Comment by no_wizard

3 days ago

Why call it jank? It is a negative associated word in most contexts that’s why I’m curious about it

I guess it stands out. "Git" is similar. "Rust" isn't a very positive word either. Perhaps it's a new trend. Maybe the answer is "all the good names have been taken" and/or they are simply lazy.

  • Neither is as negative. This sort of name is more like Gimp.

    It is definitely a lot less negative than Nimrod (which is actually positive in origin - but Americans do not get biblical references) which changed its name.

    You can also get away with a lot more if you are Linux Torvalds or Mozilla.

all code is somewhat jank though.

While jank is technically a negative term, its quite playful as opposed to scathing. My favourite usage was in MTG where large control decks that just slap together strong cards are referred to as "jank piles".

Yep I won’t use anything with a negative self deprecating name like this. Because some tech bro will use it as a a basis to disqualify my entire resume or sabotage an interview after solving the leetcode trivia troll questions and whatever other video game battles they add to the interview process in the future.

Project manager fires the entire team except 1 intern to finish the project with 1000 points of stories in 1 sprint? Heh or did you just figure out jank wasn’t capable of doing the job what did you expect?

Hotfix to fix a bug with the stage environment because the SREs set it up wrong? No bro it’s jank it’s that jank thing. Source: ctrl F “jank” in the message analytics and copilot says all matches are in the stage environment and that jank is also a tech thing. It also bright up every engineers profile that lists jank as a skill. Time to pick a scape goat.