What is randomnoun ?

“What is randomnoun?” is a question I get asked at least once a year, so here’s a quick list of things that the entity known as randomnoun definitely is.

• randomnoun is the indefinite article
• randomnoun is the name of your new project
• randomnoun is the next big thing
• randomnoun is what your constantly evolving software requirements are going to be in a week and a half
• randomnoun is your highly original username
• randomnoun is your super secret password
• randomnoun is your product branding strategy
• randomnoun is your personalised license plate
• randomnoun is your trademarked domain name
• randomnoun is the name of your thoroughbred.
• randomnoun is two levels of abstraction higher than that other guy
• randomnoun is patent pending
• randomnoun is trying, but failing to explain to someone what a context free grammar is to someone who has difficulty operating a biro
• randomnoun is the name of the fifth PC in the seventh rack on the second floor in the third datacentre
• randomnoun is the concatenation of two design patterns and another word into a java class name
• randomnoun is the Operation name of the next US war
• randomnoun is the result of your focus group session
• randomnoun is no substitute for creativity
• randomnoun is the first page of hackernews, with any words that aren’t product names redacted
• randomnoun is the last word emitted by your markov chain generator before it gains sentience
• randomnoun is the name of the turing machine that compensates for the infinite number of off-by-one errors made by other developers
• randomnoun is the title of chapter 14 of your memoirs
• randomnoun is your next conversation topic
• randomnoun is the ten-byte magic file header octet sequence
• randomnoun is the topic of your next photographic portfolio
• randomnoun is your 10th most least-used word, sorted by relevancy
• randomnoun is the reason you still use the word ‘cat‘ to view files, more or less
• randomnoun does not believe that the quality of a software product increases with the number of forks it has on github
• randomnoun should not be shortened to RND for project management purposes
• randomnoun is a project management tool that calculates the cost difference between keeping your existing system running and building a new system that doesn’t work
• randomnoun is the autocorrected name of the next folder you’re going to create under ‘My Documents’
• randomnoun is the name of your shelf company in the Cayman Islands
• randomnoun is a collaborative Rules Engine
• randomnoun is Welcoming you to your New Admin Console
• randomnoun is the punchline you’ll finally get when your early-onset dementia kicks in
• randomnoun is a dance craze
• randomnoun is a band name
• randomnoun is a local sporting team
• randomnoun is what ‘IT’ is in the lyrics to Faith No More’s “Epic”
• randomnoun is the next table in your database schema
• randomnoun is your privacy-enabled cloud-based backup solution
• randomnoun is the name of the Next Great Advancement of the Unified Microsoft/Apple/Ubuntu/Android/Nintendo/Sony/GTK/KDE User Interface
• randomnoun is the typeface name of the London Underground
• randomnoun is one of the list of operations that don’t require UAC escalation privileges
• randomnoun is automating the processes that you want to prevent everyone else from doing
• randomnoun is the i18n resource key of the English text “Hello World”
• randomnoun is the section heading of the third bank of unicode emoji in Roget’s Thesaurus
• randomnoun has a weighting of -8 in SpamAssassin
• randomnoun is the brazilian software department’s idea of what a variable name is supposed to be
• randomnoun is whatever it is that the SEO industry “does”
• randomnoun are the three remaining ssl cyphers that haven’t been compromised by the nsa
• randomnoun is configuring a cacheManagerPeerListenerFactory with class=”net.sf.ehcache.distribution.RMICacheManagerPeerListenerFactory” in ehcache.xml
• randomnoun is my opinion of your hashtag
• randomnoun is the vitally important clue discovered by Hercule Poirot in the smoking room, was tortured out of a suspect by Jack Bauer, or is about to be Columbo’s one more thing.
• randomnoun is the product that the company your quantitative analyst recommended actually makes
• randomnoun is the reason why interest rates went up/down yesterday
• randomnoun is the reason why exchange rates are going up/down today
• randomnoun is the reason why the SOI is going to go up/down tomorrow
• randomnoun is the name of the political party that your political party gave their preferences to
• randomnoun is what someone who voted liberal thinks is the bottleneck in your scalability platform
• randomnoun is a new flavour of dirt that the chinese can turn into cheaper TVs.
• randomnoun is trending on twitter
• randomnoun is #3 on the top thousand years of video uploaded to youtube in the last ten minutes
• randomnoun is what’s behind door number 2 on that TV gameshow
• randomnoun is the insurance policy that you actually needed to get
• randomnoun is the next two-syllable mobile app that you’re going to download
• randomnoun is what’s at the top of your core dump’s stackframe
• randomnoun is the arbitrary level of complexity that your client wants in their ‘easy-to-use’ query builder to avoid having to write the SQL themselves, which may or may not include the ability to put conditions in brackets .
• randomnoun is the quantitative difference between the word ‘cloud’ and the word ‘datacentre’, between the phrase ‘big data’ and the word ‘database’. and between ‘datacentre’ and ‘that PC that sits in the kitchenette on the shelf above the kettle, 60 years after someone invented Moore’s Law’
• randomnoun is the filename that the Australian Tax Office helpfully gives to the PDF in which it describes how to complete your activity statement.
• randomnoun is the phonetic pronunciation of every device driver that is displayed in autoruns.exe
• randomnoun has no idea who peter todd is
• randomnoun is the final end-result of the Digital Convergence

Think that about covers it.

I reserve the right to add to this list over time.