Tech-people-tech Vocabulary
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Miscellanous terms you might see people using when talking about technical issues regarding CS.
Words you would like to have explained
- an error in the website's code which leads to malfunctioning. See Bug reporting guide
- common storage for code for all developers working on the site.
- developer making their changes made on the site code available to other developers (see Code Repository)
- Cascading StyleSheets - a way to make HTML less cluttered and the website more uniform in look
- "A possible definition is that a database is a collection of records or information which is stored in a computer in a systematic (i.e. structured) way, so that a computer program can consult it to answer queries. The records retrieved in answer to queries become information that can be used to make decisions. The computer program used to manage and query a database is known as a database management system (DBMS)."
- Darcs is a distributed revision control system by David Roundy that was designed to replace the centralized CVS. Two particular features in its design distinguish it from CVS. Each copy of the source tree acts as a full repository, allowing several different versions to be maintained in different locations. Patches are global to the repository and are subject under certain conditions to reordering, as governed by the project's "theory of patches".
- The patch management in Darcs make it much easier than SVN to review code by another programmer before it is deployed on the production servers.
- echo command on PHP programming language is used for printing whatever needs to be printed on screen. Developers usually use it to see what's going on with variables being processed - this helps out in catching bugs.
- making changes from the Code Repository available on the live site. CS deployment process has two stages: first from Code Repository to server www1 (nickname: dub one), then from www1 to rest of the servers (www2, www3, www4 and www5). There might be a delay before deploying from www1 onwards due to developers needing to test things before going fully live with changes. Staging group is aimed at people willing to test out changes on www1.
- person who is working on the site code. See Tech Team
- "is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed with little or no restriction beyond the requirement that source code must be made available".
- HyperText Markup Language - set of instructions to mark up text so it shows up nicely on your web browser
- Code that is well-organized into self-containing chunks: a "black box" that behaves in well-defined and simple ways with the rest of the code but might be very complex internally.
- "describes the principles and methodologies to promote open access to the production and design process for various goods, products and resources". Often used as a synonym for free software, although not quite the same.
- small improvement on the code made by developer who doesn't necessarily have the right to commit bigger code changes
- Rewriting parts of the code so that it becomes better-structured (see Modular) and more readable for other developers.
- "In computer science source code (commonly just source or code) is any sequence of statements and/or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language"
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