What colour is your yak? Visualizing developer jargon
Tags: haskell, elmlang, art, jargon
Published: 2020-04-22 17:30:43

---
title: What colour is your yak? Visualizing developer jargon
published: true
date: 2020-04-21 18:05:00 UTC
tags: Haskell, ElmLang, art, jargon
canonical_url: https://blog.fission.codes/yak-visualizing-developer-jargon/
cover_image: https://s3.fission.codes/2020/04/lieve-ransijn-FsJ_vzp_NI4-unsplash.jpg
---
We're creating illustrations for developer concepts, catch phrases, and other jargon. _Yak shaving_ is one of those terms. It's fun to dig into the concepts and learn about their background, teach other people about them, and we get some cool images to use in a number of different ways that aren't just company branding. We have ideas for some new illustrations, we're happy to take other suggestions and have people [vote for their favourites](https://talk.fission.codes/t/vote-for-and-suggest-developer-concepts-to-illustrate/590).

## Bear and Penguin

We had fun last year [sourcing the Bear and Penguin illustration for the Berlin Open Source Salon](https://blog.fission.codes/bear-penguin-bounty-for-boss/). The inner meaning here is that the bear is the coat of arms for the city of Berlin – the "Berliner Bär". The bear is holding a Club Mate drink, traditional drink of German hackers (although I know at one time the Mozilla Vancouver team imported it for their office fridge, too!). And the penguin is the long time mascot of Linux.

![What colour is your yak? Visualizing developer jargon](https://s3.fission.codes/2020/04/bear---penguin-02-2000px-white.jpg)

## Wizards and Snakes

Since then, we've worked with [Bruno Monts](https://www.behance.net/brunomonts), an illustrator based in Brasil, to create a number of other illustrations.

We just released the **Haskell Wizards** series, written up in our [Haskell for Typescript Devs book](https://haskellfortypescriptdevs.fission.codes/appendix/haskell-wizards):

![What colour is your yak? Visualizing developer jargon](https://s3.fission.codes/2020/04/haskell-wizard-trio.png)

[SCREAMING SNAKE CASE](https://blog.fission.codes/screaming-snake-case/) was just a pure piece of fun, with the vaporwave stylings pushed to the max. We did a first run of stickers with this image, and can't wait to come up with t-shirts or other swag with this fun image:

![What colour is your yak? Visualizing developer jargon](https://s3.fission.codes/2020/04/screaming_snake_case-1024.png)

## Vote for developer jargon to illustrate

We're going to get some more illustrations made, and have a couple of ideas already:

1. **Kebab case** wouldn't be vaporwave, but maybe a sort of comic / graphic art – a delicious kebab, dripping sauce.
2. The **Elm programming language** is a favourite of ours at Fission, so vote for this one if you want an Elm-y character in the style of the Haskell Wizards
3. We recently added some [definitions for Yak shaving to our forum](https://talk.fission.codes/t/yak-shaving-programming-term/582). It's only about 20 years old – but of course software development has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, so it's a term that's not well known.
4. **Bike shedding** and
5. **Pets vs. Cattle** are the last two suggestions we have so far.

[Read more about these ideas, vote in the forum for your favourites to get illustrated, or suggest your own »](https://talk.fission.codes/t/vote-for-and-suggest-developer-concepts-to-illustrate/590)

We're working with Bruno now, and will run the vote for a couple of weeks, and then get at least 2 or 3 of the developer jargon ideas turned into high quality illustrations.

_Post header photo by [Lieve Ransijn](https://unsplash.com/@lievemax) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/)_