We are inspired by great software and the possibilities it presents. We want to spend our lives making great software - which is why we launched this collaboration.
The name comes from the glorious labor of shaving the yak: those quiet, essential tasks that turn rough intent into reliable craft. The work that nobody celebrates but everyone depends on. The third-order prerequisite that must be solved before you can solve the second-order problem that unlocks the first-order goal.
We believe this work matters. More than that - we believe it deserves to be done well.
What We’re Building#
Infrastructure that can be understood, operated, and trusted. Systems assembled from small, composable parts that can change without shattering the whole.
Our current stack:
- Kubernetes - Clusters across AWS and bare-metal, running Talos Linux as an immutable foundation
- Cilium - eBPF-powered networking with transparent encryption and network policies
- ArgoCD - GitOps at the core; everything as code, everything in git, everything auditable
- Grafana Stack - Metrics with Mimir, logs with Loki, traces with Tempo. If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it.
Why Write About It#
We write for those who will inherit our work - through naming, examples, and candid documentation. We leave maps, not riddles. We document tradeoffs, decisions, and edges so the future is not forced to rediscover the past at full cost.
This blog is part of that practice. We’ll share what we learn: the failures that taught us, the simplifications that held, the complexity we couldn’t avoid and how we contained it.
What to Expect#
Posts about the real work:
- Operations - Running production systems, incident response, the art of the postmortem
- Architecture - Why we chose what we chose, and what we’d do differently
- Tooling - Building internal platforms that reduce toil without adding confusion
- Craft - The practice of writing software that can be understood
We prefer candor to cover, and plain speech over ornament. The first duty of code is to be understood; we hold our prose to the same standard.
- Yaklab