Technical writing - A type of writing where the author is writing about a particular subject that requires direction, instruction, or explanation
Divio Documentation System - A framework that proposes that all documentation should be explicitly structured according to its purpose, into four distinct types: tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation
ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010: Systems and software engineering — Architecture description
Flowchart - A type of diagram that represents a workflow or process
4+1 architectural view model - A view model used for "describing the architecture of software-intensive systems, based on the use of multiple, concurrent views"
The C4 model - An easy to learn, developer friendly approach to software architecture diagramming
UML - The graphical language for visualizing, specifying, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of a software-intensive system
Diagramming Tools
draw.io - A technology stack for building diagramming applications, and the world's most widely used browser-based end-user diagramming software
Markdown - A lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor
CommonMark - A rationalized version of Markdown syntax, with a spec and BSD-licensed reference implementations in C and JavaScript
GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown) - A formal specification, based on the CommonMark Spec, that defines the syntax and semantics of GitHub's dialect of Markdown
Markdown Guide - A free and open-source reference guide that explains how to use Markdown
DocUtils - An open-source text processing system for processing plaintext documentation into useful formats, such as HTML, LaTeX, man-pages, open-document, or XML
reStructuredText - An easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system
Asciidoc - A lightweight markup language for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs
Asciidoctor - A fast, open source text processor and publishing toolchain for converting AsciiDoc content to HTML5, DocBook 5 (or 4.5) and other formats
Org Mode - An authoring tool and a TODO lists manager for GNU Emacs
nvim-orgmode - An Orgmode clone for Neovim written in Lua
Wikitext - The markup language that consists of the syntax and keywords used by the MediaWiki software to format a page
Microsoft Writing Style Guide - A guide for writers creating a variety of content types, including apps and websites
Google documentation style guide - The editorial guidelines for writing clear and consistent technical documentation for an audience of software developers and other technical practitioners
Red Hat documentation style guide - The guide that provides style guidelines for Red Hat product and cross-product solution documentation
Microsoft Terminology - A collection of rules that define language and style conventions for specific languages
Mindfullness - The basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we're doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what's going on around us
Zen - A school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty
Flow - The mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity
Defence mechanism - Unconscious psychological processes that protect the self from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings related to internal conflicts and external stressors
Psychological resilience - The ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to pre-crisis status quickly
Occupational burnout - A work-related phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed
Cognitive bias - A systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment
Default mode network - A large-scale brain network; known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest
Situation awareness - The understanding of an environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors
1: Perception of the elements in the environment.
2: Comprehension or understanding of the situation.
3: Projection of future status.
Related Philosophies
Three Virtues - The qualities of a great programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris
Psychological safety - The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes
Trust - The belief that another person will do what is expected
Collective intelligence - The shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making
Groupthink - A psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome
Bystander effect - A social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when there are other people present
Dunbar's number - A suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships
Illustrative Concepts
Broken windows theory - A criminological theory that states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes
Stone soup story - A European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal
Market - A composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange
Inflation - An increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time
Prospect theory - A theory of behavioral economics and behavioral finance which states that people make decisions based on the potential value of losses and gains rather than the final outcome
Information asymmetry - A situation in which one party in a transaction has more or better information than the other
Induced demand - The phenomenon that after supply increases, more of a good is consumed
Metcalfe's law - The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2)
Network effect - The phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products
Braess's paradox - The observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it
Nash equilibrium - A solution concept of a non-cooperative game involving two or more players in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only their own strategy
Pareto efficiency - A state of allocation of resources from which it is impossible to reallocate so as to make any one individual or preference criterion better off without making at least one individual or preference criterion worse off
Currency - A standardization of money in any form, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange
Interest - The payment from a debtor or deposit-taking financial institution to a lender or depositor of an amount above repayment of the principal sum (that is, the amount borrowed), at a particular rate
Central bank - An institution that manages the monetary policy of a country or monetary union
Revenue model - A framework for generating financial income
Financial capital - An economic resource measured in terms of money used by entrepreneurs and businesses to buy what they need to make their products or to provide their services
Venture capital - A form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential
Contracts
Credit - The trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately
Debt - An obligation that requires one party, the debtor, to pay money or otherwise return value to another party, the creditor
Discounting - A mechanism in which a debtor obtains the right to delay payments to a creditor, for a defined period of time, in exchange for a charge or fee
Bond - A type of security under which the issuer (debtor) owes the holder (creditor) a debt, and is obliged – depending on the terms – to repay the principal of the bond at the maturity date and pay interest over a specified time
Spot - A contract of buying or selling a commodity, security or currency for immediate settlement
Futures - A standardized legal contract to buy or sell something at a predetermined price for delivery at a specified time in the future
Option - A contract which conveys to its owner, the holder, the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a specific quantity of an underlying asset or instrument at a specified strike price on or before a specified date
Cryptocurrency - A type of currency which uses digital files as money
Blockchain - A distributed ledger with growing lists of records
Bitcoin - A decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network
Return on investment - The ratio between net income (over a period) and investment (costs resulting from an investment of some resources at a point in time)
Cash flow statement - A financial statement that shows how changes in balance sheet accounts and income affect cash and cash equivalents
Income statement - One of the financial statements of a company and shows the company's financial performance for a specific period of time
Balance sheet - A summary of the financial balances of an individual or organization
Net present value - A way of measuring the value of an asset that has cashflow by adding up the present value of all the future cash flows that asset will generate
Argument - The central object of study in informal logic; a series of statements (premises) intended to determine the degree of truth of another statement (the conclusion)
Enthymeme - An argument in which one premise is not explicitly stated, a common feature of real-world reasoning
Criteria for Argument Evaluation
Fallacy - The use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument that may appear to be well-reasoned if unnoticed
Category mistake - The broader application of informal logic and other skills (like analysis and self-reflection) to decide what to believe or do
Formal system - An abstract structure and formalization of an axiomatic system used for deducing, using rules of inference, theorems from axioms by a set of inference rules
Gödel's incompleteness theorems - The two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic
Logic Principles
De Morgan's laws - A pair of transformation rules that are both valid rules of inference
Law of noncontradiction - The law that states that for any given proposition, the proposition and its negation cannot both be simultaneously true
Law of excluded middle - The principle that for every proposition, either this proposition or its negation is true
Proof by contradiction - A form of indirect proof that establishes the truth of a proposition by showing that assuming the proposition to be false leads to a contradiction
Logical Systems
Propositional calculus - A branch of logic that deals with propositions (which can be true or false) and relations between propositions, including the construction of arguments based on them
conjunction, disjunction, implication, biconditional and negation
Tautology - A formula that is true regardless of the interpretation of its component terms, with only the logical constants having a fixed meaning
First order logic - A collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science
universal quantification and existential quantification
Higher order logic - A form of logic that is distinguished from first-order logic by additional quantifiers and, sometimes, stronger semantics
Modal logic - A type of logic that is used to represent statements about possibility and necessity
Branches of Mathematical Logic
Set theory - The branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects
Naive set theory
Set - A collection of different things; these things are called elements or members of the set and are typically mathematical objects of any kind
Function (a.k.a. Map) - A binary relation between two sets that associates every element of the first set to exactly one element of the second set
Idempotence - The property of certain operations in which they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application
Partition of a set - A grouping of a set's elements into non-empty, disjoint subsets (called "blocks" or "cells") such that every element is in exactly one subset
Equivalence relation - A binary relation (reflexive, symmetric, and transitive) that partitions a set into disjoint equivalence classes
Axiomatic set theory
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory - An axiomatic system that was proposed in the early twentieth century in order to formulate a theory of sets free of paradoxes such as Russell's paradox
Ordinals & Cardinals
Type Theory - A formal system that provides an alternative foundation for mathematics (like Set Theory) and is the basis for typed functional programming and proof assistants.
Proof Theory - A major branch of mathematical logic that represents proofs as formal mathematical objects, facilitating their analysis by mathematical techniques
Natural deduction - A kind of proof calculus in which logical reasoning is expressed by inference rules closely related to the "natural" way of reasoning
Computability Theory - A branch of mathematical logic, computer science, and the theory of computation that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees
Lambda calculus - A formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application
Turing machine - A mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules
Model Theory - The study of the relationship between formal theories (collections of sentences in a formal language) and their models (structures in which the sentences are true)
Applications
Constraint satisfaction problem - Mathematical questions defined as a set of objects whose state must satisfy a number of constraints or limitations
Automated theorem proving - A subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs
Formal verification - the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics
Hoare logic - A formal system with a set of logical rules for reasoning rigorously about the correctness of computer programs
Tools and Resources
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - A reference work that organizes scholars in philosophy and related fields from around the world to create and maintain up-to-date content
SMT-LIB - A command language for interacting with SMT solvers via a textual interface
MiniZinc - A free and open-source constraint modeling language
P - A state machine based programming language for formally modeling and specifying complex distributed systems
Lean - An interactive theorem prover and programming language based on the Calculus of Constructions