plain english for the meeting you're about to fake your way through.
you've nodded in a meeting at a word you didn't know. everybody has. that nod is the whole problem: half of tech vocabulary is plain ideas wearing a lab coat, kept fuzzy on purpose.
$0+ · pay what you want. zero is the price, and it's a fair one.
why this exists
jargon is gatekeeping. most glossaries explain a buzzword with three more buzzwords. this one peels the marketing off and hands you the plain version, accurate underneath the joke, every time.
how every entry works
the real definition. accurate. the version you could repeat to an engineer without getting a look.
the version that actually sticks. the one you'll remember at 4pm in the meeting that matters.
what it means when someone leans on the word too hard. the tell. and a bluff rating, so you know how much is real and how much is air.
a taste · 12 of 181
type a term, or filter by bluff rating. this is the lookup that takes ten seconds, the full book does it 181 times.
no match in this taster, but it's almost certainly one of the other 169. grab the full A–Z →
the bluff rating
real, just overused. the word means something, people just say it too much.
real core, marketing wrap. there's a true idea under the gloss.
mostly air. a sliver of meaning, a lot of theatre.
means nothing. retire it. it exists to fill a silence.
what's inside
cloud, on-prem, virtualization, the primitives.
networking, top to bottom.
databases, SQL vs NoSQL, warehouses, lakes.
tokens, context, hallucination, agents, the hype words.
egress, reserved vs spot, the horror-novel invoice.
CI/CD, zero trust, the acronym soup.
the words that mean nothing, with a bluff rating.
three ways to use it
you heard a word. the A–Z index gets you the real version in ten seconds, mid-meeting, no one the wiser.
pick the section that matches the meeting you just survived. it reads like a friend two drinks in who actually knows her stuff.
every entry is a card, built to send to the next person who says "synergy" with a straight face.
the obvious questions
stop nodding
the dictionary is free and stays free. but if it saved you from one more confident nod, you can leave a tip, same 181 entries either way.
the dictionary is the fast version. Decoded by Zara ($9) is the long one: embeddings, ACID, the whole CAP-theorem mess, each with the full chapter a dictionary can't give. start free here, go deeper if you want.