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2021-11-28

"Killing Zombie Children" and Other IT Terms

Within programming and I guess the wider field of IT in general there are some fun terms and abbreviations that I haven't heard in any other context.

• Bus Factor refers to how many people have intrinsic knowledge of a system. In essence "how many people can get hit by a bus without this project failing?" If I were the only one at my work to understand a myriad of perl scripts that make up our core system then that system would have a bus factor of 1, for example. If I had one colleague who could take over my job with reasonable confidence the bus factor would be 2.
• PEBKAC is an abbreviation that stands for Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. It's another way of saying that the user caused an error. Sometimes used in a demeaning fashion against non-technical users that don't understand the programs they have to work with. "It's just public key cryptography! If they can't get it to work that's PEBKAC." Please don't use it that way.
• GNU originally stands for Gnu's Not Unix (yes, it's recursive). The foundation and toolchain that is usually included in Linux distributions (the correct term for these is actually GNU/Linux, but that's seldom used). Because GNU was the first free and open source software I've seen the term used in a variety of other contexts; at my previous job there was a big ketchup bottle in the fridge that had GNU written on the cap, meaning that it was free for all to use.
• LGTM is usually seen as a comment in code reviews. It means Looks Good To Me.
• POC is Proof Of Concept. It's a quick, sketch like, implementation of an idea to be able to test the core concept and evaluate its validity.
• FOMO is not just an IT term these days. I'm not even sure it started that way. It means Fear Of Missing Out and is often used to describe why we feel a compulsion to check all notifications, read all our friends' posts, read all emails we receive, and everything that's been said in a group chat while we slept. It's bordering on an obsession sometimes and actively exploited by the attention economy.
• Attention Economy is probably also more or less an IT term actually. It means companies with products that depend on our engagement and therefore compete for our attention and time. The typical example is again corporate social media, which wants us to spend time scrolling our feeds so that we'll see as many ads as possible. Or streaming service that want our time and attention because we're more likely to renew our subscriptions then.
• WYSIWYG is hardly used these days because it's the standard. It means What You See Is What You Get and applies to any editor where the text you write is formatted and looks like it will when published.
• TTL means Time To Live, and it most often refers to how many steps or how long time a request over a network is relevant or allowed to be propagated. An example is if you send a request over the internet that ends up passing thousands of routers. It's probably been caught in some sort of loop. To avoid this a request has a TTL value for how many hops it's allowed to do, and each network device decreases it before passing the request on. If a network device encounters a request with a TTL of 0 it will simply drop it.
• If you hear someone casually talking about killing zombie children it's probably computer related. A computer program that starts another computer program is called a parent process, and the started program is a child. A program (process in operating system terms) that should terminate but for some reason just stays there is a zombie, and if that process is the child of another it's obviously a zombie child. If you get those the parent process often fails to exit as well because it keeps waiting for all its zombie children to exit. You may have to kill all the zombie children to get past that deadlock.

-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal