# A short glossary of tech industry terms Agile: 1. an attribute of any team, no matter how dysfunctional; 2. [see SCRUM] * * * ### 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 By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [October 24, 2018](https://medium.com/p/4b5f9fef8db3). [Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/a-short-glossary-of-tech-industry- terms-4b5f9fef8db3) Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.