How to Talk Like a Valley Monk
Phrases I keep hearing in the Bay Area
Allow me to share some phrases I frequently overhear. These aren’t necessarily unique to the Bay Area, but in my experience, I don’t hear them nearly as often back in Virginia.
User churn
Managers love to talk about this one. User gain and involvement is a valuable metric, but minimizing the number of users that leave your product is the other half of the battle.
Are you a committer?
Too many variations of this question were asked in the Cassandra Summit 2013. There’s just something unbelievably god-like about it. That label, “committer” holds one of the highest regards in the world of open source software.
Just do a MapReduce
I stare into their eyes waiting for a punchline as someone tells me this. But no, they’re serious. I always thought of MapReduce as an ugly monolith of theoretical code. Well it may be, but “just do a MapReduce and you’re done”.
Lowest hanging fruit
Sure, this is nothing new, but what really surprises me is that people really do say this. It’s not just another buzz-word entrepreneurs use to sound edgy, but more so a casual and meaningful assessment of the task ahead.
Core value proposition
I hate this phrase, but it’s uttered all the time. Fortunately, everyone here knows how to use it properly.
Send me a diff
Thinking about code as diffs really changes the way you write. Every change you make is scrutinized and perfected. Or should be.
Affordance
I’m not going to lie, this one is completely new to me. Wikipedia suggests the currently used definition is based off afford meaning “to suggest” or “to invite” in reference to designers and those in the field of HCI.
Full stack engineer
A few startup engineers (Imgur, Snapchat) that I befriended rightfully took great pride in titling themselves as masters of the full software stack.
Curated
This is probably the most commonly used word out of everything else in this list. There’s a great debate on whether the power should be given to the user or the service to satisfy the user. Should the product assume what the user will like (Apple), or should the user decide for him or her self?
Premature optimization
This is the biggest no-no emphasized around here. Don’t overly correct your code in a way that it significantly delays shipping. Zuck, in one of his Q&As this Summer, really brought to attention the importance of shipping code when you’re 80% there and fixing it later. Get your code out now, that’s the hardest step.
Bets
Risks, challenges, and new frontiers are best known as bets. This sounds a bit more manageable and ridicules the idea of impossibility.
Run an experiment
Sometimes you should let the numbers make the decisions for you. Comparing effects of a change against a control group wins any argument. The scientific method prevails once again!
