www.globalnerdy.com/2010/05/09/new-programming-jargon
Global Nerdy Tech Evangelist Joey deVilla on software development, tech news and other nerdy stuff New Programming Jargon by Joey deVilla on May 9, 2010 Every field comes up with its own jargon, and oftentimes subgroups within a field come up with their own specific words or phrases (those of you familiar with Microsoft Canada's Developer and Platform Evangelism Team know that we have our own term for "broken", named after one of our teammates who is notorious for killing all sorts of tech gear).
A question recently posted on Stack Overflow asked for people to submit programming terms that they or their team have coined and have come into regular use in their own circles. I took a number of the submissions and compiled them into the alphabetically ordered list below for your education and entertainment.
Banana Banana Banana "Bluth's Frozen Banana" stand from "Arrested Development" Placeholder text indicating that documentation is in progress or yet to be completed.
FxCop complains when a public function lacks documentation. Example: /// <summary> /// banana banana banana /// </summary> public CustomerValidationResponse Validate(CustomerValidationRequest request, bool ...
Barack Obama A project management account to which the most aspirational tickets - stuff you'd really like to do but will pobably never get approval for - gets assigned.
Configuration Programming / Programmer Someone that says they are a programmer but only knows how to hack at configuration files of some other pieces of software configuration to make them do what they want.
DOCTYPE Decoration When web designers add a proper DOCTYPE declaration at the beginning of an HTML document, but then don't bother to write valid markup for the rest of it.
Drug Report A bug report so utterly incomprehensible that whoever submitted it must have been smoking crack. The lesser version is a chug report, where the submitter is thought have had one too many.
Duck Rubber "Devil Duckies" surrounding a lone rubber "Angel Duckie" A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product.
It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.
Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation. Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "That looks great.
Ghetto Code Ceiling fan kludged by hanging a box fan from the ceiling A particularly inelegant and obviously suboptimal section of code that still meets the requirements. Joey's note: I've written ghetto code before, but that's because I'm street, yo!
writes: We found as we were developing a framework component that required minimal knowledge of how it worked for the other developers. We would always phrase our questions as: "What if Jimmy forgets to update the attribute?" This led to the term "Jimmy-proof" when referring to well designed framework code.
Reality 101 Failure Solar-powered flashlight The program (or more likely feature of a program) does exactly what was asked for, but when it's deployed it turns out that the problem was misunderstood and the program is basically useless.
Refuctoring The process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself.
The Sheath The isolating interface between your team's (good) code, and the brain-dead code contributed by some other group. Joey's note: I've heard the term "shim" used for this sort of construct. I've used the term "transmogrifier" for this sort of thing.
Smug Report A bug report submitted by a user who thinks he knows a lot more about the system's design than he really does. Filled with irrelevant technical details and one or more suggestions (always wrong) about what he thinks is causing the problem and how we should fix it.
Stringly-Typed i can has string A riff on strongly-typed. Used to describe an implementation that needlessly relies on strings when programmer- and refactor-friendly options are available. Examples: * Method parameters that take strings when other more appropriate types should be used * On the occasion that a string is required in a method call (eg network service), the string is then passed and used throughout the rest of the call graph without first converting it to a more suitable internal representation (eg parse it and create an enum, then you have strong typing throughout the rest of your codebase) * Message passing without using typed messages etc. Excessively stringly typed code is usually a pain to understand and detonates at runtime with errors that the compiler would normally find.
But in fact, due to a bug, one explodes and the other is nearly dead. Then all users give you feedback, that this is perfect this way, and you mustn't change it.
Microsoft Education Competencies: Humor Microsoft has a site devoted to covering skills and competencies of their employees -- here's the page that describes the "humour" competency.
The State of Web Development 2010 A survey of professional web designers and developers. It includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today's web professionals employ.
Learning jQuery - Tutorial Roundup for Beginners From the article: "Here's a roundup of the 10 best tutorials and series of articles online, that will be your very best resources for getting to grips with the awesome jQuery library."
He says that thanks to "helicopter parenting" and a culture foucsed on building their self-esteem, they've been condition to get rewards and recognition for just showing up and believe they're all above average.
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