Manu's Open Tech Glossary

2021-07-01

(Still work in progress!)

I spent 14 years at Google, which has a bit of a Not Invented Here syndrome and tends to reinvent (or invent!) everything it uses. After leaving, I’m learning about all those awesome open tools and this page is a glossary attempt, mostly for myself.

Babel: Javascript compiler to translate newer features into more compatible code.
Chai: Javascript library containing assertion functions, for testing.
Enzyme: Javascript library for writing unit tests against React components.
ESLint: Linter for Javascript (a.k.a. ECMAScript).
Flow: Javascript static type checker.
GraphQL: Query language to replace all REST operations using a single endpoint, reduce round trip count and unneeded data in the response.
JSX: File format that combines Javascript and markup.
Mocha: Javascript testing library.
Next JS: TODO.
Nuxt JS: TODO.
Node JS: Fork of Chrome’s V8 engine to run Javascript headless in server applications.
NPM: Node package manager. Allows specifying a project’s dependencies in a JSON file and auto-install and manage them.
Phabricator: General software dev tool, but mostly used for code reviews. No longer maintained.
PNPM: Another flavor of NPM.
React: Library for Javascript to build user interfaces.
Redux: State container for Javascript apps, with redundancy functionality. Can be in-memory (like memcache) but also persistent.
Relay: TODO.
Tailwind CSS: TODO.
Thrift: Open version of protocol buffers.
TSX: Is to Typescript what JSX is to Javascript.
Turbo: Tool to manage several NPM-backed projects within the same repository.
Typescript: statically-typed flavor of Javascript. Browsers can’t parse that so it’s usually compiled down to Javascript.
Vite: TODO.
Vitest: TODO.
Vue: TODO.
Webpack: Module bundler. Takes modules with dependencies and packs them into static assets to be served. Can also do minification, and includes a dev webserver for on-the-fly refreshes.
Yarn: Javascript package manager. Similar to Node Package Manager.