A short glossary of tech industry terms
A short glossary of tech industry terms
Agile: 1. an attribute of any team, no matter how dysfunctional; 2. [see SCRUM]
Altcoin: a slow spreadsheet [see Blockchain]
Big data: spreadsheets that won’t fit in excel
Big data science: a silicon valley themed porn parody of the Insane Clown Posse film “Big Money Hustlers”
Blockchain: [marketing slang] slow linked list
Business logic: whatever actions the software is intended to perform (as opposed to the much greater number of actions forced by poor design decisions)
CGI: 1. a shell script that prints HTML; 2. pixels
Cloud, the: a computer you rented from Amazon or Microsoft
Cloud computing: the pyramid-selling of cycles
Container: slow chroot jail
Containerization: a packaging method wherein a script is packaged with an entire linux distribution [see Electron]
Crypto: 1. (obs.) cryptography; 2. an altcoin
Data: spreadsheets
Data mining: using grep on your http logs
Data science: using grep on your http logs with a minor in statistics
Deep learning: brute force statistical modeling, performed by non-staticians, using third party code on rented computers [see Cloud, Cloud computing, Data]
Disrupt: to undercut the competition by mislabeling employees as independent contractors & paying them less than minimum wage
Elastic: using more rented server resources than planned
Electron: a packaging method wherein a static copy of a website’s cache is packaged with a complete duplicate copy of the user’s web browser
Engineer time: the duration of the period during which a developer browses stack overflow instead of browsing reddit
Enterprise: any business large enough to have two help desks that don’t know about each other’s existence
Enterprise-grade: slow and broken
Enterprise ready: once reached the front page of HN
Ethereum: a mechanism for making normally-free voluntary distributed computing schemes cost money
Full-stack developer: a software engineer who falsely believes that the web browser is the entire computer
ICO: (orig. Initial Coin Offering) a tupperware party for men with frosted tips
Internet of things: [formerly: ubiquitous computing, ambient computing, environmental computing, internet of everything, the networked home, home automation, everyware, smart home, smart building, intelligent building, intelligent architecture] putting linux on your toaster
IPO: the transfer of a failing business’s debt from venture capitalists to employees and other rubes
Mechanical turk: [see Disrupt]
Portfolio: 1. a spreadsheet of debt owed to failing businesses; 2. a collection of invalid patents not yet invalidated by the examiners; 3. Atari’s entry into the PDA market
Reactive: the property of a website wherein it is made possible to view it on a smartphone-sized screen by adding so much bloat that it is no longer possible to render it on a smartphone CPU or cache it in a smartphone’s RAM
Revision control: a ledger containing the mistakes of youth
Script: a small segment of someone’s shell history
SCRUM: a machine that turns engineer-time into meetings
Software engineer: a programmer with a bachelor’s degree
Software engineering: writing code that doesn’t need to exist, but writing it in Java
Startup: a small business with no plans to become profitable
Uber: a taxi service [see Disrupt]
Venture capitalist: a problem gambler
Venture capital: a collection of high-risk payday loans
Visionary: someone who repeats other people’s ideas while wearing a turtleneck
Waterfall: [see SCRUM]
Web 2.0: simulating native applications by live-editing a rich text document
Web application: [see CGI]
World wide web: rich text documents on other people’s computers