Medium Glossary

Internal terms, externalised

With the release of our growth framework, I realised that lots of people outside Medium wouldn’t know what many of the examples were describing. When putting the rubric together, we deliberately used very concrete projects from Medium’s history as examples, so that our engineers had a clear understanding of the kind of complexity or scale we’d expect, but now that it’s public, some of those require a little more explanation. They also give a sneak peek into Medium’s culture!

Series Reader

This is the project that enabled Series to be read on Medium’s native apps.

ResponseScreen

Our standardised technology for rendering a screen within our single page app.

PostMorpher and Delta System

The technical foundations of our editor, described more fully in Why ContentEditable Is Terrible.

ETL

Extract, Transform, and Load — the art of moving large amounts of data from one form and place to another.

BBFD

Our deployment system, based around containers, which lets us move code into staging and production very quickly. The meaning of the acronym is secret, known only to a couple of devops engineers.

Buggle

Our native media service, named for this song. Originally, it was designed to support native video for Series, but it was extended to later support audio too, rendering the name nonsensical.

Gotham

Our Golang framework, which enables rapid creation of Go Services with standardised components. It was created around the time that Batkid took San Francisco by storm, and begins with “Go” as all good Go projects should.

Textshots

The service that supports highlighted screenshots of text.

Project Retros

We run retros after every reasonable sized project. During these, we take time to ask “What went well?”, “What could we have done better?”, and “What would be silly not to do next time?”, then we disseminate the results throughout the company so we can all learn from them.

Hightower

The project that supported expanding our Partners Program to get creators paid. It took a bunch of people a couple of months to bring this to fruition, and is an example of a major project with lots of moving parts. It was named after the library in Oldtown in Game of Thrones, which was a huge repository of great information.

10/7

This was a major company launch in October 2015 where we announced multiple new initiatives. Other meaningful launch dates have included 4/7, 6/1, 3/22, and most recently 8/22.

Check-in and Check-out

Most of Medium’s meetings start with a check-in round, where we make space for everyone to say what is on their mind, one-by-one. This helps everyone to get focused on the meeting, encourages shy or introverted people to talk, and understand each other’s frame of mind. We typically finish with a quick check-out where everyone comments on how the meeting went, to help keep our meetings healthy, inclusive, and efficient.

Eng Briefing

A standard meeting held every week where engineering leads give one minute updates that are pertinent to the rest of the team. Modelled loosely on a meeting format described in McChrystal’s Team of Teams.

Tension

A holdover from Holacracy, we define a tension as being the difference between where we are and where we could be, whether positive or negative. Basically just an opportunity or a weakness.

Zelda Fitzgerald

An integration test that ensures we continually improve our coverage of Medium endpoints. It defines a maximum number of untested routes and we aim to decrease it to zero over time. Tests run alphabetically, and this name was chosen so it runs last. An astute reader will notice that this means these particular kinds of tests do not run concurrently.

The Watch

At Medium, the on-call rotation is staffed by product engineers, with support and tooling from devops. Every product engineer goes through this rotation. It helps build empathy for SREs and mindfulness when writing code. It used to be called the SWAT team, standing for Site Wellness, Availability, and Triage, but we didn’t like the connotations of militarised police (plus one of our staff was swatted), so we renamed it after the altogether more genial Ankh Morpork guards in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Heartbleed

A pretty serious SSL vulnerability that affected many sites around the world, big and small. We put an initial fix out for this inside a couple of hours, then implemented remedial steps.

Hatch

Our internal hosted version of Medium, doubling as a staging environment, and repository of company lore. Pretty much all of our ideas, plans, idle thoughts, kids photos, and research is on Hatch. It’s an awesome resource for understanding Medium’s history and culture.

FAM

Friday Afternoon Meeting, a standing All Hands, where teams present what they’ve been working on, people tell stories, and we get to ask Ev and the executive team any question we like.

Interviewing Rubric

Medium has a thorough guide for interviewing, which we’ve made public and released under a CC license. Engineers applying for a job at Medium should read the rubric before they interview with us, so they understand how they’ll be graded.

Medium2

The name of the monolithic NodeJS codebase that powers most of Medium, which replaced an original prototype many years ago.

Holacracy

The organisational system we used at Medium in the early days. It has since been superseded, but it influenced how we think about accountability, distributed authority, priorities, and innovation.

Medium Lite

An initiative within engineering to move Medium to a more modern platform, based on React, Apollo, and GraphQL. Currently powering small parts of the site.

Floodgate Academy

An awesome program that provides opportunities to people from underrepresented communities to do sysadmin/devops internships.

Frankenmeeting

A particular meeting type, suitable for small teams, consisting of three parts. First, a 15 minute retro describing what was good, bad, or meh this week. Then, 15 minute planning for the following week where backlog tasks are taken or assigned. Then a 30 minute tactical meeting to discuss next steps for any currently held tensions. It’s called a frankenmeeting because we bolted three kinds of meeting together, but it works pretty well, is very efficient, and actually quite a lot of fun.

Guilds

Groups within engineering that are stewards for certain areas of the codebase, and responsible for developing and maintaining excellence. At various times, we have had guilds for Web Client, Data, and Mobile. They meet regularly, define curricula for training engineers, and provide domain expertise for design and code reviews. Originally modelled on the Bauhaus.

Group Lead

What we call people managers at Medium. We separate technical leadership from people leadership, and try to arrange that an engineer’s tech lead and people lead are different people. This helps ensure engineers always have a consistent champion, mentor, and advocate, who has some separation from the day-to-day stresses of shipping code, and will be there for them even if the engineer moves to another team.

Medium-U

Our onboarding and training program, which we use to get new hires up to speed, and to cross-train engineers.

Brown Bag Series

Lunchtime talks by internal or external speakers, which anyone on the team can attend and learn from.

Code2040

An awesome organisation dedicated to getting black and latinx students into the industry, and keeping them there. Medium has partnered with Code2040 for four years and we love love love them. (And we’ve hired 6 or 7 engineers who are alumni of their fellows program!)

Prod Ops

A standing meeting where product and eng leads coordinate product initiatives. The writeups of the meeting are made public to the rest of the company to keep everyone informed.

Onboarding Bingo

When new hires arrive, we give them a bingo sheet with things to mark off that they do or find, or standard phrases that they might hear around the office (like “tension resolved”).

Secretary

A temporary and rotating role for someone who takes notes during a meeting for wider dissemination. It’s a pretty intensive activity, requiring concentration and touch typing. Under Holacracy it was actually a pretty low-key power role in a team, because Secretaries could strike down rules created within their team if they interpreted them as harmful or violating the company constitution.

Shepherd

A dependency injection system for Node which was developed in-house. We kind of overused it early on, and had to do lots of tedious work to refactor code to use it more effectively.

Boxen

A system for setting up and keeping development environments in sync, created by Github. We don’t use it anymore and replaced it with Brew and a couple of shell scripts.