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Last active August 12, 2020 08:04
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Software Engineering Terms That Need Translation

canary (canary test, canary deployment): In software testing, a canary is a push of programming code changes to a small group of end users who are unaware that they are receiving new code. Because the canary is only distributed to a small number of users, its impact is relatively small and changes can be reversed quickly should the new code prove to be buggy. Canary tests, which are often automated, are run after testing in a sandbox environment has been completed.

greenfield: In many disciplines a greenfield project is one that lacks constraints imposed by prior work. The analogy is to that of construction on greenfield land where there is no need to work within the constraints of existing buildings or infrastructure.

BCDR: Business continuity and disaster recovery

Cattle-not-pets: You should treat your servers as cattle, not pets. Servers are immutable. Once created they cannot be changed. To be changed they need to be generated.

Mozilla: The name "Mozilla" was already in use at Netscape as the codename for Netscape Navigator 1.0. The name stood for "Mosaic killer", as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser.

foobar: The foo RFC https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3092.txt

Cargo cult programming: Use blindly a pattern or technology because it has been used successfully elsewhere.

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