Our profession as software engineers is governed by terminology which includes a whole bunch of acronyms that make life even more difficult than it is already. Here's an open-source, easy-to-use online resource that helps make sense of complicated tech terms.

How many times have you attended a meeting or watched a presentation or read a manual which were riddled with such jargon unknown to you? Wouldn't an accessible and quick lookup guide help in such situations?

Well wish granted. Here is the "Dev Encyclopedia" made by a single Python backend developer who thought along those lines and set out to assist those bewildered by

providing clear, concise explanations for all those tricky tech terms

Dev Encyclopedia is just a simple statically served web site with a plain interface full of jargon that is sorted alphabetically and grouped by category. As such you can find what your looking for by just browsing through the site or using the autocomplete-enabled search functionality.

The database of terms is exhaustive, encompassing many SE disciplines. It ranges from ACID to APIs and Antivirus, from Big O to Deep Learning and LLMs, from MVC and up to Zombie processes.

When you pick the term you are interested in , say "Zombie Process", you are presented with a little pop-up that contains a very short explanation with the addition of graphics when available :

A Zombie Process is a defunct process in a computer system that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table. This occurs because its parent process has not yet read its exit status. Zombie processes can accumulate and waste system resources if not properly cleaned up.

If more info is required there are links to more references.

Of course, one could argue that in this age of AI and LLMs, a dictionary like this is antiquated since you can just fire ChatGPT and get what you need. This might be true, but where an resource like this excels is it directness; I don't want to wait for the LLM to formulate its answer which could span multiple paragraphs. I need the information asap and as straightforward as possible.

Yet another advantage over a chatbot would be that maybe I don't want to look up something specific but instead want to casually browse the site to discover terms that I was totally unaware of just for educational purposes, or discover terms related to a topic that I'm doing research on.

So there you have it. Next time you're in a meeting and people start throwing acronyms around to play smart, don't despair. Just get your phone up and reach for Dev Encyclopedia.

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Dev Encyclopedia

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