appendix · every term from the ticker, plus the abbreviations and a few strays
the engineering side
- code review
- engineers reading each other’s changes before they ship
- data privacy
- keeping personal information away from anyone who shouldn’t see it
- audit trails
- records of who did what in a system, and when
- observability
- instruments that show what software is doing from the outside
- GDPR
- the General Data Protection Regulation, Europe’s data privacy law
- feature flags
- switches that turn parts of software on or off without redeploying
- role-based access
- people see only what their role permits
- documentation
- written explanations of how a system works and why
- 3rd-party integrations
- connections between your software and someone else’s
- SOC 2
- Service Organization Control 2, an audit standard for how companies handle data
- RFP
- request for proposal, the questionnaire-heavy way big buyers pick vendors
- due diligence
- the homework a buyer or investor does on you before money moves
- subprocessors
- the other companies your vendor quietly relies on to handle your data
- incident response
- the practiced way a team handles things breaking
- compliance
- meeting the rules a regulator or a standard sets
- zero-downtime deploys
- shipping new software while the old keeps running
- data pipelines
- automated paths that move and reshape data between systems
- API
- application programming interface, the way one program talks to another
- fractional
- part-time by design, a share of a senior role without the full-time hire
- CTO
- chief technology officer
- MA
- master of arts, a graduate degree
- pro bono
- unpaid, on purpose, for work that matters
- colophon
- the bookbinder’s page about how the book was made, ours is about this site
the field side
- peer review
- scientists checking each other’s work before publication
- harm reduction
- meeting people where they are and lowering risk, not demanding abstinence
- altered states
- consciousness doing something other than its default
- introspection
- looking inward and reporting what you find
- informed consent
- agreeing to something after actually understanding it
- titration
- starting small and adjusting the dose gradually
- set & setting
- mindset and environment, the two big variables of any psychedelic experience
- trip reports
- firsthand written accounts of psychedelic experiences
- integration circles
- group conversations for making sense of an experience afterward
- trip sitting
- staying sober and present while someone else journeys
- challenging experiences
- the field’s honest name for difficult trips
- ceremony
- a held, intentional container for an experience
- non-ordinary states
- the research term for consciousness off its usual path
- dosing protocols
- the schedule and amounts a study or a clinic follows
- psilocybin
- the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms