Microspeak Archives | Page 2 of 13

Microspeak sighting: over-index

Raymond ChenJanuary 29, 2018Jan 29, 201801/29/18

The other day, I heard the Microspeak term over-index used in the wild. It's like birdwatching, but for words. In a brief interview with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, they talked about the significance of having Amazon headquartered in your city. And Amazon can take some of the wealth of Seattle or Silicon Valley and bring it to the center of the...

Microspeak: Impedance mismatch

Raymond ChenJanuary 23, 2018Jan 23, 201801/23/18

In electrical engineering, an impedance mismatch occurs when the input impedance of an electrical load does not match the output impedance of the signal source, resulting in signal reflection or an inefficient power transfer (depending on the type of matching required). That is not what it means at Microsoft. In relational databases, an ...

Microspeak: over-index

Raymond ChenDecember 26, 2017Dec 26, 201712/26/17

Some time ago, I wrote a document that discusses the design of a new component. In the document overview, I summarized how the component interacts with the host. If the host supports widgets, then the component uses the host's widget manager. If the host doesn't support widgets, then there were several paragraphs that summarized how we deal ...

Microspeak: FCIB

Raymond ChenNovember 14, 2017Nov 14, 201711/14/17

FCIB (pronounced either by spelling it out F-C-I-B or as a sort-of acronym eff-sib) stands for "foreign checked-in binary". It refers to content checked into a project as binary output, rather than as source code. For example, a photo management project may use a facial recognition module provided by a team in Microsoft Research. There are ...

Microspeak: Gardening

Raymond ChenOctober 10, 2017Oct 10, 201710/10/17

A lot of project management tasks are simply housekeeping: Maintenance tasks that keep things running smoothly. For a project, that could be doing things like closing out old work items that were successfully completed, but which the developer failed to mark as complete in the work item tracker. Or it could be verifying that all the milestones...

Microspeak: Ripcord

Raymond ChenSeptember 12, 2017Sep 12, 201709/12/17

Remember: General business jargon still qualifies as Microspeak if it is in wide enough use at Microsoft that you are expected to know what it means and how to use it. Today's Microspeak term is ripcord. A ripcord is an alternate, much less risky plan which can be easily deployed at the last moment. You can think of pulling the ripcord as ...

Microspeak: To stand up

Raymond ChenJuly 11, 2017Jul 11, 201707/11/17

Today's Microspeak term is stand up, as a verb. This is not to be confused with stand-up as a noun, referring to a short meeting according to the agile development model. It's also not to be confused with a form of comedy, usually performed in front of a brick wall for some reason. Anyway, the Microspeak term stand up means "to get something ...

Microspeak: ROB and Office Hours

Raymond ChenJune 6, 2017Jun 6, 201706/6/17

At a team meeting, I was introduced to yet another acronym: ROB. This is spelled out rather than pronounced as a word. (So maybe it's not really an acronym? Whatever.) It was never actually stated in the meeting, presumably because the underlying assumption from the speaker was that everybody already was familiar with the term,¹ but the ...

Microspeak: Work-back

Raymond ChenMay 2, 2017May 2, 201705/2/17

A work-back schedule is a schedule created by taking a final deadline and "working backwards" in order to determine intermediate deadlines. For example, suppose we want our feature to go out in the last Windows Insider build of the year, so that we can gather results during the holiday break. The Windows Insider team tells us that their last ...

Microspeak: to reason over

Raymond ChenMarch 7, 2017Mar 7, 201703/7/17

Today's Microspeak is the phrase reason over. This API allows you to reason over the objects and relationships contained in the schema model generated by DACFx. To get value out of that data, we must be able to reason over it, tap into processing power to quickly analyze it and accelerate the insights. COMObject may be imported via tlbimp ...

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