You know those phrases your team uses constantly, but outside of the context of those few people, these words make absolutely zero sense? It's more than technical lingo.
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These are at least globally recognizable lingo. No, what I'm talking about is two categories:
- The secret words that only your team knows, based on specific parts of the application you work on
- The nomenclature built up around your technology that is actually incorrect
Secret Words
A few years ago we had a specific set of features, it went by a business name that was long and impossible to remember, so we gave it a pet name. Everywhere you saw this feature in the code or the dev docs, it would be referenced as Fat Kookaburra. It's eccentric maybe, but these kinds of jokes really pass the time.
Many decades ago, I worked at a dating site company. I know, I'm sure you're jealous now of all the crap we had to deal with there. I was married with kids, and they paid me in Peanuts. About a month in, we found a folder called moo which had a bunch of code that didn't look like it was supposed to be there. So m'buddy James deleted it to see what would happen. The CEO walked in about 3 minutes later and demanded to know what happened to the singles search - the key part of the entire application: searching for people was missing! We put it back and started the rewrite 2 days later because we deleted the "moo" folder.
We also have pet names for parts of programs that our users don't know about. They're appropriate and accurate, but are usually an abridged version of what the users know. This is totally normal.
Incorrect Words
It's so funny how teammates can get lost in certain types of language, with certain words that have overloaded meanings to them. For example, today one of my coworkers kept saying "the prod" instead of just prod. She didn't think anything of it. It's likely that I'm the only one who did. These tend to cluster around certain people.
I call this semantic drift.
What is real-time? I think we here, on dopefly, know what that means - real time is right now. As it happens over there, it also happens over here, only delayed by moments. Well, some older factory applications at Boeing use the phrase "real time" to mean "probably today, no promises." Then they have the gumption to call it "real time." It's silly but I've been trying to educate us into the future for years now.
I've been working heavily in .NET over the past decade. Two short stories here:
- .NET Core came out in 2016. I picked it up at v2 in 2017, they skipped v4 to not get confused with the classic .NET Framework v4 (cir. 2010; final version is 4.8.1). Anyway, There was never a .NET Core 5.0, they renamed it ".NET 5.0," not .NET Core, not .NET Framework. Just
.NET. Of course that doesn't mean the community uses that new name. Tons of people call it "dotnet core eleven." - A fun project at Microsoft was called .NET Aspire, and is now just called "Aspire". It's a fluent (describe the end-result in code) service (great for microservices) orchestrator (wiring things together) for local dev or deployment with a sweet dashboard. It outgrew its .NET foundations and is just a great tool now. I use it to boot up my dev environment in one click! If you call it ".NET Aspire" on x-twitter, Microsoft engineer David Fowler will appear out of the ether and correct you - "It's Aspire, not .NET Aspire." He's done it dozens of times.
We had some "job" records in our system, synced from another one in the factory, but they were apparently deleted in the source system and somehow we weren't notified. Their existence was haunting us, and they had a poltergeist nature: very hard to detect. We started calling them "ghost jobs" and it stuck. Now there are a couple classifications of "ghost jobs" and sometimes other records - not even "job" records - are also called "ghost jobs."
Freebie: Don't Use Inappropriate Language in Code
Once we had a guy that was debugging a form post for a login. He was having a bad day or something, and couldn't figure it out. He was visibly frustrated with the form for a few hours. Finally he got it working by the end of the day, saved his changes, and pushed it up.
No problems for about a month.
Then one day it broke again. We don't know why, but a customer called us and told us he was getting an embarrassing error, and sent a screenshot. The specific error was:
THE_F####NG_LOGIN_VARIABLE is undefined.
All I can offer you is this bit of wisdom: do better than our former employee.
I realize this ended up just a fun opportunity to tell stories. That last one wasn't even mine (thanks Alan!). What vocabulary does your team use?