yak has seen things.