awesome-naming

When you explore a search space and you reach a dead end, you follow your back to the last crossroad and try the other way

Violence is actually almost always a solution but not a very clever one

An algorithm that finds a solution by always picking the currently best looking option without thinking too much about past and future decisions

Starting somewhere in the hilly "landscape" of solutions you go in the direction of steepest ascent until reaching the top of a hill. You might miss higher hills though

A type of priority queue and a reference to the infamously unorganized queues in Israel. Here items can when they

Like with a stack of pancakes you can only add and remove items from the top of this data structure

A hierarchically organized data structure. From the item the other items into and . A collection of trees is often called a

In this data structure items are always added at the end and removed at the front as if the items were waiting in line

Allows classes with incompatible interfaces to work together by wrapping its own interface around that of an already existing class

Analogous to a facade in architecture, a facade is an object that serves as a front-facing interface masking more complex underlying structure

A representation of a result that is available in the future, unless there are errors. Like in reality, promises are broken sometimes

A programming antipattern where in a single change you wildly add code everywhere in your codebase

A program with a tangled and hard-to-follow stucture

Like a blanket being folded up, this function iterates a collection and in each step combines the current item with everything that has already been folded

Parser function that greedily consumes an input stream until it's satisfied

Continuously runs functions which itself return functions. Like a child on a trampoline that and bounces back up

Merges two lists into one list of pairs like the interlocking teeth of a zipper

A method of bypassing normal authentication in a computer system

A computer program that self replicates by other computer programs similar to the behavior of biological viruses

Steps and practices that users should take to maintain system health and improve online security

Part of a system meant to look like an attractive target but actually helps detect and deflect attackers

When a system (e.g. stolen computer) secretly reports back to a third party other than the current possessor. The name is a reference to the movie E.T

A safe and isolated environment to test unverified programs that may contain malicious code

Malware which misleads users of its true intent. The term is derived from the Ancient Greek story of the deceptive Trojan Horse

A tabular summary of a classifiers "confusion", i.e. how often it thought to make correct predictions when it actually didn't

A boundary dividing the space of possible data points. Here you decide, everything on this side is SPAM, everything on that side is not

Minimizing a cost function by iteratively computing the gradient and moving in the direction of steepest descent

A confident response by an AI that does not seem to be justified by its training data

The process of showing the machine a bunch of examples, until it learns what we want from it

A programming paradigm where programs are compositions of interactions among multiple concurrent participants

A functional language making extensive use of but with a because it's running on the Java virtual machine

Although C was certainly a bad name, C++ was quite clever. The iconic increment operator indicates that is the successor

Part of a program that attempts to find and reclaim garbage pieces of memory not used anymore

An evaluation stategy which suspends evaluation until it's absolutely necessary and then never does it again

Syntax that makes the language "sweeter" for human use. Usually a shorthand for common operations that can also be expressed in a more verbose form

A grid based layout resembling the compartmentation of bento boxes

Navigational aid allowing users to keep track of their location within programs, documents, or websites. The term is a reference to the fairy tale

A kind of animated slideshow looping back on itself

Where you temporarily put you are working with (i.e. the copy & paste buffer)

The metaphorical top of the user's desk, upon which objects such as documents and folders of documents can be placed

A button to toggle a menu. The associated icon resembles a hamburger

User interfaces that assume expensive operations will complete successfully thereby improving the perceived performance

Screen content is often less like a book with discrete pages and more like a continuous roll of parchment, i.e. a scroll

Turing machines that produce numbers so insanly large, no other algorithm can keep up with them

The problem of finding groups of mutual friends in a network of people with friendship relations. Or more general, finding complete subgraphs

A game world that showcases how astonishing complexity can arise from very simple ingredients

A black box that magically gives answers even to undeciable questions like the halting problem

The fact that in some formal languages any sufficiently long string can be with repetitions of its substring and the result stays in the same formal language

clooney

A JavaScript library implementing the actor model for concurrent computation. The term is a reference to George Clooney who is also an actor

Database application, that is marketed as being so fault tolerant and resilient as a cockroach

horcrux

Splits a file into encrypted fragments that only together can be decrypted again. In the Harry Potter universe, Horcruxes are fragments of a persons soul. To kill the person, all fragments must be destroyed

Puppeteer

A browser automation library. If the browser is the puppet, this is the puppeteer

Web browser developed by Apple

Simplified man pages with practical examples

Uglify

A JavaScript minifier. Removes everything that makes the code readable and pretty to make it smaller

uppy

A dog themed uploader component. The name is a blend of and . It even comes with a crash recovery plugin called

A bundler for JavaScript and other assets with a short and descriptive name that also somewhat rhymes

NodeJS dependency manager

Abbreviating long words by keeping the first and last letter and writing the number of omitted letters in between

Acronyms describing competing database ideologies (aka. SQL vs. NoSQL). Note that acid and base are also opposites in chemistry

A central part of a network/application that significantly limits throughput/performance and should ideally be eliminated

When your device is so corrupted it virtually turns into a brick

Different case styles where the name illustrates its appearance

E.g. claiming a GitHub issue, then not working on it

A hidden feature especially in video games in reference to the Easter egg hunt

This representation can encode numbers at very different magnitudes with limited amount of digits by letting the radix point instead of being fixed in place

In software architecture (like in actual architecture) frameworks provide basic structure to build upon that guide and constrain the further development

Jenga and LEGO bricks don't share the same interface but you can always glue them together

A bug that seems to disappear or change when one tries to study it. It's a pun on Werner Heisenberg who discovered that the act of observing quantum systems inevitably alters their state

A bug that, when an attempt to fix is made, introduces multiple new bugs. It's a bug that cannot be fixed

A magic program/piece of code is doing it's job but nobody knows how. Like in reality, magic doesn't actually exist. Once you understand it, it's not magic anymore

A problem where a process is perpetually denied resources to do its work

Stepping back in time through source code to understand execution and sometimes even to change history

Shake the dependency tree until all the dead parts are falling off and you end up with a nice lean tree

A program that outputs all even numbers and then all odd numbers generates an unfair enumeration of the natural numbers because some numbers are never reached

When you write instead of because it reads as, “if red equals the color”, similar to the way the Star Wars character Yoda speaks