From AI to ZI. An encyclopedia of the “I-tier” tech stack.
And a free tech stack generator.
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“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”
— Albert Einstein
The digital revolution shoves us in the direction of individualism. Ironically, our only chance of salvation is a total commitment to the “I”, beating our corporate overlords at their own game.
I humbly present the following programme, which takes a series of technocrat buzz-words with the letter “I” as the second element in a dyad of Latin uppercase letters, and fills the blanks to complete an alphabet of ouroborosian perfection. Dear reader, I believe that the text speaks for itself. I hope that you follow its directives for the glory of our dystopic wasteland.
Demo
For those of you who are keen on interactive experiences, look no further:
This lovely app was made with React. The full code is available on the sandbox. You can take a look at the main file here:
For those of you inclined to reading in an orderly fashion, the entire alphabet is also available here:
AI — Artificial Intelligence.
The grandaddy of them all. Currently, it works as a catch-all term for the things that we want computers to do that are just outside of our reach.
Its popularity derives from its loftiest goal, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). A holy grail that probably won’t materialize in the 21st century, if ever.
BI — Business Intelligence.
BI is a series of techniques and processes to collect and analyze data in support of a business.
It works on the assumption that knowledge is power. Therefore knowing what’s going on, and reacting accordingly, is good for business.
CI — Continuous Integration.
The practice of having developers frequently commit their code changes, thereby “integrating” them to the main branch in source control.
Usually, each commit triggers a workflow in a “CI server”, which builds the code and performs tests and QA, then notifies developers if everything works correctly.
DI — Dependency Injection.
A technique in which a “client” object receives “dependency” (or “service”) objects. The code that passes the service to the client is called the “injector”. Instead of the client specifying which service it will use, the injector tells the client what service to use.
DI is one form of the broader technique of “inversion of control”. The aim is to achieve “separation of concerns” of construction and use of objects.
EI — Emotional Inteligence.
A term popularized in the ’90s by a best-seller pop science book. It describes the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage emotions. It’s typically associated with empathy.
It’s a most valuable skill to have in a field dominated by narcissistic personality types.
FI — Frontend Interoperability.
A frontend technique to make applications future-proof and to allow different teams to work on the same application using multiple stacks and frameworks.
It generally encompasses the use of web standards like Web Components and techniques like Micro Frontends.
GI — Global Illumination.
A group of algorithms used in 3D computer graphics that are meant to add more realistic lighting to 3D scenes.
Such algorithms take into account the light that comes directly from a light source (direct illumination) and subsequent cases in which other surfaces in the scene reflect light rays from the same source.
HI — Honor Institutionality.
The practice of imbuing every person in an institution with the concept of honor. Thereby allowing everyone, from a clerk to the CEO, to challenge each other to a duel.
A duel must be performed with swords or pistols at dawn until one of the participants falls dead or attains satisfaction.
II (I²) — Income Inequality.
Under the capitalist work ethic, an employee performs better if he is subject to a form of wage slavery. Business owners must systematically calibrate the amount of remuneration to maximize motivation and value generation.
It has been observed that high wages promote the satisfaction of basic human needs, reducing productivity. Such a state is recommended only to the ruling class.
JI — Just Intonation.
In music, just intonation is the attempt to tune all musical intervals as whole number ratios (such as 3:2 or 4:3) of frequencies.
Although the use of just intonation fell out of favor concurrently with the increasing use of instrumental accompaniment, most Acappella ensembles naturally tend toward just intonation because of the comfort of its stability. Barbershop quartets are a good example of this.
KI — Kubernetes Imperialism.
The belief that Kubernetes should be the basis of every single software engineering practice and implementation. Should resistance be found, we are willing to implement Kubernetes by force.
If the initiative is successful, we expect Kubernetes to power even this piece of text.
LI — List Item.
Li is the most useful of all HTML tags. List Item (“<li></li>”) represent a single item in ordered (“ol”) or unordered (“ul”) lists. It was standardized in HTML 2.
With the modern prominence of lists in mobile applications, this brave HTML tag can give you the momentum your startup needs.
MI — Multiple Inheritance.
A feature of some object-oriented programming languages in which an object or class can inherit characteristics and features from more than one parent object or class. It is distinct from single inheritance.
It has been a controversial issue for many years, with opponents pointing to its increased complexity and ambiguity in the “diamond problem”.
NI — Natural Intelligence.
A term used to contrast intelligence found in nature, particularly in man, from artificial intelligence.
With all the buzz around AI, you can keep a competitive edge by relying on NI and having a human in the loop. For extra scalability, make an abstraction layer around your human so that you may replace him quickly shall an intelligent alien race be discovered who’s willing to participate as a piece of your tech stack.
OI — Opacity Initial.
AKA the “punk-rock pattern”. It consists of having the senior developer setting the global CSS rule “* {opacity: initial !important}”.
This rule prevents all the junior developers from using the opacity property to hide elements. Instead, the rule forces them to conditionally render HTML elements, maintaining a healthy and semantic HTML structure.
PI — PHP Infallibility.
The dogma of PHP infallibility asserts that the beautiful programming language PHP, christened in the year of our Lord 1994, will continue to maintain its hegemony until the end times.
At the time of writing, PHP is used by 79.2% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.
QI — Quantum Intranet.
With the rise of cloud quantum services like “Azure Quantum”, it is as good a time as any to remind you that you can roll out your own in-house quantum implementation.
The development costs and theoretical physicist salaries might be high, but nothing compares to the freedom of having all your quantum needs covered without a big corporation behind.
RI — Random Invocation.
Add some spice to your application by using a random number generator to decide which function to invoke. Users love uncertainty, as gamblers worldwide would attest.
RNGs are readily available on most standard libraries, but you can go the extra mile and generate your numbers with a couple of coins and an Arduino.
SI — Synthetic intelligence.
An alternative/opposite term for artificial intelligence emphasizing that the intelligence of machines need not be an imitation or in any way artificial. It can be a genuine form of intelligence.
John Haugeland proposes an analogy with simulated diamonds and synthetic diamonds, only the synthetic diamond is truly a diamond. A “synthetic intelligence” would therefore be or appear man-made, but not a simulation.
TI — Texas Instrumenting.
The practice of incorporating one or more of the ubiquitous Texas Instruments graphing calculators, as feared by many undergraduate students, into your technology stack.
UI — User Interface.
A user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine from the human end.
It is projected that the user won’t be a fundamental part of the technological landscape in the future. Use this technology with caution.
VI — vi.
When you are too cool to use Vim.
WI — Window Interface.
Originally conceived as a psychological projection of a young Bill Gates who was troubled by the architectural features of his last name, the window control element remains a staple of GUIs.
It is severely underused in the mobile and web apps of today. Be like Microsoft and boldly manifest your draggable widgets!
XI — xkcd Inspiration.
According to Randall Munroe’s Law, there is a relevant xkcd comic for everything. Using relational database terminology, we can say there’s a one-to-one relationship between xkcd comics and reality. We hope that this knowledge will level the playing field.
YI — Yi-Jing Inspiration.
Yi-Jing, also known as “I Ching”, is an ancient Chinese divination text and among the oldest of the Chinese classics. It can be used very effectively for software development of any kind, as exemplified here.
ZI — Zumba Instructor.
Thanks for reading this far! As a reward, go outside and find your closest Zumba instructor and get ready to rock the boat! Physical fitness is as crucial as mental.
Also, make sure that you get your 8 hours of sleep, eat well, stay hydrated, be around nature once in a while, don’t drink or smoke too much, exercise a bit, stretch in the morning, and everything’s gonna be just fine.
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