Glossary. IT, minus the jargon.

The person who stands between you and the people doing the actual work. Forwards emails, calls meetings and translates your requests into a language nobody understands. You won’t find one here.

Development in short steps, where you see the result as it grows and can change direction. It works when it’s done honestly. When it isn’t, it’s just the old waterfall with more meetings.

A program that uses a language model to carry out tasks on its own. It searches, writes, fills in forms and calls other systems. Useful where the task is clear and the result can be checked.

An interface two programs use to talk to each other. Thanks to APIs, systems pass data along on their own instead of someone retyping it by hand.

The part of an application the user doesn’t see. The database, the logic and the connections to other systems. If the frontend is the shop window, the backend is the warehouse and the accounts department rolled into one.

Customer data platform. One place where data about customers comes together from every source, consents included. Other systems take it from there instead of each keeping its own copy.

Servers and services you rent from a provider instead of owning the hardware. You pay for what you use. Just make sure that in a few years you’re not mostly paying for what you forgot to switch off.

Content management system, where you edit your website’s content yourself. Text, images, whole pages. No calling a developer over every comma.

An inspection of an existing system. What state the code is in, where the risks are and what needs fixing first. Useful before taking over a system or before a big decision.

A system for managing customers and sales. Who the customer is, what they bought and when someone last got in touch. Works best when it pulls the data from your other systems on its own.

Chief technology officer. Makes the technology decisions in a company and answers for them. When you don’t need one full time, there’s the fractional CTO.

Software built exactly for your processes. It makes sense where bending a ready-made product would cost you more than building your own. Elsewhere it doesn’t.

Moving a company’s processes into digital form. Often just an expensive way of saying you’ll stop retyping spreadsheets. Which may be exactly what you need.

A description of how a system works, why it’s built the way it is and how to run it. Without it, only the person who wrote the system understands it. And that’s the shortest road to vendor lock-in.

A large business system that holds accounting, stock, purchasing, production and other areas together. A powerful tool, but it rarely does everything you’d like it to.

The part of an application or website the user sees and works with. It decides whether people enjoy using the application or find ways around it.

When a language model confidently states something that isn’t true. That’s why AI output that matters is always checked by someone or something.

Renting space on a server where your website or application runs. The cheapest hosting looks great right up to the first outage.

Connecting systems so they pass data to each other on their own. An order from the online shop shows up in accounting and nobody has to retype it.

An older system the company depends on, but which hardly anyone understands any more. It works, and that’s why everyone is afraid to touch it.

The right to use software, and possibly to modify or distribute it. With custom software, it matters whether you only have a licence or whether the code really belongs to you.

Large language model. The technology behind ChatGPT or Claude. It can write, summarise and answer, but it doesn’t know what’s true. It only knows what sounds likely.

Keeping a constant eye on whether a system is running, how fast it responds and whether anything strange is going on in it. So you hear about an outage before your customers do.

Minimum viable product, the smallest version of a product that is already useful. You build it quickly, test it on real people, and only then decide what comes next.

Ready-made software you buy or rent as it is. Quick and often cheaper than custom development. Until it makes you work the way its author imagined.

Software whose source code is public and which anyone can use and modify. Good insurance against depending on a single supplier.

Work on top of the original agreement. Sometimes justified, because the brief changed. Sometimes a business model.

Software as a service. Software you rent as a service over the internet, usually on a monthly subscription. Convenient, except your data and processes then live with someone else.

Search engine optimisation. In reality mostly a fast website, a good structure and clear content. Tricks stop working over time; the basics don’t.

Service level agreement. It says how quickly the supplier responds to a problem and what availability of the system they guarantee. A good SLA is clear, not long.

The text a program is built from. Whoever has the source code can fix and develop the system. That’s why it should belong to you, not to your supplier.

A detailed description of what a system should do. A good specification comes out of a conversation between the client and the people who will build it. The hundred-page one nobody finished reading usually doesn’t.

Shortcuts and stopgaps in the code that save time today but make every change more expensive tomorrow. Like any debt, it can be paid off gradually. It can only be ignored for so long.

A studio that designs and makes typefaces. We run our own, which is why we know how much typography makes or breaks a website. This site, by the way, is set in our own type.

Depending on a single supplier. You can’t sensibly leave, because only they know the system, hold the access or own the code. It can be prevented, and it can be escaped.

Programming on vibes. You let AI write the code and don’t read it. It works until somebody has to maintain it, fix it or explain it to an investor.

A program that runs in the browser. Unlike a website, it’s something you work in. Bookings, orders, client portals, internal tools.