Signals Glossary

Browse 11 signals terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

11 Signals Terms

Canary
A deliberately placed marker or value used to detect tampering, exploitation, or unexpected access, such as a stack canary, token canary, or canary document....
Canary in the Coal Mine
An early warning sign that points to a larger hidden problem. In engineering slang, a canary in the coal mine is usually a small failure or metric change that...
Code Smoke
The early visible signs that something in the code is burning, even before the full fire is obvious. In engineering slang, code smoke refers to weak warnings,...
Flag
A configurable switch, signal, or marker used to enable behavior, track state, or indicate a condition. In product and engineering culture, 'flag' often refers...
Indicator
A specific observable sign associated with suspicious or malicious activity, such as an IP address, domain, file hash, mutex, or process path. Indicators are...
Intent Data
Behavioral data suggesting that a company or buyer may be actively researching or considering a product category, such as content consumption, search behavior,...
Intent Signal
A specific indicator that a prospect may be entering a buying process, such as content downloads, job postings, website behavior, or partner alerts. Individual...
Kill Dash Nine
A spoken version of `kill -9`, usually said with a tone that mixes practicality and violence. In engineering slang, it stands for the bluntest process...
Process Group
A collection of one or more processes in a Unix-like OS that share a process group ID (PGID), allowing signals to be sent to the entire group at once. Process...
Repository Health
The overall condition of a repository as judged by signals like activity, issue response time, docs quality, test coverage, and release reliability. In...
Warning Shot
An early signal or minor incident that should be treated as a serious warning before worse things happen. In engineering slang, teams regret ignoring warning...

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