Lazycoder

Mashup and hack

Can we put a moratorium on using the word “mashup”. You’re not cool when you say it and it’s being used for everything now. All these apps are doing is combining two different components together. Did I spend a lot of time in the 90′s creating COM/ASP “mashups”? By adding a Flickr badge to my site do I now have a WordPress/Flickr “mashup”. Bleh. Oh yeah, the dot-bomb era is back and so are the stupid buzzwords.

Second, you can not “hack” a banana. You can not “hack” headphones. If you put a sticker on your iPod, you are not “hacking” your iPod. When you are actually manipulating code, then you are “hacking” and you can call what you are doing a “hack”. Using the word “hack” to describe modifying something may make you feel like a real geek, even though you spent your 6 years of college drinking your way through a marketing or english degree, but you’re not. You’re still one of the many technically untalented who wish you had paid more attention during school to the computers down in the library.

Either buckle down with a Petzold, Steele, or the Kernighan-Ritchie book or STFU.