Adam Korga’s IT DICTIONARY (subtitled “A Survival Manual for Devs, Dreamers, and Those Still Pretending Their Job Has Structure”) is a humorous compendium of all the terms, acronyms, and abbreviations that pepper the conversation of IT professionals and drive their stakeholders to distraction. The book is grouped into various sections, including “Core IT–Survival Mode Activated,” “Agile Rituals And Other Cargo Cults,” and “Startupistan–Chaos, Hoodie and Deadline.” As such, readers who know the landscape of web development, the IT helpdesk, and systems operations will get the most out of it.
For many, IT subculture is a closed book; the British sitcom The IT Crowd is now over a decade in the past, and how devs, programmers, and various other IT professionals joke about their work is hard to discern. The most obvious point of contact is with office work, and, in particular, what to do when something goes wrong. Korga damns the eyes of corporate high-ups who don’t understand the system and want the impossible; of clueless clients who get promised undeliverable deliverables by people-pleasing managers; and of users whose klutzy ways of working foul up even the most straightforward processes.
Of course, the jargon is the point. Some of the terms will be familiar to the general reader (“RTFM,” used to describe someone who hasn’t “Read The F—ing Manual,” is a personal favorite), but most won’t be. The target audience may very well laugh out loud from “biological stack overflow” (a euphemistic way of saying the user got overwhelmed by too much information); and Korga’s definition of using Google Docs collaboratively (“Simultaneous typing + unresolved comments = modern gladiator arena”) will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has tried parallel writing.
However, it’s also true that jargon is best appreciated by those who use it. For non-programmers, witticisms on checking one’s Git status, log levels, or this bit of code being “green in Jenkins” renders large parts of the book arcane. At such times, one is reduced to “getting it from context” and appreciating the joke from afar. As such, the book struggles to maintain interest over its 200-odd pages. But as a text to be dipped into for a few minutes of humor now and then, IT DICTIONARY will appeal to those intimately related to the world of tech.
Adam Korga’s IT DICTIONARY: A Survival Manual for Devs, Dreamers, and Those Still Pretending Their Job Has Structure will raise a laugh with IT professionals who know the grind of keeping a company’s network up and running all too well.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader