Buzzword bingo
The tech industry is full of jargon and technobabble and as a developer I wade through these on a daily basis. Some of them really get my goat however, so I've gone ahead and vented what I believe the true meanings are.
- Agile
- A way of working that usually involves absolutely no plan of what to do whilst everyone smiles and rocks in a chair pretending that everything will be okay.
- Blue chip
- A phrase used by recruiters to convey that the company you'll be interviewing with is a corporation and probably doesn't care much about your personal values or development.
- Framework
- A set of largely legacy functions and support that are designed to make your life easier whilst simultaneously making your development time longer, knowledge base smaller, introducing masses of code bloat, reducing performance, and lower employability because you don't use it.
- Game changer
- Something that in no way changes any games.
- Greenfield
- The lack of any sort of existing codebase or specification and an effective licence to fail targets and overrun deadlines.
- Grid
- A posh word that attempts to hide the fact that main-content and sub-content were actually a form of grid in the early 2000s, but you're definitely much better at spelling them correctly now.
- Hack
- When used in the media, this word represents something which is almost always not a hack.
- Organic
- Biology; something that is comprised of organs or organelles. Basically anything that goes into your mouth, unless you're a vegetarian, vegan, hippy, or on a new-age health kick – in which case it's food that hasn't been grown with chemicals that a machine has sprayed over it. Ironically, water itself is a chemical. Currently used in tech to represent something which sorts itself out, like your ranking in Google. Ironically, requiring a lot of work to achieve the desired effect.
- Paradigm
- Another posh word that some directors and project managers use to make themselves sound like they know what they're talking about.
- Shipping code
- Chiefly American. Used to describe the old fashioned and convoluted process whereby code is printed out, packaged, and delivered across the world via boats. The rest of us deliver code.
- Vanilla
- A word I was mocked for not having heard before a few years ago, despite having been a programmer for 20 years. This is a code word for ‘can actually program without relying on dodgy frameworks', and has become more apparent now that a vast array of JavaScript and CSS frameworks are bastardising the internet. Vanilla is my flavour.
- Web app
- A yuppie contraction of website application, which is something that does not exist. As we know, an application is something that is compiled per operating system and runs by itself without relying on another application interpreting and rendering code, the latter being a website.