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jargon

  • AMoD: Autonomous Mobility on Demand
  • bikeshedding: The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively.
  • cargo cult: software containing elements that are included because of successful utilization elsewhere, unnecessary for the task at hand.
  • Conway's Law: "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
  • Cunningham's law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.
  • cybernetics: "Cybernetics" comes from a Greek word meaning "the art of steering". Cybernetics is about having a goal and taking action to achieve that goal.
  • [deterministic]: In mathematics and physics, a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system. A deterministic model will thus always produce the same output from a given starting condition or initial state.
  • DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system"
  • idempotent: Idempotence is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science, that they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.
  • KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid!
  • martian packet: A Martian packet is an IP packet which specifies a source or destination address that is reserved for special-use by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
  • monotonic: A function or set of values that always increases or always decreases.
  • PRD: product requirements document
  • teleology: Teleology or finality is a reason or explanation for something in function of its end, purpose, or goal.
  • transitive dependency: a functional dependency which holds by virtue of transitivity among various software components. (EG: a dependency of a dependency)
  • warrant canary: Text on a website that states the company or person has never been served with a secret government subpoena. Once the statement is removed, the users can assume the company or person has been served and has been told not to talk about it.
  • YAGNI: a principle that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary.
  • yak shaving: Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.