From ACK to ZOI: The Story of Software in Three Letter Acronyms

Developers love inventing acronyms almost as much as we love writing code. From APL to BFFs, from WWW to XML, new acronyms are popping up all the time. But if we want to understand developer culture, we need to embrace the language: the jargon and the acronyms that technology uses to describe itself.

Join Dylan Beattie for an alphabetical journey through the history - and future - of technology and software development, from the everyday acronyms that have become so ubiquitous we’ve forgotten they were ever acronyms in the first place, to the emerging jargon of quantum computing, cryptocurrency and augmented reality. Hardware, software, frameworks, algorithms, languages… acronyms are everywhere, and they’re not going away any time soon, so let’s get to know them all a little better.