Tech jargon explained by a Senior Dev [Computer Science Terminology]

Key Takeaways

and there's like 62 people it says here but not here which is odd I don't know if people can see us tell us if you can see us there's a red broadcast seems to like not be working I don't know why or what to do about it but then that's gonna give it a wrong hmm I think we are live now yes we are live now oh apologies for that huh how strange that was odd yes anyway I guess in the recording you can watch later how three minutes we're trying to figure out why it's not showing on the screen well it wasn't showing on my phone anyway but anyway I think you can all see us now just say get sets I see two human beings yes we can see it good okay nice okay let's start that again hello everyone it's maybe the second time you're listening to this intro in which case apologies maybe you're watching this in a recording this is going to appear very strange depending on when the recording started yeah yeah anyway we are here right now joined by senior developer Michael who you may be familiar with from our Friday live streams yes he joins us to code but today we're not coding no we're talking about code why because yes um we have over the years come to realize that the tech world can be quite baffling when it comes to the lingo lots of people ask us how can you learn all of those acronyms and so on what does this mean what does that mean I'm sure we've all looked at a job ad and thought what language is this actually written in well we're here to clear a few things up because it's a very common complaint uh we hear from people joining the tech bar so you want to clarify things a bit yes yes Michael here he can think of as you're living breathing coffee drinking dictionary yes we're going to discuss why is Tech so full of jargon how to deal with a phrase you don't understand for example in a meeting and how to make the language of the tech World easier to manage plus we'll be going through a few uh random seemingly random Tech phrases I've collected to clarify them for you but we do these things live so you can ask the things you want to know so if you've got a question just pop it in the chat or any other kind of thought as well yes thank you uh all for coming along brilliant to see you all here Michael with your tan yeah really okay brilliant it's been good summer in in Wales so yeah yeah so let's kick off with the most important burning question which is why is Tech so full of jargon uh I think it's just like any other professional field to be honest uh you know people just tend to uh use their own uh words for describing different things and I think it's like wherever you go you know you go to some kind of factory or something like mechanical engineers use a lot of their own jargon uh and then doctors use their own and so on so I would imagine that it's probably not any different to uh like most other professional fields so yeah I think the difference might be that new jargon comes along more often because in the medical field yeah there are medical advancements and things but I don't think they come along I could be wrong um as often and as varied and as obscure yeah I guess Tech yeah there is a lot of like inventing new technologies and stuff and it kind of enters vocabulary very quickly um yeah I suppose like react now is a very well-known uh technology and it's not that old by the measures of like inventions in general uh so yeah I suppose it's kind of like because it's all there's always the churn in the different names for different things and techniques and stuff so yeah maybe there is but again it's kind of it's a very hyper quickly evolving field so inevitable that people will get more and more new words to describe something that they're doing perhaps also with other fields like law and medicine as an example those kind of words do sometimes creep into everyday vocab so you sort of understand what these things are or at least have a vague concept whereas with tech I don't think you would necessarily do that like I mean it's difficult because we've been in tech for so long now we maybe do use them together but you wouldn't someone who's not in Tech yeah but also Tech uses a lot of military Sports uh vocabulary and it's kind of and the engineering quite a lot of generic vocabulary as well so um you know if you are transitioning from some of the fields it could be somewhat familiar to you because the concept like the context that those words are used in that very similar and it could be but then you get words like tree shaking switches right but I mean I don't know I always found that one very self-explanatory what does it actually mean while we're here actually shaking so I think that's referring to like in uh in the front-end bundles it's referred to like when you have a lot of different code that might not be used by your code base so instead of shipping literally everything so you like you import a module like let's say moment or some some other module and it has a lot of different methods that might not be completely used by your code base so what it does is like it tries to just keep the things that your code is using and eliminate everything else so I feel like tree shaking is a very good metaphor here because like you check the tree and the fruits fall off and the trees on your left so kind of like yeah trying to get rid of stuff that you can get rid of yeah I don't know I always made sense to me I was like oh yeah that makes sense is actually confusing well the thing is you grew up around a lot of fruit trees yes for those of us that didn't it's like why would you do that yeah the other one I like is bike shedding tell us about that oh I think bike shedding actually goes from uh that's been coined in I think the guy's name is Parkinson's or something there there was a book uh that was describing how a nuclear power plant was built and uh it was effectively this like little the author noticed this uh particular case where uh while discussing how to build nuclear power plant people were kind of not particularly engaging in the very tricky aspects of the building of a power plant but when it came to which color to paint the bike shed where the employees are parking their bikes it seems like that generated an awful lot of discussions so kind of like bike shedding is now just referring from that kind of carrying on from that book it was uh like taken over by tech people to use to just refer to inconsequential discussions that are very heated so in the grand scheme of things the color of the bike Shadow the nuclear power plant has literally very very little impact uh and it's the most discussed disproportionately so so it's the phrase for when you end up over discussing a basically something very inconsequential to the life of the project yes brilliant let's move on to my next question which is how can you deal with tech jargon which you don't understand in general but also especially if you find yourself in a situation where everyone's talking about something and you don't know what it is I think it's uh yeah like currently what I'm doing is actually software it means um I think it's very wise uh I think it's I think it's very important to uh especially like in Tech nowadays people are a little bit more welcoming to newcomers so if somebody is not quite aware of what something means uh it's important to just say uh can we just clarify that or can you explain what this acronym means or something like that um if you feel like a little bit not quite sure what people are talking about you can probably just uh quickly write it down what it means but nowadays like most people work from home so while the meeting is going on in Zoom you can actually literally just Google what it means uh so it you won't need to ask the question about it but you know yeah I think I think asking directly is uh quite good quite a good way you can just say like oh I'm really sorry I'm not I didn't quite casual what was that what was that term what does it mean uh and then you'll get very quick tldr uh but if people like it's also a very good point that if people can't explain what a particular um word means then probably they don't quite understand what it means themselves yeah that's maybe yeah maybe nobody meaning knows what in the meeting it's like one of those cases when you're sitting the classroom and everyone is like pretending that they understand everything and then if somebody asks that question you just think oh thank God somebody asked that yeah you could be that person who would be thanked by literally everyone in the meeting asking the question yeah absolutely and then you might realize that she say that the people talking about it also don't know what it actually is so then you can ask a question of them should we really be doing this if no one knows what it is yeah for him onto a wider question how can we understand or manage the world of tech language but what I mean by that is is there an easy way to approach getting your head around all these different phrases um I think kind of yes and no uh I've seen some people create like vocabularies on GitHub and stuff like what some terms mean and they you you can probably come across them um especially if you give a read to a couple of a couple you can probably understand pretty much majority of what's what's out there I probably wouldn't keep one myself and I never did uh it kind of never quite made sense um I suppose it's it depends on how comfortable you are with acquiring new words in general like uh you know if if people start using language that uh you're not familiar with uh how comfortable are you with acquiring it and if uh you know if you feel uncomfortable around new words uh then maybe you should yeah maybe you should try to keep some kind of vocabulary uh but generally you know I I always found it fairly easy to pick up a new word or something that what it means and uh I know I quite kept a dictionary um also it's kind of very Bound by what you're getting involved in so if you're getting into front end or back end and stuff then you will go down a particular part of trying to figure out what all different words mean yeah have a Google play around and always ask questions about what does it actually mean quite often you will find that uh like for example with terms like API there is a distinction there is definition what it means but you will see that different people mean different things and it kind of changes meaning depending on the context uh so a lot of terms are also very context specific yeah and there might also be some which upset they might have they might name a meeting or something yeah strange like people sometimes say like API endpoint that means one thing and then sometimes people say this library has a nice API which is very different to API endpoint yeah absolutely so I actually used to have a glossary I suppose you call it of words I picked up and acronyms and things just go I struggle to remember things if I don't write them down so if you're like me I'd recommend doing that yes if there are any um words or phrases which have confused you in the past or maybe now let us know in the chat we would love to go over them yes you may be wondering why some people are putting tigers into your chat yeah allow me to explain we have a tradition here where if you're new please put a bunny rabbit emoji into the chat and if you've been before hit me with that tiger we don't use this information it's just for fun yes hopefully oh the Tigers will come rolling in now like Gina thanks for coming a lot yeah wow now that's an interesting question from crochet crime Chef um is saying in the restaurant world here in the US we use heard or we Chef or yes chef to tell our boss that you understand and we'll do what's asked is there a tech equivalent hmm interesting um I would say that I've heard I've heard people do the same in restaurants in the UK as well I think it's kind of a restaurant jargon thing but just this like speak French a bit we chef um I don't know if there is something similar in Tech um I know that it's kind of a bit of a cliche if somebody asks you to do something you reply with uh put it in a ticket I suppose done really yeah I'm probably the closest that I can think of right now um yeah and the the ticket is basically kind of from the systems for like tracking tasks like each task that needs to be done is called the ticket uh actually I don't quite know whether that why is it called your ticket why is it not called something else but there's always there's always something else uh because I would imagine that you know normally all the task boards they use Post-it notes so why is it called a ticket and I posted maybe there is something from the 80s or 70s there must be something it's quite interesting because once you try to delve into the language that people use you always found this very exciting uh life events that occurred uh and some quite interesting pieces of trivia that influences the language uh so yeah like for a language geek like us who used to teach uh the language it's always fascinating to discover something like that like while I was trying to discover why do people say bike shedding it's a better random term to use and then I came across this beautiful book uh that was fascinating to read so yeah there you go maybe maybe there is something like that but I'll have to think about is the equivalent of we chef in Tech I'm not sure Philip provoking question though Dallas says some jargon has five names like DDOS from the 90s called Pepsi I don't know what that means do you no um a type of DDOS called Pepsi but anyway called Pepsi not sure I'm glad you brought didos up because that was something I wanted to talk about yes denial of service so basically uh DDOS is a type of attack where um it's well if you are trying to uh prevent somebody from using the service you can try to overwhelm it so nobody can use it so think about it like if you don't want people to see a particular film in the cinema you can try to prevent people from entering the cinema or like try to I don't know burn down the cinema or something so like hack a website too uh but that might not work uh so what you might do is you like you can ask as many friends as you can to buy all the tickets to that Cinema and then sit in the summer so no one can enter and watch that film so that will be the equivalent of a DDOS attack you're basically overwhelm a website by such an extent that all the requests that are being served you haven't really taken all of that capacity so the server is serving you and your Bots and stuff your network that you're trying to request everything from and then somebody else who's trying to like get some information from that server cannot be served by it because it's wasting all of the energy on you so that would be uh what DDOS attack is ache yeah basically usually people use like botnets and stuff to you know there are like printers that are connected to the internet in their fridges or just laptops and stuff that people are not using uh or it could be quite well coordinated uh where people kind of voluntarily uh agree all together to use uh they pick a Target and then they go like just Hammer the website sometimes you can accidentally DDOS yourself uh for example like you know lots of people uh you know on your local machine or something you can write write a while up for a very long request so you'll create a node server or something or a website that you have on your own local machine and a particular request takes quite a long time and you have accidentally put it on an infinite look and then your browser can crash so you effectively have like ddosed yourself with too many requests so it can happen it's an infinite Loop Adidas then uh no it's kind of it could lead to Adidas so if you have a request that takes a long time and there is always a limited amount of how many requests a website can serve so if you exceed that number you have effectively ddosed Target or yourself lips yeah it can happen especially like on local developments where it's a little bit more likely that you can accidentally do something like that yeah yeah or like for example you've entered a while like a particular piece of code leads to some kind of uh while loop so and it takes just a little bit longer and if you hit that code path again and again and again you will lead to the website going down interesting Jorge is asking what distributed means uh like in trying to think how to not explain the word distributed we use in the right distributors in what context would you like uh are you talking about distributed services or like distributed servers networks that kind of stuff like what's the well let's go with sir yeah let's well a distributed Services is usually referring to um kind of a lot of different computers in a lot of different places so everyone can be doing uh different computation at different point so sometimes you can have problems with uh distributed computation of how to synchronize some of the data access and so on so but again it's all it's all like specific because the word is a bit too broad to narrow it down interesting but generally it basically means in lots of different places [Laughter] these Tech words can seem quite complicated but they're actually quite literal like yes my favorite example is sometimes people on Twitter say I've been wondering all this time what this means in JavaScript but it just literally means it yeah sometimes they are deceptively simple I think yes kids are there any phrases which you wish you knew sooner interesting um no probably not because a lot of the time uh different words well I would say uh concept you learn them when you are presented with some problem where you have to learn them so um you know if you if you learn it it's just open the dictionary and start reading words most of the time you won't really remember anything because you know like how often do you use really obscure words that you just read in the dictionary and haven't tried to use it so most of the time people remember something because they had to use it or they heard someone use it and they had to understand what it means um so but you only see it in context really yeah exactly yeah but contact less words and terms they are not particularly helpful um well unless you're I don't know trying to like fake it till you make it or something uh but okay no I would say probably not it's asking we would prepare for an algorithm question for example I would I would probably recommend against it um like learning times on its own has very limited usefulness like what's the point of you like learning load balancing as a word if you're not going to learn it as a concept so I think from maybe from an interview point of view especially for junior roles that's the kind of question you get isn't it like what's hello yeah so it's mostly it's mostly all about trying to learn the concepts behind it uh yeah probably probably there is a point of like uh occasionally yeah when you're trying to prepare for your first job uh there's very limited uh kind of conceptually very limited amount of stuff that you're going to be presented with so sometimes it is useful to just open some kind of book that covers a bit broader of all the different various problems that you might face to just learn a little bit about them so when you're presented with something like for example you have multiple servers that do the same thing and there is one request who's gonna serve uh that request and then you're gonna be like ah I remember reading something about that it was something about balancing and then hopefully that will help you out so yeah occasionally it is useful to just kind of read up on the wider World which I would say about what's feasible and possible out there yeah why not yeah I think it's worth looking at giggling something like our common Junior developer interview questions and yeah so instead of learning the answer like how to correctly answer that question you should probably read the answer to that question and then read up on the concepts that are in that answer and that will serve you much better than just memorizing the just the memorizing of the answer can you remember your interview for the junior role that you got um it was mostly a question like what motivates you why do you why why do you want to be a developer that kind of stuff um think there were some basic questions like what's an array what's a dictionary um what is a dictionary well in the tech sense yeah you just explained like uh I remember at the time I was I was uh doing python so I just said it's like a Json object in Python which is the okay now I know that's not quite correct answer but if you just say it's a key value data structure that kind of that is kind of the more appropriate correct but again there are caveats so kind of people ask these questions that there are different levels of correctness how to answer them so if you asked people what's a python dictionary and they have 10 years of experience in Python then you would have very high expectations then ask in person who's looking for their first job so luckily for me I was looking for my first job and they said yeah that fair enough so they're not expecting you of as many caveats to this answer yeah the if you do know some you should definitely mention it yeah see I wonder about this because occasionally I answer a question and I was like oh halfway through and then I think oh I think I've been talking for too long you should probably answer at the beginning oh sorry I asked at the beginning uh like how deep into this subject should we go so I can like higher level here is a very simple explanation what it means and here is slightly more complex do you want me to go further down into this and if the interviewer is really perceptive they would say yeah definitely go go as far as you want with this topic then you can yeah you can just go ahead cool okay thank you for the question there how's that um John Paul is wondering about hydration again in what Concept in what context are we talking about because I think hydration data usually isn't it yeah sometimes in terms of hydrating data that usually means that for example if you receive a particular bit of data and then you know well for example uh I would say uh I have family members stored in a database like for example that is number one so I know that if a request comes in with ID number one I can then hydrate that request with saying ID number one name Leanne favorite pet cats that kind of stuff and I can add all the extra details to that request so usually that's what hydration refers to basically you have some bit of information about something and then you go somewhere else pull up lots more detail and you add to that request and forward it on good thank you for clearing that up now Jorge is also wondering about uh scram cheer Azure they use with slashes so it's like uh you know they usually go hand in hand uh which quite often they do yeah they do like in Enterprises with another like Tech job Enterprise which is uh usually it's just a very very big company very big customer who can spend a lot of money on your software that's what basically Enterprise most of the time means um so what do these things mean then we've got scrum we've got jira we've got agile yeah a lot of the time for example if you take a very big company like something like IBM or Oracle or your historically very large you know or like some really big car manufacturers like Mercedes or BMW that kind of stuff uh a lot of the time how they love processes and in those processes people are trying to also create how do you create software so the way for creating software kind of gone through the manufacturing line analogies so people thought you know like we manufactured stuff like cars and stuff so we have our manufacturing line so what if we're trying to manufacture software in a very similar way and that's how they were for example came up with all the different tickets for example kanban is a word coming from Toyota manufacturing um the well Joe said Toyota manufacturing process so can Banner was just the board where you would link things where the where they are in the process so for example they're prepared uh to be shipped or they are prepared to be assembled or we're waiting for parts that kind of stuff so from the very simple like assembly point of view people were kind of going further in and they were trying to say can we now organize ourselves into some other ways so scramble agile is usually used with a slash because scrum is like a way of trying to organize people to do work in more or less predictable manageable way uh and agile basically says that we can do that but we also have to stay agile to be able to respond to new demands new requirements and to be able to change our course accordingly so software development is not like you know here is the stuff that you need to do and that's it like Let's ignore everything until it's done uh and Jerry is basically is just a product for you know think of like Asana Trello it's basically a software that helps you manage tasks and boards and things like that and a lot of people utterly despise the hate it uh it does I've never actually cleared it let's even look at it a lot of uh developer communities GRE is kind of a butt of all jokes it's um have you used it yes I have indeed I will not comment in public unfunk your word flow workflow not wordplay getting to you can see that it's like there are also all sorts of different ways of like it's super customizable and it's kind of its own um it's a plus and a negative at the same time because it's a really complex piece of software and a lot of time um people find themselves battling with what they have created because the flows are so over complicated kind of like think about it like Excel spreadsheet you know everyone probably seen a very convoluted Excel spreadsheet where you're like it feels like it's much easier to bin it and create something from scratch that'll actually try to figure out what's wrong with it yeah people oftentimes get to that point with jira really yeah it's very very flexible and a lot of the time that's it that's a downfall but it ends up being unmaintainable basically yeah so it's very customizable piece of software it's very customized basically uh task board interesting with lots of things on top I'm back to scrum and agile yeah former scrum Master here it's true yeah broadly speaking to give you an overview scrum is a method of organizing your employees to work and it can look different from company to company but generally you have Sprints where you aim to complete large pieces of work within a time frame typically two or three weeks yeah and then you usually have various sets of meetings a daily catch-up meeting to talk about what you've done any blockers you've got what you're going to do the next day and then you'll have sometimes Sprint update meeting at the end of each week yeah at the end of their Sprint you have a retro which is where you talk about what went well what we can do differently next time and yeah I would say like uh the difference is obviously I would say that agile is a philosophy it's kind of it's just generic there is like there is this thing called agile Manifesto where there are like yeah and Ten Commandments or something it was written very long time ago by quite frankly actually quite um well nowadays quite famous uh contributors to Software uh in general here it is so yeah but if you know if you just Google a lot of these names there are there's a lot of really cool work done by these people so at some point they basically decided that you know there should be some kind of guiding principles to how to build software uh but yeah and it's been translated many different languages um yeah but generally it's kind of it's very kind of vague enough to you know you you can do literally anything and call it agile because it's real vague enough to be able to do that and scrum is a more of an approach to try to do Agile which is sometimes they kind of go you know on job descriptions that go scrum slash agile but then again you know I've never seen a come I've never seen two companies that do these things the same way yeah so it's it's kind of like cooking you know it's like everybody eats but pretty much everyone does it differently let's move on uh it's a comment actually Nick Dixon new software developer here hoping to break into Tech this year this is helpful get loves this Grandma Community I've got this coming along yes um Gideon is asking is it a good idea for a junior developer to start learning architecture and patterns which brings me to a question what is web architecture starters and then do you need to know it to become a junior device interesting I would say uh it would be quite helpful to just kind of understand because architecture generally refers to uh there is a common set of problems that people encounter and what is the most common approach to solving these problems so for example if you have a UI and you need to reach to the database to get some data then we'll really have kind of a very common architecture of like front-end back-end database so then it kind of goes into way more complicated things and you know what people normally mean by patterns it also depends on the context like coding patterns or architecture patterns um so yeah I would say probably helpful to just be aware of it um the depending on the language patterns obviously change so for example if you just Google code architecture patterns you'll probably get a lot of like C sharp Java examples and a lot of the patents might not be applicable to um to your code and language like JavaScript might not support some of them some of the patterns that for example are applicable to typed languages and some patents would not be that useful like for example dependency ejection is used mostly in touch patterns in type languages so in JavaScript it's quite hard to achieve that and then like with typescript it's a little bit probably easier but I'm just going to gloss over the rest of that part but yeah I would say it's useful to be aware of them and then the when we come to web architecture in general like how to build certain architectures for backend services and stuff it yeah it's also useful to learn more and more but I I'm not gonna lie nobody expects you to know uh that from Junior developer or like even software engineer who are looking for their first role or even second role yeah good to know yeah if you're just if you're just aware of the most common things like uh you know client and uh clients client server yeah that's probably more than enough for you good to know yeah going back to jira Assad says it reminded me of this jira sounds funny because jira is here in cumin seeds huh interesting well I think it has something to do with uh Godzilla I think Godzilla yeah originally it was yeah it's got some very funny history why is jira called jira uh and there is like some history about it uh but I can't try and remember yeah yeah I think it's because like in Japanese it's like gojiru or something so somebody thought uh they they knew what they were making yeah they either liked the film or something and they just named it after it or yeah basically or they thought my jira boards look like a Godzilla so I'm gonna go with it yeah that's close yeah good um question here from Michaela um not super specific but when I first started coding people referred a lot to get terms and reposed a lot and it just seemed really vague I can relate to this when you first get started with Git yes all of the words they're not the most intuitive in my opinion and you can't really figure out what they mean from the words themselves yeah how do you get your head around that like repositories branches I think the most intuitive one is the cherry pick I don't know why I just kind of I just quite quickly caught on the term uh but also well because mainly in English it's the same term right to Cherry pigments to like very selectively take something um I've never heard any any contacts though uh yeah there is a command get cherry pick uh right so yeah and what does that actually do well it takes one commit and brings it over to your branch really yeah it's like you give a hash of a commit and it basically takes that commit and uh puts it Right Where You Are but yes uh I think with with Git mostly if you just follow a couple of tutorials and try to understand what each of the terms refers to so it's it's kind of like learning with the mechanics you know like you you were not born knowing what a bonnet is in the car or what a wheel is you know at some point you came across a car and people told you this is a wheel this is a car there's uh like a windscreen um you know with green wipers and then you eventually learn them by also using them so I would say that you should probably go try to do a couple of tutorials to get a little bit more used to this whole thing um yeah but repos I've heard people like Miss hear repost and call them Repros and uh some people get bugged by that uh but honestly I think it's fine it's all right like whatever whatever you call it repository uh although some people don't quite like it because it sounds a bit medical it does a bit yeah I have a suggestion for those of you um letting the get the process at the moment that is two years GitHub desktop no shape yes um we have recently added into the front end developer career path here some more and material on git where we're using GitHub desktop yeah people usually invite to use like command line and stuff but I feel command line um makes it ten times harder it makes it it makes it quite harder and it also makes it very it makes it a little bit hard to visualize what's going on while yeah if you're using desktop to you you kind of just map the concepts in your head so you have some visualization it will make it a little bit easier later down the line to then switch the command line while having the concepts uh visualized very vividly that's exactly what the teacher who created these paths and the next treasure yes treasure said that yeah using a desktop really helps you to map out in your mind what's going on when I use desktop I feel like it's less dangerous than the command line it might not be what do you think because you know you you can do yeah terrible things with the command line unintentionally but with desktop I feel like the buttons are there because it's expecting you to press them so right it's not going to have a delete the whole code base button or something right yeah I said we may uh yeah that's true with some with some commands if you kind of mistyped in some way well I put the wrong number it might revert instead of one commit in my revert like 50 commits by accident this is what I mean so but you can't really do that with desktop can you I mean I'm not saying it's foolproof but I feel like there's chances I haven't used desktop enough to kind of remember correctly uh if you can or not but look if if you set me a challenge I'm sure I can mess stuff up yeah that's good I am you know going to another one now which is no verse is undefined Ah that's a very uh it's a very JavaScript specific uh so yeah generally programming languages have different ways of trying to tell you that something is not quite um something doesn't exist as much as of value um so for example if you're creating a number obviously assign it to a particular value but then different languages pick different ways to tell you that some variable is not a part of a value so for example the the way I like to remember it myself is that undefined means the value the variables created that value has not been assigned well now it's the very explicit absence of value so undefined is mostly like somebody forgot something well now it's very explicitly nothing so the variable doesn't exist uh no variable exists but it's assigned to nothing as opposed to well as opposed to some value like five or ten was a string of a name uh or something else while undefined it's like it exists but it's so on what does it actually look like in code is what I'm asking well for example if you see if you type like let and then you type a variable name so by default it will be undefined here we are yeah so if you go to JavaScript right and you just type in let's undefined no because that's that's a key word so uh alert you and why not I'm finally I've been doing react today so that's right I'm and they're fine okay equals I know just just put semicolon and then just console log of the value right drum roll and refined okay if you haven't made it anything but now if you say let I'm undefined no dude just on the first line um on the first line you can now say equals null well no it's not going to be I'm undefined yeah now you have made it explicitly something and now you have maybe explicitly empty so here it's you have created it and by default it's like what is it it's undefined think of undefined as like a question like what should it be uh I don't know that I'm not equals no yes but when you assign something to null it's explicitly nothing and sometimes it is useful to return explicitly nothing in in code so sometimes you want to say like this is uh that's it like this is nothing you know it's like zero in uh in a number you know sometimes you don't want to have a value sometimes you want to represent that something is zero like if you if you go to a supermarket you know how would you indicate that there are no tomatoes you would say you know we have zero Tomatoes we have nothing so it's not the same as zero then it's kind of to indicate value but if you set zero that means numerical value but null is like a coding way of saying it's nothing as a concept you know so zero is mathematical way of saying it but null is more of a computer way of saying it so it could be no when it's any data type the result could be no yes because if you say zero that is a number and if you say if you put that in quotes it could be a zero as a string and so on so you see like zero is a good concept but it becomes a little bit wobbly so people have come up with something a little bit more explicit and it could be null nil and so on but for example people say that um I think the grade of JavaScript said that undefined was the biggest mistake he's made with JavaScript he shouldn't have allowed it so some languages for example they don't have undefined value I think go basically has nil and that's it so there is no difference between null and undefined like in JavaScript go just has one value that's it so what difference does it actually make then if something ends up being undefined or null so I would say that if you get null as a result then somebody has gone to an effort of telling you some piece of information that this doesn't exist whatever you're trying to get it's not accidental there's nothing while if you get undefined it could be accidental it could be that you've done something wrong and it's not quite there hmm I've done things in code though and then I'm expecting for whatever result and then it gives me null which I'm definitely not expecting well that could be on like compiler level or browser level or something to show you that this has to be not interesting yeah thank you for that so um who oh yes that is a very good point I've just come so logged no so obviously it's given no but just to confirm console log I'm null also does that thank you yeah but the JavaScript is a quirky language so there are a lot of uh different uh you know there are there are some assumptions that you make as learning just computer science in general and then JavaScript is a little bit different like uh if you if you Google a talk called WTF JavaScript uh there are there will be a lot of uh people will show some quirks that you should probably be aware of yeah so they're all like uh there's a whole website dedicated to it oh wow look at this there you go look at this yeah that is actually interesting uh yeah definitely to change it's quite useful because especially when it comes to comparing some values uh people expect certain things uh but it might not be the way they expect it because of some historical reasons undefined can be defined yes yes exactly interesting yes Muhammad says if the browser tells us that the value of a variable does not exist it will give us undefined yeah so like this we've got the variable yeah but we're having assignment it doesn't have a value so he just says I'm on the phone because basically a read undefined as I have not been defined yet there you go um well and if one JavaScript Dev wants to tell another one that a value is not defined here we'll write null yeah so if I want to be super explicit to the receiver of my value that it's nothing I will not leave it as undefined I will say no yeah so really if the one Dev wants to tell another Dev that the value doesn't exist yeah I will right now yeah because if he if you try to say it is not defined then it's uh it becomes linguistically in English it becomes a little bit awkward to say that yeah philosophical questions yeah I'm just reading through these um wow nice undefined versus null chat yeah but let's uh move on to the next one whereabouts versus mobile apps what are they so again it's one of these things that people argue a lot about what why web apps were just apps in general but I would say you know if you're looking for a first job very quick distinction is web app is something that runs in your browser Explorer but and you type something into the page uh and it does it's not like a simple page that listings so for example you go to Airbnb that will be a web app if you go to Airbnb on your mobile phone they'll be a mobile app but if you on your mobile phone if you open the Chrome and go to the page that was my next question that's a web app interesting so what about a responsive web app what are people arguing about then because that seems fairly straightforward um well yeah but there are also there are kind of like all the in-betweens because uh to run a mobile app uh you sometimes have to write it in uh like in kotlin or Java to run on Google and you have to write in an Objective C or Swift to run on Apple uh so sometimes what people do is that there are like Frameworks that it looks like you're pressing the button on your phone to open an app like Airbnb but what it actually is is just an icon that is a shortcut to your browser that then opens a page inside that looks like a mobile app but actually it's it's a web app is there a word for this uh no people just call them mobile apps because they're on your phone no yeah so it's so that's basically what people are getting you then kind of get into this gray area where it's a web app that kind of masking is a mobile app and there is an argument what constitutes that uh but generally you know like I try not to get involved into these things but what makes a mobile app it's made in so if I in my head if I click it on the icon on on my on my phone and it opens some program on it it's a mobile app if I do it on in my browser it's a web app but the ones that I'm asking you uh I still call as a mobile app interesting yeah and oftentimes a lot of people like especially people who write these Frameworks they also refer to them as mobile apps Wesley asks what if I'm just walking around with my laptop well that's still web app because it's not your laptop is not your mobile phone but then well his thing is like on an iPad is that is that is an iPad a small laptop or a really big phone the Eternal question [Laughter] ignacia is wondering how hard is it to transition from web apps to mobile apps being a programmer uh so normally like web apps on the front end for example you will write them in JavaScript um or some other languages in their Frameworks like for example uh c-sharp used to have xamarin that kind of stuff so you can write both mobile and web apps in c-sharp but generally transitioning from web apps to mobile apps means that you now have to think about interactions that happen with your mobile phone so that will be the primary thing so for example if you're creating web apps you have to think about responsiveness how people navigate the browser how they use their computer but with mobile phones you now have to switch your primary focus on the experience of using interacting with your program through the phone so sometimes people might use signal is so the your app you you can't rely on the connectivity that much or for example people will be mostly using it with two fingers um so some interactions will be awkward or you have to think extra hard about types typefaces and stuff probably a lot of problems will involve Maps or like movement because uh phones are always carried around um so yeah and I feel like probably accessibility on the phone is a bit more of an issue because you know depending on the app like uh people are much more likely to use your phone uh to use your app on the phone when they're stressed on their brush or they have some emergency and they have to do something then when they're on a laptop um so yeah there's that just say it's pointed out or maybe it's JS eager um that is why people often use the distinction between a native mobile app so is that when it's actually built for mobile um Native mobile app refers to you writing it as the mobile app first or like in Objective C or Swift or kotlin okay so yeah kind of there are reasons why people not uh do that because for example if you have an idea for a mobile app and you want to you know for example you want to write another Airbnb so you have a choice do I write basically two applications one in uh one for iOS and one for Android but there are two different applications that I have to make sure that two teams work the same way and make it look as similar as possible and the interactions are very similar and so on or do I basically try to have this in between stage because what does browser allows is that it just creates a shortcut on the phone but actually there is Unified um piece of software underneath your browser that makes it look the same and then you have to have a new one team it's different set of problems so like for example it's never going to be as fast as a native mobile app it's never going to be like apple especially kind of discriminates against non-native apps it makes it's very kind of once you've seen a few it's very easy to spot when an app is native and when it's not like it's just a little bit sharper it uses um it's a little bit quicker a little bit sharper and because Apple just prefers these apps interesting some interesting questions have come in Gideon what's the best way to explain Internet of Things I would say it's when your fridge is connected to Wi-Fi yeah so instead of things appliances yeah it's basically like a list of these smart appliances yes it's internet of things it's when there is an outage in a cloud service and you cannot for example put your shoes on or something you know because your shoes are connected to Wi-Fi and the functionality of doing up the laces has now been turned off because the server is down didn't we have something like that recently I don't remember what it was uh usually people kind of spot these things here and there like for example I think there was like quite high profile like Tesla cars were not able to open because of AWS outage uh once in London I missed the train because uh signals for that line were connected to a cloud provider that went down and there's of course locked themselves out because the lock was controlled by their own server which had gone down so yeah there you go that's an example like if you connect things to the internet uh you do that so there is interactivity so like you know you you can do a lot of cool things with any type of things like for example what you can do if you connect everything to the internet what you can do is you have a bus lane uh and when the bus approaches a junction then for that bus the light turns green so that's a good example of usage of internal things so the way you make things interact with each other is like you know the proximity everything is very quickly communicating to allow that so you don't have a whole bus of people standing in like waiting for a red light uh so that's a good useful user joint yeah Wesley is asking how about Ai and hacker crackable listening devices no idea what a hack a crack about listening devices so I'll just you know use my own advice from the beginning of the stream and just ask directly like uh Wesley what does hacker crackable listening device mean what is it never heard of that interesting yeah cool eBay sometimes gets not a number I've had that one um can you talk about it or is it the same as no uh not quite it's kind of a very specific uh type of error in JavaScript when you're trying to um probably convert something that is not a number to a number and it gives you that error so when for example you're trying to pass in on a string uh that is a name it will tell you uh not a number right let's I'm mad it calls um change it yeah so now we want to do pass and offload yeah I'm done but you need to be console like that yeah oh that's a no as well huh when do you get I'm not a number then can't remember now I do know that Nam not a number its data type is a number yes which is interesting well there you go it's basically it's basically to tell you that something is not enough I have had that before and it baffled me I'm sorry we're not being particularly helpful here but just know you're not alone yes brilliant hmm what does it mean it does get you to a ninja or a floating ninja a floating integer is like 1.2 it's interesting how did how did JavaScript then compute hgf ew to say not well there you go so in this case they're trying to tell you explicitly that the value is nothing you have tried to pass in it and it's been nothing interesting yes well I better wrap it up now yeah it's been great having you here Michael thank you for clearing up all those things pleasure I've got some notes all right this will be news to you I think really I think so because on Friday we're coding yeah so Friday coding sessions this time all right it's our Discovery series and we're discovering react whoa with Bob's roll Bob will be joining us that is news indeed yes helping us take not our first steps in react because we have years react with or you said not for a while so yes we're going to be building a little app in react hope you can join us if you enjoyed this stream please give us the thumbs up and maybe subscribing so you don't miss the next one and we mentioned GitHub desktop next week treasure is joining me on the Wednesday oh there you go to talk about GitHub desktop yeah looking forward to that any closing thoughts Michael uh enjoy the rest of your week always but advice yes well see you on Friday yes thanks for coming everyone [Music]