Software Slang

These are a few of my favorite slangs

Software engineers have great slang – funny turns of phrase that are often oddly relevant to education as well. I mentioned one of them in two earlier pieces: tech debt.

Here are several more of my favorites:

Timebox: Let’s say we want to add a leaderboard to Mathchops, so that students can have a little fun competing against each other while they practice. We’d want to timebox that – limit how long we spend working on it – because it might end up turning into a much larger project than we want. Suppose there are privacy concerns, or it’s hard to make the design look good on desktop and mobile, or it’s hard to find good groups (so that one player doesn’t win all the time). If one of those issues (or some other unexpected issue) pops up, we may find ourselves neglecting other, more valuable projects (like Grammarchops!).

Students have to timebox their efforts on standardized tests as well. You should never be spending much more than a minute on an ACT math question on your first attempt, for example. The same is true of questions on every section on the test. If you’re spending more than a minute, you may find yourself stuck on that problem 2 or 3 minutes later, making it hard to do your best on the rest of the questions.

Tutors also have to be very aware of how much time they’re spending on each topic during sessions. If you’re covering both sections of the SAT, for example, you may be tempted to spend a long time on those difficult module 2 reading questions…but if you spend too long, you may miss out on the more-lucrative questions, like grammar, transitions, notes, and various math topics.

Magic Incantation: Sometimes when you’re working with third party software, you’ll need to word a command in a very specific way or it won’t work. There isn’t necessarily any obvious logic to writing the command one way or another – you just have to know. I think students and parents often think there are magic incantations in test prep (see this footnote¹ for a trick that will improve your score by 200 points!), but there really aren’t. Various calculator functions might be the closest parallel.

Repro: If a user reports an error and I pass it on to Matt or Jon, the first thing they’ll probably ask me is, “Can you repro?” They want to know if I can reproduce the error. If so, they can always fix it. But if I can’t, then they probably won’t be able to do anything about it. The idea is that it’s important to directly observe the error, because otherwise you’ll just be guessing, and you may mess something else up in the process of ‘fixing’ the issue.

Something very similar happens with time management problems on reading tests. Students will often arrive at a session having completed and graded a reading section. You may think a conversation will provide enough information to determine why they missed a certain question. You ask what steps they took, what logic they used, and show them the correct steps and logic. But this assumes that they are reliable narrators – do they remember what they did or thought? And if the actual issue is time management – taking too long to read the passage, double-checking answers, reading the questions too fast, not taking enough time to find information – then you will most likely have to observe the error in action, via a live drill. Otherwise, you may assign homework that reinforces bad habits, or even worsens the time management issues.

Scrumlord: The positive version² of this term refers to a person whose job is to keep the bureaucracy away from engineers, so that they can do their jobs. They protect them from endless meetings, memos, and updates, so that they can immerse themselves in ‘deep work’ and produce great software. I think tutors sometimes play this role for students, protecting them from overzealous parents³ who are tempted to micromanage the student, going so far as to assign extra work to the student or make them feel bad about recent performances. A good tutor scrumlord handles important communications with parents, keeping them informed and confident.

1. Kidding, there aren’t any tips like that.

2. I see on the internet that some people use this term as an insult…maybe I misunderstood, but I only heard it used in this positive way.

3. Sorry parents! Most of you are great.