Hello and welcome back to Startup Curious, where we discuss things you should know if you’re thinking about working for or starting a startup.
Today, I want to do a brief overview of a bunch of common technical terms you may hear at a startup. If you have a technical background, you’re likely already familiar with these, but if you don’t, it’s a good idea to brush up on this sort of vocabulary. I don’t want to go needlessly deep into any of them so I’m just going to kind of breeze through these. Here we go!
First, frontend and backend. You may hear things like “They’re a frontend engineer” or “We have to focus on fixing the backend.” Basically - the frontend is everything you see, the backend is all of the stuff behind the scenes that’s working to make things happen.
Unless you’re using a no-code tool, frontends and backends are written in programming languages. There are a bunch of kind of confusing programming language names, but if you hear things like Javascript, Python, Java, Ruby, Swift… these are all names for different languages you can write products in. To make it even more confusing, these languages can actually have variations called frameworks. Some of the popular frameworks are things like Django, Ruby on Rails, React, Node.js… the list goes on.
Next, databases. You might hear things like “We should query the database to figure that out.” Databases are a collection of information. Pretty much all information that your product collects is stored in a database somewhere. You can basically visualize a database like a bunch of spreadsheets - in fact, when you export from a database, that’s often the format they take.
Another thing you may hear about is Git. Git is more or less a way to keep track of changes in code, also known as a version control system. It keeps track of changes that are made and who made them, which allows problems to be more easily traced and fixed. If you’ve ever looked at your edits in Google Docs - sort of the same thing. Github and Gitlab are popular tools that companies often use to store their code and get the same benefits of version control, among other things.
The last terms I want to cover today are deployment and releasing. You’ll likely hear things like “I need to deploy” or “We can’t release on Friday!” Basically, these are ways of taking the code that has been written and putting it somewhere more publicly accessible. Usually deployment is used when you’re putting it somewhere with limited access, like a test environment.
Okay, another term - test environments are basically copies of public products but only accessible to a limited number of people, often just employees of the company. This allows them, as the name implies, to test the product to make sure it all works before deploying the code to the “real” product - also known as the production environment.
When code is going to be made publicly accessible, it’s called releasing the code. Notably, a lot of companies prefer not to do a release on Fridays, because if there is an urgent issue that was missed while testing, then someone has to use their weekend to fix it.
While we’re on the topic of environments, I’ll throw one more in - you may hear “it worked on my local environment” or “it worked locally.” When you write code, you can test it out just on your own computer, which is referred to as “testing it locally.” There are often some differences between the test & production environments and local environments, which is why more testing is often required after this initial step - lots of things work locally that end up breaking further down the line. That’s a little in the weeds, but hopefully it makes sense.
And that’s where we’ll wrap up for today. There are a ton of other useful terms to know, so I’ll likely do a part two of this at some point. I do want to say that if you’re currently in school in a non-technical major and considering working at a startup… try to take an elective or two that covers some of these topics. It will pay off in the long run!
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What are some technical terms I should know?