Thursday, March 18, 2010

Network Dictionary — Grok

June 4, 2008 by Greg Ferro · 1 Comment 

In net­work­ing, used to describe your exal­ted under­stand­ing of a par­tic­u­lar net­work , typ­ic­ally by work­ing on it for enough time to know all the areas of the net­work includ­ing mem­or­ising IP addresses, archi­tec­ture, con­nectiv­ity. As in, I grok my network.

Also used in ref­er­ence to your exper­i­ence of a tech­no­logy, i.e. I know mul­tic­ast but I don’t grok it.

As first used in the Heinlein novel Stranger in a Strange Land: Grok means to under­stand so thor­oughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed — to merge, blend, inter­marry, lose iden­tity in group experience.

From the Jargon File —  When you claim to ‘grok’ some know­ledge or tech­nique, you are assert­ing that you have not merely learned it in a detached instru­mental way but that it has become part of you, part of your iden­tity. For example, to say that you “know” LISP is simply to assert that you can code in it if neces­sary — but to say you “grok” LISP is to claim that you have deeply entered the world-​​view and spirit of the lan­guage, with the implic­a­tion that it has trans­formed your view of pro­gram­ming. Contrast zen, which is a sim­ilar super­nat­ural under­stand­ing exper­i­enced as a single brief flash.

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