Glossary

These are makerspace and Protospace specific terms that you should know.

bay 108

• The bay containing the metal shop.

bay 110

• The bay containing the wood shop.

bar o’clock

• Pre-pandemic social gathering after Meet & Geek.

bikeshedding

• Futile investment of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
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DMZ

• The area between the mitre saw and garage door in the woodshop (bay 110).
• (also called the no-fly zone)

dogfooding

• The practice of using one's own products or services to help find bugs.
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do-ocracy

• An organizational structure in which people are encouraged to set goals and accomplish tasks on their own, rather than leaders assigning tasks or roles to a particular person or group. Individuals are “free” to do tasks that they feel they should be done and minimal supervision or permission is required. The success or failure of a particular project is linked directly to the efforts of the people who do the things.
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grok

• To understand something intuitively or by empathy.

meet & geek

• Weekly event, traditionally held on Tuesday evenings between 1900 and 2100, where Protospace welcomes visitors for tours, and when many Protospace members (a.k.a. Protospacers) gather to socialize and bikeshed.

microwave hour

• The time it takes for someone to complete a project you can do in about an hour with a salvaged microwave oven transformer. We have never completed a Microwave hour.

rubber ducking

• Derived from the problem solving process of explaining your problem out-loud to an inanimate object, evolved to include arriving at a solution while articulating your problem in email/discussion post before hitting send.

toast

• A unit of volume, weight, distance, equal to a single slice of standard toast.

yak shaving

• Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
• A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.
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XY problem

• Asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem.
• The person asking for help obscures the real issue, X, because instead of asking directly about issue X, they ask how to solve a secondary issue, Y, which they believe will allow them to resolve issue X on their own.
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