Well, that's not the only meaning of "postmortem". The fine article does open with,
"The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and has been in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing, jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to an end. This post briefly describes jemalloc’s development phases, each with some success/failure highlights, followed by some retrospective commentary."
postmortem is looking back after an event. That can be a security event/outage, it can also be the completion of a project (see: game studios often do postmortems once their game is out to look back on what went wrong and right between preproduction, production, and post launch).
It's weird that we use "postmortem" in those cases since the word literally means "after death"; kind of implying something bad happened. I get that most of these postmortems are done after major development ceases, so it kind of is "dead" but still.
Surely a "retrospective" would be a better word for a look back. It even means "look back.
The last part is unfortunate. However, it is a perfectly fine choice of title, as it does not make the majority of us think that there were an outage caused by jemalloc. You should update how you think of the word, and align it with the majority usage
I think this implies your understanding of the term “post-mortem” is incorrect, rather than the title.
Or maybe not
Well, that's not the only meaning of "postmortem". The fine article does open with,
"The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and has been in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing, jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to an end. This post briefly describes jemalloc’s development phases, each with some success/failure highlights, followed by some retrospective commentary."
postmortem is looking back after an event. That can be a security event/outage, it can also be the completion of a project (see: game studios often do postmortems once their game is out to look back on what went wrong and right between preproduction, production, and post launch).
It's weird that we use "postmortem" in those cases since the word literally means "after death"; kind of implying something bad happened. I get that most of these postmortems are done after major development ceases, so it kind of is "dead" but still.
Surely a "retrospective" would be a better word for a look back. It even means "look back.
It gets even better. Some companies use "mid-mortems", which are evaluation and reflection processes in the middle of a project...
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The last part is unfortunate. However, it is a perfectly fine choice of title, as it does not make the majority of us think that there were an outage caused by jemalloc. You should update how you think of the word, and align it with the majority usage