Yak shaving. It is weird, because sometimes a serious refactor is virtually indistinguishable from jack shaving, it looks the same from the outside and it feels

Yak shaving. It is weird, because sometimes a serious refactor is virtually indistinguishable from jack shaving, it looks the same from the outside and it feels the same from the inside. The only difference is that the yak shaver often labours under the illusion that what they are doing is indeed important, while the refactorer knows what they do is important. I think in programming it is easy to get lost in scale. We all know these videos where you scale in from the universe into a single atom. In programming tou operate at similar dieseperate scales. You need to have the high level perspective ("I want to get to this mountaintop!"), the mid level perspective ("I chose to scale the mountain via that route") and the detail level perspective ("I put that finger into that nook of the rock to my left and shift my weight slightly to the right..") and of course there is also a tooling perspective ("What kind of gear do I need to scale that mountain?"). When you operate just at the detail level it can happen that you end up on the wrong mountain, branch off into the wrong route etc. To make things worse you can also have a meta-perspective ("How will this help me beyond the mountain I am currently on?").