Shako Attempts To Automate His Own Yoga Practice
An article about Shalva "Shako" Beridze · Filed under: Convergence · Yoga
It was inevitable. Two forces of comparable magnitude, operating in the same small flat for years, were always going to meet.
In the winter, Shalva “Shako” Beridze — manual QA engineer and self-styled Tibetan yoga master — announced that he was going to automate his yoga practice.1
The concept
The stated goal was a script that would announce each pose, time the hold, and log the session, freeing him from what he described as “the overhead of remembering the sequence” — a sequence consisting of six poses that he has performed every morning for several years.
Colleagues pointed out that he already knew the sequence. He agreed that he knew the sequence. He explained that knowing it was “not scalable.”[citation needed]
Development
The project was scaffolded on a Saturday. It has the full Beridze signature: a confident folder structure, a configuration loader of surprisingly high quality, and no functionality.
Development halted at the timing module, where Shako encountered a problem he had not anticipated. To time a hold, the script needed to know when the hold began. To know when the hold began, it needed input. To provide input, he had to reach over to the laptop, which required leaving the pose.
He spent, by his own admission, a full morning attempting to solve this — a morning in which he did no yoga at all, on account of being at a laptop.2
Proposed solutions, in order
- Voice control. Abandoned after the microphone kept triggering on his breathing, which the script interpreted as a command, which was — as he noted at the time — “a little on the nose.”
- A fixed schedule. Rejected on the grounds that it does not respond to how the body feels that day, an objection he raised in a tone of deep spiritual conviction about a project he had started in order to remove exactly that kind of judgement.
- A foot pedal. He does not own a foot pedal. This did not stop the solution being seriously discussed for two days.
- Doing it manually. Adopted. Immediately. Without comment.
Outcome
The project sits in the home directory with the others, bringing the confirmed total to five. It is the only one whose failure he will discuss openly, because — and he is right — it is genuinely funny, and he realised it before anyone else did.
The yoga practice continues every morning, on time, unautomated, in silence, exactly as it did before.
Asked whether he would return to the script, he was quiet for a moment, and then gave the only answer available to him.