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Words to Erase From Your Vocabulary When Coaching at RailsGirls

·1 min

On October 13th 2012 I had the pleasure of being a coach at RailsGirls in Munich.

Having spent quite a fair I amount of time in front of a computer screen, I gathered a lot of technical terms and been using them as if they were standard vocabulary.

But if you use terms like ‘continuous deployment’, ‘rapid prototyping’ or ‘static typing’ like talking about the weather you will have a hard time teaching programming to a beginner. Unfortunately a lot of strange terms will arise during an eight hour course of web-development.

Because avoiding these terms all together will be impossible, you should be at least be in the position to give a good explanation to each and every of the following expressions (in alphabetical order):

  • database
  • datatype
  • migration
  • route/routing
  • server
  • string

But keep in mind. While looking up the correct definition might be a good idea, it’s much more effective to find a good metaphor that fits 90% of the time (e.g. a string is ‘a line of text’).