Warning: This blog post comes from the point of view of a non-programmer who has had to quickly come to terms with the whole bowl of alphabet soup that is programming jargon.
- “We need to create and drop in the SFX.”
- “We need more TDD.”
- “The wifi P2P is acting up again.”
- “UPnP”
- "EOF"
- "FRP"
- "Post RCM about SRP."
- "I need a high DPI device."
- "Using control+shift+F is a DGA."
Have you heard of PCMCIA? It stands for “People can’t memorize computer industry acronyms”. And, it’s the truth. Every day that I’m in the studio someone introduces me to another acronym that I don’t understand and won’t remember. I write down as many of them as possible so that the next time I hear letters mentioned in that configuration, I can inconspicuously (or very conspicuously) flip through the pages of my notebook and figure out what people are saying as the programmers continue their conversation. The problem is that I’m constantly bombarded by these acronyms. I mean, really, even the name of our group gets shortened into a TLA! When we chose our name, we realized that Space Monkey Studio is “SMS” so we added the tagline “Message and data rates may apply” and were highly pleased with our cleverness.
So, here’s my question to all of the programmers out there: How long did it take for you to unscramble the mess that is computer industry jargon? Is there any possibility that in one semester I can memorize enough to hold a coherent conversation with a programmer (and without my notebook)? Do you have a favorite TLA that I should know about? Leave a comment and let me know.
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