I ran my jargon-highlighting extension on 10 of Fireship's most popular videos — here's the programming jargon that came up

Jamie Andrew — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:33:36 +0000

I got tired of watching coding tutorials with a friend who's still learning, because every 20 seconds the video would drop a word — "compiler", "runtime", "memoization" — and we'd have to pause, Google it, lose the thread, and rewind. "Just look it up" started to break his flow of learning.

So I built JargonPop: a Chrome extension that scans for programming jargon right in YouTube captions and shows a beginner-friendly definition in a popup, without pausing the video or leaving the page.

To put it through its paces, I pointed it at 10 of Fireship's most popular videos — fast, dense, and absolutely packed with terminology and collected everything it flagged. 21 terms came up. Here they are, grouped.

How code actually runs

Syntax, compiler, interpreter, runtime.

Objects and design

Abstraction, inheritance, interface, instance, API.

Data structures

Stack, queue, hash map.

Algorithms

Algorithm, recursion, memoization, backtracking, Dijkstra's algorithm.

Concurrency and tooling

Asynchronous programming, parallelism, refactoring, bundlers.

The thing that jumped out

Almost none of this is keyword churn. No React, no Tailwind, no library-of-the-week. It's nearly all core computer science — the vocabulary that sits underneath whatever framework you happen to be using.

Which makes sense when you think about it. Fireship's most-watched videos earn their views by being conceptual, and the words that actually trip up a learner aren't the trendy ones — they're the foundational ones everyone assumes you already know. "Backtracking" doesn't care what year it is.

That's exactly the gap I'm trying to close with JargonPop: not dumbing anything down, just making sure the word "memoization" doesn't end the video for someone on day three.

Want to see what comes up on the videos you're watching? Try it at www.jargonpop.com. It launches properly on Product Hunt on 15 July — would love to see you there.