The language of silicon dreams and stack overflows.
An unintended feature that makes your software do something hilariously or catastrophically wrong. The word comes from an actual moth found in a 1947 computer, which means the very first bug was literally a bug, and it's been downhill ever since.
Either a website where developers copy-paste solutions written by strangers in 2014, or a programming error that occurs when a program eats all available memory. Both types cause developers to stare blankly at their screens, just for different reasons.
Someone else's computer that you pay rent on, marketed with imagery of fluffy sky formations to distract you from the fact that your data lives in a warehouse in Virginia. Moving to the cloud means your problems are now someone else's problems, for a monthly fee.
A software development methodology that replaced long, painful development cycles with short, painful development cycles called sprints. The only thing that actually moves fast is the deadline. Comes with its own priesthood of certified Scrum Masters.
Application Programming Interface: the digital equivalent of a restaurant menu -- it tells you what you can order without making you watch the kitchen catch fire. When an API breaks, every developer suddenly becomes a detective and a therapist simultaneously.
Ancient code written by developers who have long since left the company, taking all knowledge of its inner workings with them. Touching it is like playing Jenga with dynamite -- every change might bring the whole thing crashing down.
A version control system that tracks every change to your code, preserving your mistakes for all eternity like a digital fossil record of bad decisions. Mastering Git requires approximately the same amount of time as learning an ancient martial art.
The accumulated cost of all the shortcuts, quick fixes, and "we'll refactor it later" promises that pile up like credit card bills you keep meaning to pay. Every codebase has technical debt; the only question is whether yours requires minimum payments or full bankruptcy.
Code so tangled and intertwined that following its logic requires the same skills as untangling Christmas lights in the dark. It's written without structure, maintained without hope, and understood by absolutely nobody, including the person who wrote it yesterday.
To release code into production, an act that ranges from mundane to terrifying depending on whether it's Monday morning or Friday at 4:59 PM. Every deployment is a trust fall between the developer and the universe.
A developer who works on both the front-end and back-end of an application, which is a polite way of saying one person doing the work of two for the salary of 0.75. The mythical unicorn of tech hiring.
Minimum Viable Product: the absolute least you can build before showing it to humans, which somehow always ends up being the final product. It's the software development equivalent of serving someone a raw potato and calling it a restaurant soft launch.
A distributed ledger technology that promised to revolutionize everything from banking to banana tracking, and has so far mostly revolutionized the electricity bill. It's the answer to a question nobody asked, delivered on a whitepaper nobody read.
A software vulnerability that is discovered and exploited before the developer even knows it exists, giving them zero days to fix it. It's the cybersecurity equivalent of finding out your house has been robbed by reading about it in the newspaper.
A culture where developers and operations teams work together in harmony, much like cats and dogs would if you put them in the same room and told them to collaborate. In practice, it means one person does both jobs for the salary of neither.
Software whose source code is freely available for anyone to use, modify, and argue about on GitHub. It's built by volunteers, maintained by guilt, and funded by the desperate hope that someone will eventually click the "Sponsor" button.
A pre-built foundation for software development that saves you from reinventing the wheel, then buries you under 40,000 wheels you didn't ask for. Choosing a framework is like choosing a religion -- it comes with strong opinions, devoted followers, and holy wars.
An emergency code change deployed to fix something that's broken in production right now, usually written in a state of controlled panic. A hotfix is the software equivalent of performing surgery on a moving train.
A fixed time period, usually two weeks, during which a development team tries to accomplish everything they promised in sprint planning and achieves roughly 60 percent of it. Named after a running metaphor, but feels more like a marathon through quicksand.
Reverting to a previous version of the software because the new version set something on fire, either literally or figuratively. A rollback is the "undo" button of production, and pressing it is always accompanied by a mixture of relief and shame.
User Interface and User Experience: the art of making software look pretty (UI) and making it actually usable (UX), two goals that are constantly at war with each other. UI/UX designers are the diplomats of tech, negotiating between what developers can build and what humans can tolerate.
A security system that guards your network like a bouncer at a nightclub, except this bouncer checks packets instead of IDs and has zero tolerance for suspicious port numbers. It keeps the bad stuff out and occasionally keeps the good stuff out too, just to be safe.
A framework within Agile methodology that organizes work into sprints and meetings that are definitely not meetings but "ceremonies." It features roles like Scrum Master, which sounds like a martial arts title but mostly involves asking people what they did yesterday.
A container orchestration platform so complex that understanding it fully is considered a personality trait. Named after the Greek word for helmsman, which is fitting because you'll need divine navigation skills to configure it correctly.