A Bestiary of Web Jargon
Every field has its own vocabulary for grouping things — a school of fish, a herd of cattle. For web developers, Melanie Sumner has curated a similar collection of collective nouns tailored to the peculiarities of front-end and web work.
Some of the definitions are disarmingly precise. A vanity, for instance, is ten or more domains owned by a single person, where very few are actually in use. A parade describes an RSS feed list so long that you must scroll to see all of it.
The list also captures common developer frustrations with a dose of humor:
- A braintrust is a meeting of company bigwigs who are only indirectly related to a project but retain the power to "swoop and poop" on your work.
- A diatribe is a Pull Request whose comment thread has grown so long that the original scope of the change is no longer recognizable.
- A hot minute is the amount of time spent debugging an issue that turns out to be a simple typo.
- A roost is four or more levels of nesting in Sass.
Other entries are more playful constructions. A gommit is a portmanteau of "group" and "commit" — a single commit that bundles several smaller ones. And a tababyte is a unit of measurement equal to ten open browser tabs in the same window; two tababytes, then, are twenty tabs.
If any of these ring true and you have your own suggestions, Sumner accepts contributions via the project's GitHub repository.
