Learning Glossary

Browse 67 learning terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

67 Learning Terms

Active Recall
A learning method that strengthens memory by forcing yourself to retrieve information rather than only rereading it. In tech culture it often comes up in the...
Apprenticeship
A learning path based on working closely with more experienced practitioners while doing real tasks, rather than relying only on formal coursework. In tech,...
Book Club
A group that reads and discusses a shared book, paper, or set of readings, often adapted in tech teams to cover technical books, management texts, or research...
Brown Bag
An informal lunch-hour talk or knowledge-sharing session, historically attended while people brought their own lunch in a brown paper bag. In tech culture...
Brown Bag Session
An informal lunchtime presentation or discussion where coworkers share knowledge, demos, or lessons learned with the rest of the team. The name comes from the...
Cargo Culting
Copying code, architecture, or practices without understanding why they work — like cargo cult islanders building wooden airplanes hoping to attract supply...
Cheat Sheet
A compact reference document that summarizes commands, concepts, syntax, or procedures for quick lookup. In tech culture cheat sheets are prized because they...
Code Academy
A coding school, program, or learning environment focused on teaching software development skills, often in a practical or accelerated format. The phrase may...
Code Book
A book about programming, source code, or software practice, or in some contexts a collection of coding standards and conventions. In developer culture code...
Code Buddy
A person paired with someone for coding support, feedback, accountability, or onboarding. The phrase is informal, but the idea is common in mentorship,...
Code Camp
A community learning event or intensive training program focused on programming skills, tooling, or software practices. Depending on context it can mean a...
Code Dojo
A structured practice session where developers solve small programming exercises together to improve fluency, design instincts, or collaboration habits. It...
Code Exercise
A practice problem or guided task used to build coding skill, explore a concept, or assess understanding. In culture, code exercises show up in interviews,...
Code Kata
A small, repeatable programming exercise used to practice a particular technique, design move, or problem-solving pattern. Like martial arts kata, the point is...
Code Kitchen
An informal term for a hands-on coding space, workshop, or learning environment where people experiment, tinker, and build things together. The phrase evokes a...
Code Lab
A guided hands-on environment or workshop where people learn by building or following step-by-step coding tasks. Code labs are common in education, onboarding,...
Code Literacy
The ability to read, understand, and reason about code at a useful level, even if someone is not a professional developer. In modern workplaces, code literacy...
Code Mentorship
Mentorship focused specifically on coding judgment, style, debugging, review habits, and technical growth. Code mentorship often happens through pairing,...
Code Pairing
Working on code together in real time, often with one person typing and the other reviewing, questioning, or navigating. Code pairing is used for onboarding,...
Code Question
A question about code, coding behavior, architecture, debugging, or software concepts. In communities and teams, the quality of code questions often determines...
Code Quiz
A quiz or short assessment used to test coding knowledge, syntax familiarity, or conceptual understanding. In education and hiring culture, code quizzes are...
Code Tutorial
A guided explanation or walkthrough that teaches people how to write or understand code. In developer culture code tutorials range from excellent teaching...
Code Workshop
A hands-on learning session where participants practice coding, discuss solutions, and often build something small together. Code workshops are common in...
Coding Bootcamp
An intensive short-term program designed to teach practical software development skills quickly, often for career transition. In tech culture bootcamps are...
Coding Dojo
A collaborative coding practice session where participants work through exercises together, often emphasizing repetition, feedback, and technique over shipping...
Continuous Learning
A mindset and practice of ongoing learning rather than treating education as something finished after school or onboarding. In tech culture continuous learning...
Curiosity
A genuine desire to explore, understand, and ask questions beyond immediate necessity. In tech culture curiosity is often treated as one of the strongest...
Developer Education
The teaching, training, and enablement work aimed at helping developers learn tools, platforms, practices, or concepts. In tech culture developer education...
Developer Workshop
A hands-on workshop aimed at developers, usually focused on building, integrating, or learning something technical through active participation. Developer...
Dev Week
A week dedicated to developer-focused activities such as workshops, launches, hack time, or community events. The phrase is often used for internal learning...
Error Culture
The shared way a team responds to mistakes, failures, and bugs, including whether errors are hidden, punished, normalized, or learned from. Error culture...
Example Driven
Describing an approach that relies on concrete examples to teach, explain, or align rather than staying abstract. In technical culture example-driven...
Experiment
A deliberate test used to learn something under controlled or at least interpretable conditions. In tech culture experiments are valuable because they turn...
Expert Beginner
A person who is highly confident and practiced within a narrow comfort zone but has stopped progressing toward broader or deeper mastery. In professional...
Expert Beginner Slang
Informal language around people who have enough knowledge to sound confident but not enough depth to see where they are still missing context. In engineering...
Failure
An outcome where something does not work as intended, whether at the level of a project, system, decision, or plan. In healthy technical culture failure is not...
Failure Analysis
The systematic investigation of why something failed, with the goal of understanding causes, contributing factors, and improvements. In engineering culture...
Failure Culture
The norms a team has around how failures are discussed, remembered, punished, or learned from. Failure culture determines whether problems get surfaced early...
Feedback
Information given in response to work, behavior, products, or ideas with the goal of helping improvement, alignment, or learning. In healthy culture, feedback...
Feedback Loop
A cycle in which outputs, outcomes, or reactions are observed and then used to adjust future behavior or decisions. In product and team culture, feedback loops...
Few-Shot
Describing a setup where a model is given a small number of examples in the prompt to demonstrate the desired behavior before handling a new input. Few-shot...
Field Guide
A practical guide organized for real-world use rather than exhaustive theory, often meant to be consulted in the field or during actual work. In tech culture...
Growth Mindset
The belief that abilities and intelligence can improve through effort, practice, and learning rather than being fixed traits. In workplace culture growth...
Guest Speaker
A speaker invited to address a group, class, company, or event from outside the immediate organizing team. In workplace and community culture, guest speakers...
Gym for Engineers
A metaphor for any environment, exercise set, or workflow where engineers deliberately practice and improve technical skill, much like athletes train in a gym....
Incident Post-Mortem
A structured analysis written after an outage or operational failure to document timeline, impact, root causes, contributing factors, and follow-up actions....
Interactive Learning
Learning that occurs through ongoing interaction with users, environments, or feedback sources rather than from a fixed static dataset alone. Interactive...
Just In Time Learning
Learning something exactly when it becomes necessary rather than mastering it long in advance. In engineering slang, just-in-time learning is pragmatic and...
Mental Model
An internal conceptual map of how something works, used to predict behavior, explain failures, and make decisions. Strong engineers often differ less in syntax...
Mentor
A more experienced person who helps someone develop technical judgment, career direction, communication skills, or confidence through sustained guidance. In...
Monkey See Monkey Do
A critical phrase for copying patterns, code, or opinions simply because others are doing it, without understanding the underlying reasoning. In software it...
Pair Programming Culture
A team norm where engineers frequently work together live on the same problem to share context, reduce mistakes, and teach one another.
Passive Learning
Learning from a fixed dataset without actively choosing which examples to request or explore next. Passive learning contrasts with active or interactive...
Playground
An interactive, sandboxed environment — typically browser-based — where developers can write, run, and experiment with code without setting up a local...
Playground Culture
A culture that encourages experimentation in safe environments such as sandboxes, REPLs, notebooks, or temporary branches before formalizing changes. It values...
Postmortem
A written analysis conducted after a production incident, documenting what happened, why, how it was resolved, and what will be done to prevent recurrence....
Postmortem Culture
The way a team handles incident reviews, including whether postmortems are blameless, useful, and tied to real follow-through.
Post-Mortem Culture
The shared norms around how an organization investigates failures after they happen, including whether reviews are blameful or learning-oriented and whether...
Project Euler
A website of mathematically oriented programming problems designed to encourage clever algorithmic thinking and number-theory exploration. It is popular among...
Self-Supervised
Describing learning methods that use structure already present in unlabeled data to create training signals, rather than relying on externally labeled...
Side Project
A project pursued outside one’s main job, often for learning, experimentation, portfolio building, or personal interest. In tech culture, side projects are a...
Supervised
Describing learning that uses labeled examples or explicit targets to teach a model the desired mapping from inputs to outputs. Supervised methods remain...
The Hard Way
Doing or learning something through mistakes, failures, and direct consequences rather than through guidance. In engineering slang, teams often discover the...
Upskilling
The process of deliberately building new skills so someone can handle more advanced tools, roles, or responsibilities.
User Group
A community of people who use the same technology, product, or platform and meet to share knowledge, solve problems, and build relationships. User groups have...
Weekend Project
A small project started or built over a weekend, often for experimentation, learning, or personal satisfaction rather than formal product goals. In startup...
Zone of Proximal Development
A concept borrowed from education for the space where someone can succeed with guidance even if they cannot yet do the task alone. In engineering slang, it is...

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