Buzzword: Greenfield Brownfield

It has become common to refer to new development projects as Greenfield. This obviously conjures images of an untouched patch of land with no previous work impeding progress.

Of late, a new term Brownfield  has become trendy to describe the rest of software development. Here there is the obvious contrast with Greenfield in the sense that the ground has been torn up and there is dirt and mud everywhere. But in addition, Brownfield had a prior meaning in commercial real estate. Brownfield referred to a property contaminated by one or more toxins.

In the case of software development, these toxins are prior decisions or implementations which have gone bad or never worked in the first place.

Buzzword: Hatless

When talking about security there are two well worn buzzwords.

The White Hat is the good guy. He is the security guy who works for the company or it is used to refer to an ethical hacker. He pursues security exploits in order to make systems more secure.

The Black Hat is the evil hacker. Since both can and do use the same practices the terms white and black hat arose.

Now what about the rest of us? We are just the Hatless. (You can say it with the same emphasis you would give to "the great unwashed", only it is shorter.)

Needless to say in the battle between the Hats, white and black, we the Hatless are often the victims.