Fleebin-Flobbin

Greetings and Salutations Prattle Ppl:

So it has been about a year since I last posted to convey having removed Prattle from an increasingly totalitarian liberal loon social media platform and now it’s time for another update.

Throughout the past year, I’ve been practicing my front-end web dev endeavors and otherwise pursuing software-related minutiae but paused to include for you some software developer jargon that can just as easily crossover into the mainstream vocab of the decidedly non-developer vernacular. See how many terms you can identify and then incorporate into your daily communications.  Impress your friends and vie for that promotion today!

Deprecate

Code that is still part of the overall application and remains in place for the sake of  backwards-compatibility.  e.g. a deprecated relationship

Rubber Ducking

A method of debugging code taken from The Pragmatic Programmer (1999).  The act of carrying around a rubber duck (or some other object) and explaining your code line-by-line to it in order to understand it better.  This sometimes happens in personal relationships when one side refuses to communicate and the other has to constantly second-guess the other side’s increasingly fucked up behaviors.

Reality 101 Failure

The program, or more likely a feature of a program, does exactly what was expected but when deployed becomes annoyingly obvious that the problem was misunderstood and is basically useless.

Happy Path

A default scenario that experiences no exceptions or error conditions and leads to successful execution thereby generating a positive response.  Contrasted with an exception path that results in reality 101 failure.

Nopping

Taken from assembler language NOP  meaning no-operation. Similar to a nap but doesn’t imply sleep, just zoning out.

Copypasta

Code which contains direct or nearly direct copy-and-paste.  As in a copypasta Dear John letter.

Yoda Notation

Two parts of an expression are reversed from the typical order in a conditional statement. A Yoda condition places the constant portion of the expression on the left side of the conditional statement. The name for this programming style is derived from the Star Wars character named Yoda who speaks English with a non-standard syntax. As in,  Let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, do not.

Egosurfing

Scanning the web for one’s own name.  May be to monitor personal brand but is typically for narcissistic purposes.

Jimmy

A generalized name for a clueless n00b.

Bikeshedding

A futile investment of time and energy in a discussion of marginal technical issues such as worrying about where the bike shed will go on a property that doesn’t exist.

Unicorny

An adjective to describe a feature that’s so early in the planning stages that it might as well be imaginary.

Stress Puppy

One who requires stress in order to function well yet voices dissatisfaction with it.

It Will Be Fun They Said

For those who follow this blog, I sincerely regret the rather extended hiatus.  No, that’s not entirely accurate.  As evidenced by the POB Twitter feed embedded on this page,  I haven’t been gone at all, but rather, just active on other channels.

So what has POB been up to this whole time?

A variety of things, most prominently, learning front-end web development which as it turns out doesn’t really involve what you’re thinking it does –

Not quite.

Here, take a look for yourself.

The glory of JavaScript

Learn front-end web development.  It will be fun, they said.

That’s nice, POB.  I don’t know what I’m looking at but it is quite colorful.

And now for the $64 thousand dollar question on everyone’s mind…

So when will I write my own original content again?

That’s a really good question.  I’m always good for a retina-searing diatribe against state and federal agencies that are allegedly consumer-oriented in nature, most notably, California’s own ironically named Employment Development Department whose main job (as far as I can tell) is to determine exactly how many levels it can take Dante’s Hell to while proclaiming (with a straight face) that it is helping the state’s unemployed workers.  For those who missed it the first time, and for those who want to relive the fun, follow the link to the article in question – EDD Tenth Circle of Hell.

I don’t have a target date of my next piece.  All I can say is follow me on Twitter so you won’t miss a beat.

Thanks for your continuing support and encouragement.