Geek Culture
This short-run sci-fi TV series acquired a cult following and spawned a 2005 movie continuing the original story.
What is "Firefly"?
Early in his career, this well known software titan and philanthropist was involved in the development of the programming language BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800, an early personal computer.
Who is Bill Gates?
The C++ 17 standard library class std::byte provides a standard way to represent byte data formerly handled by using this seemingly unrelated type.
What is char?
In this year, Facebook introduced the "Like" button.
What is 2009?
In the movie "Inception", individuals infiltrate the dreams of others. Agents in the dreamer's mind who attack these infiltrators are known as this.
What is "projections"?
Known as "The Queen of Software", she was a pioneering computer scientist and the developer of COBOL language.
Who is "Grace Hopper"?
This programming language idiom, common across many languages, is manifested in containers such as std::any, std::variant, and std::function. Its key characteristic is the elimination of type matching constraints by the container.
What is type erasure, or duck typing?
Ads infra uses aggressive sharding to provide rapid access to large datasets via services such as ARDS and AdRetriever. However, creating new shards has an overhead cost to run the OS and any custom code; ads infra refers to these costs using this term.
What is tax?
This concept manifests in a location where the company has all hands; in a programming language; and in the spirit of the company.
What is Hack?
This popular web comic created by Randall Munroe is known for its humorous and sometimes profound insights into science, technology, and programming.
What is "xkcd"?
This American programmer developed the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, advocating for the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify software.
Who is "Richard Stallman"?
Utilizing a std::mutex should always be done in tandem with this standard library RAII type in order to prevent issues arising from failure to unlock the mutex.
What is lock_guard or unique_lock?
This city in Sweden, near to the arctic circle, hosts one of Meta's most well-publicized data centers.
What is Luleå?
This influential document by Eric S. Raymond has become a manifesto of sorts for the open-source software movement.
What is "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"?
This notable figure in artificial intelligence was born in the UK, grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore, and later made significant contributions to AI while working in the United States.
Who is Andrew Ng?
This trio of attributes introduced in C++20 are hints applied to statements and labels to help the compiler optimize based on likelihood of execution of a given code path.
What are "[[likely]], [[unlikely]]", and "[[nodiscard]]"?
This previous owner of Menlo Park campus remains on the back of the Facebook / Meta sign, reminding people what happens when you're on top but fail to innovate.
What is Sun Microsystems?
In the "Ip Man" films, Ip Man was shown as the martial arts teacher of this legendary Hong Kong-American actor, known for movies like "Enter the Dragon" and "Fists of Fury".
Who is Bruce Lee?
This India-born computer scientist and executive was responsible for the development of Google's search algorithms from 2000-2016, including the re-writing of the initial work performed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Who is Amit Singhal?
This feature, newly introduced in C++20, enables the naming of a set of constraints which can be associated with class and function templates.
What are "concepts"?
This famous actor's face was used in the original Facebook logo created by Andrew McCollum.
Who is Al Pacino?