IT Acronyms Every Recruiter Should Know
Learn the must-know acronyms every recruiter hiring software developers should know.
If you hire software developers, you may want to dive deeper. Our instructors (CTOs) label these terms with a #mustKnow tag.
You can also download this document for future reference as a PDF document: Recruiter’s cheat sheet to IT Acronyms
API
Online applications often need to communicate with each other. Imagine we want to display customer reviews from Trustpilot on our website, Geekruiter. We could manually copy-paste every new review once a day, but that would be way too inefficient. And boring. Who would do it? Maybe we could do it once a month? Or a developer could “just” connect to TrustPilot’s backend where all the reviews are stored and pull new reviews every hour—automatically. Sounds better, right?
And that’s what an API (Application Programming Interface) is usually good for. Developers at TrustPilot develop an API which anyone in the world can connect to. It’s a piece of software accessible from anywhere over the internet. It has a specification other developers can read and understand. Hence, we at Geekruiter can read it and implement our website in a way it can pull new reviews every hour. Or even every second if desired.
AWS
Amazon store has enormous traffic. Every day, hundreds of millions of customers visit this website. It is powered by tens of thousands of backend servers distributed all over the world, usually stored in secure data centers.
At some point, Amazon has started offering access to these servers to other companies, too. That’s how Amazon Web Services (AWS) has emerged.
AWS, offered by Amazon, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Amazon uses internally for its end-user products.
CD
CD in the context of DevOps can stand for:
- Continuous Delivery
- or Continuous Deployment
Modern teams like to develop and release new features daily. They use Agile and continuous development processes to minimize the time it takes to build, test, and release new features; while ensuring that their quality standard is maintained.
Continuous Development describes a process for iterative software development. Build, test, release, monitor.
Continuous Deployment refers to the release into the production of software that passes the automated tests.
- Every good build is automatically released to the users.
- Every build that fails tests (unit tests or integration tests) is automatically flagged and returned to developers.
CI
Continuous Integration (CI) is a best practice where all code changes (new features or bug fixes) are automatically built and pushed to multiple staging environments, including the production (Live) environment.
CMS
Products such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla make it easy to create a blog or a simple website. These tools (“systems”) make it easy to “manage content.” That’s where their name comes from; Content Management Systems (CMS).
CSS
Websites without styles and colors would be boring, right? Imagine your company’s page is black and white, text with the same font size, images misaligned… Websites should be beautiful. And that’s why developers use “style sheets” (Cascading Style Sheets or CSS) that allow them to style each element of a website: font size, font color, alignment, etc.
CX
The customer experience (CX) refers to a customer’s experience with a company or brand, at all touch-points (ads, mobile app, email notifications, …). How do customers perceive their interactions with the company? How can we create an optimal experience for customers at all such touch-points?
Note the difference between Customer Service (CS), which is reactive. It only comes into play when a dissatisfied customer contacts a company.
Customer experience goes beyond customer service department and is the responsibility of everyone in an organization, including software developers, product managers, etc.
GCP
Google Search and YouTube have enormous traffic. Every day, hundreds of millions of users visit these websites. They are powered by tens of thousands of backend servers distributed all over the world, usually stored in secure data centers.
At some point, Google has started offering access to these servers to other companies, too. That’s how Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has emerged.
GCP, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products.
HTML
Every single website on the planet uses a special markup which indicates if a particular text should be displayed as a title (heading), or a paragraph, or a quote, etc. The markup is called HTML, Hyper-Text Markup Language. It is quite easy to learn as there is a limited amount of these markups.
HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages. The purpose of a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) is to read HTML documents and display them to users in the form of a web page.
IDE
Gone are those days when developers used simple text editors to write code. Today, they use powerful code editors with zillions of functions that help them be more productive.
These editors are also called Integrated Development Environment (IDE). An IDE typically consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger.
LAMP
Software developers like to work with technologies that fit together. It’s more comfortable that mixing technologies that are not compatible.
A combination of an operating system, a web server, a database, programming language, and a framework is called a stack. One of the most popular stacks, LAMP, consists of:
- L: Linux operating system.
- ** A:** Apache webserver.
- M: MySQL database.
- P: PHP programming language.
MEAN
Software developers like to work with technologies that fit together. It’s more comfortable that mixing technologies that are not compatible.
A combination of an operating system, a web server, a database, programming language, and a framework is called a stack. One of the most popular stacks, MEAN, consists of:
- M: MongoDB database.
- E: Express.js web server.
- A: Angular framework.
- N: Node.js runtime environment.
MVP
In the standard, traditional software development (a.k.a. the Waterfall method), a product manager writes a long, detailed specification for a new feature or a product. Developers then work on it for a long time, usually.
On the contrary, Agile teams prefer to learn from users/customers and iterate. They develop a small feature (a minimum product), get feedback from users, and then adjust.
The first version of a new product, the most minimalistic version, is usually referred to as MVP – Minimum Viable Product. The product team shows it to users, gets feedback from users, and iterate based on the feedback they receive.
PL/SQL
SQL (see below) has been here since 1987. Its functionality is limited though. Hence, Oracle maintains and supports PL/SQL, which is a procedural (programming) language that extends SQL’s functionality.
Procedures, also known as routines, subroutines, or functions, contain a series of queries (SQL) to be carried out.
PL/SQL stands for Procedural Language SQL.
QA
Every non-trivial digital product or service has mistakes. In software development, they are often referred to as bugs. Most of the defects are founds and fixed by developers or testers. A fraction of these defects usually affects real customers, which is a cause of negative customer experience.
Hence, the role of Quality Assurance (QA) is to prevent mistakes and defects in products and avoid problems when delivering products or services to customers.
SDLC
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process used by the software industry to design, develop, and test high-quality software. It usually consists of the following stages.
SQL
Data such as product information is often stored in a database such as MySQL, MS SQL (Microsoft SQL), or Oracle.
To display the product’s info on a website, a developer needs to query data about the product from the database. They usually need to write a query along the lines of “SELECT all information FROM products table WHERE product name is XYZ.”
The query above is just illustrational, but you can see it has some structure (SELECT … FROM … WHERE). Hence, it’s called a Structured Query Language, or SQL.
UI
The user interface (UI) is the graphical layout of an application. It consists of the buttons users click on, the text they read, the images, sliders, text entry fields, and all the rest of the items the user interacts with. This includes screen layout, transitions, interface animations, and every single micro-interaction. Any visual element, interaction, or animation must all be designed. Usually, that’s the job of a UI designer.
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UX
A user’s experience (UX) of a digital product is determined by how they interact with it. Is the experience smooth and intuitive or clunky and confusing? Does navigating the app feel logical, or does it feel arbitrary? Does interacting with the app give people the sense that they’re efficiently accomplishing the tasks they set out to achieve, or does it feel like a struggle?
User experience is determined by how easy or difficult it is to interact with the user interface (UI) elements that the UI designers have created.
You can also download this document for future reference as a PDF document: Recruiter’s cheat sheet to IT Acronyms
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