10 words you should know as a tech newbie
Transitioning towards tech is both exciting and frightening. On the one hand, you feel like a bright-eyed child who is curious about everything and wants to learn as much as possible, but on the other hand, you’re overwhelmed by the amount of information available.
While transitioning, it was pretty easy for me to become overwhelmed with all the terminologies I had to become familiar with, so I decided to write a mini glossary of words newbies will encounter with easy-to-understand definitions and links to resources to help make your journey easier.
API: An API is an Application Programming Interface. They are a set of protocols, procedures, and tools that allow two applications to talk to each other.
Data science: Data Science is simply the field of study that combines programming skills, and knowledge of mathematics and statistics to extract meaningful insights or find unseen patterns from data. These insights can then be used by analysts and business users to make business decisions. Data science is simply making sense of data.
Data structures: A data structure is a particular way of organizing data in a computer so that it can be used effectively. They serve as the foundation for more complex applications, and it is crucial to select the appropriate data structure for every task.
Design System: A design system is a set of standards for managing design at scale with reusable components and patterns, which may contain documentation, code snippets, and design principles. Organizations utilize them to give a reference point for everyone working on a product. Ensuring that everything is consistent and reduces redundancy.
Git: Git is a distributed version control system for tracking changes in source code during software development. It allows programmers to coordinate amongst themselves and save changes in their projects over a period of time. The goal of git is to provide speed, data integrity, and support for distributed non-linear workflows. To learn more about git, you can check out this super helpful manual by Ahmed Mahmoud Eltaher here
GitHub: GitHub is a web-based platform that incorporates git’s version control and source code management (SCM) features to enable programmers to collaborate. It also includes project and team management features, as well as opportunities for networking and social coding. To learn more about GitHub, you can check out this super helpful GitHub starter pack by Rajshri Totla here
Machine learning: Machine learning is an artificial intelligence (AI) subset that allows computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. Arthur Samuel, the pioneer of AI originated the term with his seminar research on the game of checkers, in which self-proclaimed checkers master Robert Nealey lost a game of checkers to the computer. It is currently being used to create chatbots, film recommendations, translation apps, and much more. To learn more about machine learning, you can visit MIT Management Sloan School, IBM, or Oracle.
NPM: The Node Package Manager, also known as NPM, is a package manager that works with the Node JavaScript platform. It is the largest software library in the world, and it allows users to publish, discover, install, and create node programs, as well as organize modules so that node can find them and intelligently manage dependency conflicts. You can read the documentation here to learn more about NPM.
Open Source Software: Open Source Software or Open Source refers to any code that is designed to be publicly accessible. This means the code can be viewed, modified, and distributed by anyone.
Web3: If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ve probably come across the term “web 3". To understand what web 3 is, we must first understand what web 2.0 is. The term web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her article “Fragmented Future”. It simply refers to the web in its current state, which allows individuals to share, collaborate and express themselves online. Web 1.0 was read-only, whereas web 2.0 is a read-write web, meaning that individuals can not only read what they see online, but also contribute to it, share it, collaborate on it, and create it without the need for web design or publishing skills.
Now that we understand what web 2.0 is, what is web 3.0?
John Markoff coined the term in 2006 to describe the evolution of web usage and interaction, which involves transforming the web into a database. In this evolution, data isn’t owned, but rather shared. Web 3.0 is predicted to be more connected and smarter as a result of important emerging technology trends focusing on machine-assisted information.
