Use These Fancy Tech Words To Make Your Life Easier
“Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet” — Douglas Adams (English Author)
Software engineers are lazy people. We’re so lazy up to the point that we’ve practically invented EVERYTHING to make our life easier. “Let’s make a can that plays music just by commanding them” or “Let’s make a home theater in our browser so we don’t have to go to the cinema”. Oh… but it doesn’t stop there. Software engineers are so lazy that they often create a word to describe phenomena in the software world. Ok… It’s not that we’re just a bunch of lazy a** people. It’s just that… these words make our lives so much easier as software engineers cause we can understand each other quickly. These powerful words come from a real-life phenomenon, that’s why I think it’s perfect to describe real-life situations. In this story, I want to share these words with you so that you can also use them. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Load Balancing
Have you ever queued at the cashier? (*of course you did, duh!)
What do you usually do when choosing which queue you want to wait in? I bet you choose one with the least number of people, right? It makes sense cause you think fewer people means less time to wait. What you just did is what computer programmers called load balancing.
Load balancing is the art of distributing traffic equally amongst available resources for optimal performance. Fancy words, eh? 😂 Let me make it simpler to understand. Imagine there’s a staff that directs new customers to a particular register so that the load can be equally distributed. So when you try to choose the queue earlier, your brain is actually doing the load balancing calculation — then it chooses the queue that you think is the most optimal for you. In this case, is the one with the least amount of people.
This term could be used in a wide range of scenarios, but it is most suitable when you tell your friends to even out the number when you queue. There are lots of queueing scenarios that I can think of. When you queue for food at weddings, when you queue to pay in Uniqlo, or when you queue for gas in the gas station.
Instead of telling your friends, “Yo… we should split up and queue in a different line so that we can finish at the same time” — it’s too long, right? Isn’t it better to yell out “Yo… load balancing”.
First Come First Serve (FCFS)
This one is rather easy. It’s just an abbreviation of something that is very descriptive. Exactly as its name suggests, it’s a principle to serve those who came first. We’re already familiar with this concept, cause it’s majorly used in every situation we have ever been in. In restaurants, movie theaters ticketing booths, train stations, etc. We even use the sentence “first come first serve”.
FCFS is one of the scheduling algorithms in computer science. The simplest use of this principle is the servers. Servers as its name implies are serving. The usual scheduling that a server uses is an FCFS. The one that hit the server, will be served first.
Now I just want to tell you, that there’s an abbreviation for it and just use it. It’s FCFS! It’s shorter, even though it contains the same number of syllables though 😂
Round-robin
“Everybody will get a turn” is exactly what this word means. Round robin is an algorithm that makes sure each member of the group will get a turn. In computer science, they often use it for a group of servers. Each of the servers will take the same amount of load because the round-robin algorithm disperses the requests equally among them. The servers are taking turns to serve a request. Not only used for servers, but round-robin is also widely used for resource allocation typically in operating systems.
Imagine lots of scenarios where you can use this word. When you try to explain a board game rule to your friends. Instead of saying “We’re going to take turns each round” which is a mouthful, you can just say “We’re Round-robin-ing it”, isn’t that easier? 😂
You can use this for any other scenarios like facilitator rotation, person in charge of daily housework chores, and many more!
Bottleneck
I promise you, this is the most useful one. Have you ever found yourself in a traffic jam when you’re driving? And you thought to yourself, “What causing it?”. “Where is the exact point that causes this congestion?”, right?
Instead of saying that long phrase, now you can just say, “Where is the bottleneck?”. Bottleneck is a term that we use in software engineering to describe a phenomenon where the output is not getting produced at the same rate as the input. Imagine filling up water in a bottle and then trying to empty it. Because of the narrowness of the bottleneck, the water particles need to go one by one in order to get out. In this case, the input is the water inside, and the output is the water that comes out.
Software engineers use the bottleneck terms when describing a low throughput process such as poorly written unit tests that take up a significant amount of time or a server that might not have many resources so it needs more time to process requests.
I use this term often with my fellow software engineer friends. Like when we’re on the road, we just yell: “Bottleneck on route 58, let’s just turn around and find another way”. Now you know, and now you get to use it too.
These are some of the examples that I can think of and the words that I often use with my software engineer mates to communicate. It makes our communication a lot easier without having to phrase a long-winded sentence. I thought it was beneficial, that’s why I try to share it with y’all. Do you have any useful words that you want to share?
Hope you enjoy this story,
Cheers — 🍻
ferzos
