Glossary

Use this glossary when a training topic uses a role abbreviation or a Git, GitHub, or service_docs term that is new to you.

Roles and abbreviations

TW. Technical Writer.
SE/SE2. Service Engineer and Service Engineer 2. SE2 is a more senior team member.
SME. Subject Matter Expert.

Branch. A named pointer to a series of commits. Throwaway by default; deleted after merge.
Commit. One saved snapshot of changes with a message. Each commit has an SHA, which is a hex fingerprint.
Push. Upload commits from your laptop to GitHub.
Squash merge. The repo’s merge style: collapse every commit on the pull-request branch into one commit on main. Your messy “fix typo,” “actually fix typo” history disappears; only the pull-request title survives.

Pull request. The proposal “merge my branch into main,” plus the review thread and check run attached to it.
Continuous integration. The automated checks (pr-checks.yml) that run on every push to an open pull request.
Head SHA. The fingerprint of the most recent commit on your branch. GitHub shows you a short form, such as 7fb33e9a; check results are pinned to it.
Mergeable. GitHub’s flag for “no conflicts with main and all required checks and approvals are satisfied.” If a pull request is not mergeable, the green merge button is greyed out.
CODEOWNER. A user or team auto-assigned as reviewer when a matching file changes, per .github/CODEOWNERS.

Topic. A troubleshooting page, usually tied to one or more alarms.
Shared procedure. A reusable procedure that topics can link to instead of copying the same instructions into multiple places.
Local preview. A private copy of the docs site running on your computer, usually at http://localhost:4321/.
Rendered page. The browser version of a Markdown or MDX file. This is what the reader sees.
Frontmatter. The metadata block at the top of an MDX file, bounded by ---.
Decision tree. The rendered troubleshooting flow built from topic.steps[].