• September 1, 2026
• in Community, Technical
• 4 min read

Dev Trivia

This week we're playing Dev Trivia. No prep required, no keyboards needed. Just show up and shout out answers.

The questions are general software knowledge: computing history, languages and paradigms, the web, tools and open source, jargon and culture, and a few classic bugs and blunders. We deliberately kept things broad rather than drilling into one specific framework or language, so there's something for everyone whether you've been writing code for one year or thirty.

Here's how it'll run: I'll host and read the questions round by round. Answer out loud or in chat, argue about the ones that are "technically correct," and share the stories the questions remind you of. There are roughly 50 questions across 7 rounds, which should comfortably fill the hour.

Round 1 — Computing History

1. Who is generally credited as the first computer programmer, for her notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine?
2. What year was the first "Hello, World" program popularized, and in which book?
3. What does the "bug" in "debugging" famously refer to, per Grace Hopper's logbook?
4. What company produced the Altair 8800, the machine that launched Microsoft?
5. What was the name of the first electronic general-purpose digital computer, unveiled in 1945?
6. Which two people founded Apple in 1976 alongside Ronald Wayne?
7. What operating system did Linus Torvalds announce in 1991 as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional"?
8. What does ARPANET stand for, and what modern network is it the ancestor of?

Round 2 — Languages & Paradigms

1. Which language, designed by Guido van Rossum, is named after a British comedy troupe rather than the snake?
2. What language was created by Brendan Eich in 10 days in 1995?
3. "Write once, run anywhere" was the marketing slogan for which language and its virtual machine?
4. What do the C-family languages call the null-terminated character array used for text?
5. Which language introduced the concept of garbage collection in 1959?
6. What paradigm avoids mutable state and side effects, treating computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions?
7. COBOL and FORTRAN both date from which decade?
8. What does the acronym "REPL" stand for?

Round 3 — The Web & Networking

1. Who invented the World Wide Web, and at what organization?
2. What port number does HTTPS use by default?
3. What does the "S" in HTTPS stand for, and what protocol provides it today?
4. In an IPv4 address, how many bits are there in total?
5. What HTTP status code means "I'm a teapot"?
6. What does DNS translate, and into what?
7. What does the acronym "CORS" stand for?
8. Which HTTP status code family (1xx–5xx) represents client errors?

Round 4 — Tools, Git & Open Source

1. Who created Git, and what project did he build it for?
2. What Git command creates a new pointer to a series of commits that you can develop on independently?
3. What does "FOSS" stand for?
4. Which license is known as "copyleft" and requires derivative works to also be open source?
5. What's the name of the file, conventionally in all caps, that explains how to build and use a project?
6. In semantic versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH), which number do you bump for a backwards-incompatible change?
7. What does "CI/CD" stand for?
8. What year was GitHub founded—2005, 2008, or 2011?

Round 5 — Jargon, Acronyms & Culture

1. What does "YAGNI" stand for?
2. What does "DRY" stand for, and what's its opposite acronym?
3. What is a "rubber duck" used for in programming?
4. What's the term for code written quickly to be thrown away or replaced later?
5. What does "RTFM" stand for (keep it polite)?
6. In "the cloud is just someone else's computer," what does IaaS stand for?
7. What's the name for a problem that only shows up when you're not looking for it—and vanishes when you add logging?
8. What does "bikeshedding" mean?

Round 6 — Algorithms & CS Fundamentals

1. What is the Big-O time complexity of binary search on a sorted array?
2. What data structure operates on "last in, first out"?
3. What sorting algorithm repeatedly picks a pivot and partitions elements around it?
4. What's the name of the problem class for which no known polynomial-time solution exists but solutions can be verified quickly?
5. How many bytes are in a kibibyte (KiB)?
6. What's the maximum value of an unsigned 8-bit integer?
7. What traversal visits a tree level by level, and what data structure implements it?
8. What is a hash collision?

Round 7 — Bugs, Lore & Famous Incidents

1. What was the "Y2K bug," and what was the root cause?
2. The 1962 Mariner 1 rocket was destroyed partly due to a bug involving what kind of punctuation mark?
3. What 1988 program is considered the first major internet worm, and who wrote it?
4. What does "segmentation fault" indicate a program tried to do?
5. What 2014 vulnerability in OpenSSL, with a logo of a bleeding heart, let attackers read server memory?
6. What's the "off-by-one error," and where does it most commonly show up?
7. In floating point, why doesn't 0.1 + 0.2 equal exactly 0.3?
8. What 2016 incident broke thousands of JavaScript builds when one 11-line package was unpublished from npm?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.