Yaklab is named for the glorious labor of shaving the yak: the quiet, essential work that turns rough intent into reliable craft. We hold that software is not a monument but a practice, never finished, only refined. Each pass removes a little friction, reveals a little truth, and leaves the work cleaner than we found it.
What We Believe#
We treat our work as a choice made visible: shaped by purpose, executed with care, and worthy of pride without needing applause.
Physics is sovereign. We respect the unglamorous limits - time, entropy, bandwidth, latency, cost, and attention - and design so truth, not wishing, governs outcomes.
We wield machines; we do not answer to them. Tools may amplify judgment, but they cannot replace it. We refuse to surrender agency to automation, metrics, or models, and we remain accountable for what we ship.
We seek the simplest shape that holds. Fewer moving parts, clearer seams, truer names. Elegance is often subtraction, not addition.
We treat failure as part of the design. Errors are citizens, not accidents to be hidden. We surface failure early, handle it deliberately, and design recovery paths. Reliability is not optimism; it is preparation.
What We Build#
Infrastructure that can be understood, operated, and trusted:
- Kubernetes clusters across AWS and bare-metal, running Talos Linux
- GitOps with ArgoCD - everything as code, everything in git
- Cilium for networking and security
- Grafana Stack for observability - if you can’t see it, you can’t fix it
We assemble power from small, composable parts. Cohesion within, loose coupling between. Systems endure when pieces can change without shattering the whole.
Open Source#
We do not hoard credit; we spread it generously, because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Our infrastructure configurations and tooling are open source where possible.
Find our work on GitHub.