How to Speak Tech (and Save Your Career)

Save talented professionals from making ignorance-based mistakes.

You may have a dirty little secret, which is that you have NO IDEA what people at work are talking about when it comes to Web - or software - development. It's so bad that when you hear "back end development," you start thinking about your butt.

I just stumbled upon a tiny book designed to rescue people like you. It's called "How to Speak Tech."

Truth be told, the first time I picked up Vinay Trivedi's book, he almost lost me immediately. Vinay's opening sentence is: The progenitor of the Internet was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was funded by the US Department of Defense to enable computers at universities and research laboratories to share information.

Note to Vinay: the only people who use the word "progenitor" are people who already know what ARPANET means.

But I soon realized that Vinay's genius is to explain technical details very quickly. This isn't a dumbed-down, overly superficial summary; it's a cheat sheet for people in positions of authority who should understand the technical aspects of Internet development, but don't.

For example, he explains cloud computing in just five pages, and does a pretty good job of it. If you can understand this sentence, you will be able to understand his explanation: The cloud is a bunch of computers connected in a large network such that they remain decentralized but able to interact collaboratively and selectively via Internet exchange.

The odds are that people at work talk about API's. Perhaps you have a vague sense that this means application programming interfaces, but that's about all you know. Vinay explains that APIs make it easy to share data that others have already gathered: say you want to show your users the locations of the nearest ATMs on a map and want to accept credit card payments... Either your team can build these features from scratch, which will increase development time considerably and perhaps delay your scheduled launch date, or you can utilize the work of others, such as Google Maps.

You can easily read this book in a few hours, but you probably won't. My guess is that most readers will take 20 minutes to read the relevant chapter or two, and thus save themselves a world of embarrassment. But if this description fits you, I also suggest you keep the book in your desk drawer, just in case your boss calls you into a development meeting with just a few minutes warning; this book is a lifesaver for the less-than-tech-savvy among us.

One last point... I don't normally review books, and my goal isn't to sell more books for an author I've never met; it's to save talented professionals from making ignorance-based mistakes.