Fatih Pense's Blog

Useful Idioms (for Developers and Startups)

Wednesday, January 7th, 2015

Lists for technical terminology exists on the net. However I couldn’t find one which is curated for startup or software development perspective. My best example is “technical debt”. Please suggest your favorite idioms!

Technical Debt: It is like financial debt. Used for technical solutions that are fast and easy now. But you have to pay later(maybe with interest) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1258775/what-is-technical-debt

Hype:  Something that is overrated by media or people when in fact it isn’t beneficial that much.
FUD: Fear,Uncertainty and Doubt. “By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well known products, an established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its own, regardless of the relative technical merits.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

Bus factor: “A measurement of the concentration of information in individual team members”
“The number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated to make a project unable to proceed”. (Higher is better)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Dunning–Kruger effect: “It is a psychological effect in which people don’t realize their level of knowledge on a subject. People who know little about a subject think that they know more than they actually know.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Developer happiness: When you are deciding which language to use etc. you should also consider happiness of developers and optimize for that also. (I am studying Industrial engineering, the word “optimization” makes me cringe…)