The Definitive Guide to Things You Probably Didn't Need to Know
"Every codebase eventually grows its own mythology.
Yagnipedia simply writes it down before anyone forgets
what the acronyms stood for."
Yagnipedia is a satirical software encyclopedia — the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets Wikipedia, applied to the pathologies, rituals, and recurring delusions of the software industry.
It catalogs 520 entries across principles no one follows, anti-patterns everyone ships, phenomena that defy explanation, and entities that probably shouldn't exist.
| Ritual (in Vienna) / Anti-pattern (in a Dutch office machine) | 1 | entries |
| Profession (self-declared) | 1 | entries |
| Adaptation | 1 | entries |
| Principle | 56 | entries |
| Ritual | 22 | entries |
| Tool | 29 | entries |
| Discipline (disputed) | 1 | entries |
| Technology | 95 | entries |
| Standard | 1 | entries |
| Meta | 6 | entries |
| Category | 1 | entries |
| Condition | 5 | entries |
| Virtue | 3 | entries |
| Law | 1 | entries |
| Phenomenon | 89 | entries |
| Entity | 84 | entries |
| Protocol | 4 | entries |
| Practice | 24 | entries |
| Equipment | 3 | entries |
| Artifact | 19 | entries |
| Cut | 18 | entries |
| Technique | 12 | entries |
| Anti-pattern | 25 | entries |
| Concept | 4 | entries |
| Ceremony | 2 | entries |
| Ingredient | 13 | entries |
Entries are written with the gravity of an academic paper and the accuracy of a barroom anecdote. All severity ratings are clinically meaningless. Natural predators are aspirational. First observed dates are approximate to the nearest mass delusion.
Illustrations are rendered in the style of Sergio Aragones — the marginal cartoons of MAD Magazine — because software deserves to be laughed at from the margins.
Yagnipedia is the encyclopedia wing of the Lifelog, a mythology-driven devlog where real engineering work is told as epic comedy. Wiki articles are cross-referenced with episodes, forming a living web of footnotes, citations, and increasingly elaborate inside jokes.
The Lizard advises. The Squirrel proposes. The encyclopedia documents what went wrong.