Generate a glossary from any document. Every term cited.
Dense documents bury their jargon. Sidenote reads the whole thing and defines its acronyms, terms and proper nouns in plain English, each citing the passage it came from. Click an entry to jump to where the term first appears.
Aurora Rollout Runbook
Ask about the sample
Pick a question below. Sidenote answers from Aurora Rollout Runbook and cites the exact line so you can check it.
While the canary runs, Aurora watches three numbers. If any one of them crosses its limit, the new build is not promoted to the rest of the fleet.
- Speed: p95 checkout latency (the time that 95 in every 100 checkouts finish within) must stay at or below 450 milliseconds.
- Errors: the error rate must stay at or below 0.5 percent.
- Crashes: at least 99.8 percent of sessions must end without a crash.
Aurora checks all three every five minutes, on the Helios dashboard.
Source passage
Three metrics gate the canary automatically. Promotion is blocked if p95 checkout latency rises above 450 milliseconds, if the error rate exceeds 0.5 percent, or if crash-free sessions drop below 99.8 percent. The gates are evaluated every five minutes on the Helios dashboard.
Jargon (3)
release captain
The rotating engineer who owns a production rollout end to end: signs off on releases, checks the error budget, and is the only person who can lift a post-rollback freeze.
error budget
The amount of unreliability a service is allowed each month before releases stop. Burning more than a quarter of it defers the next rollout.
canary cohort
The slice of production users routed to a new build during the canary stage. Selected by session hash so each user sees a consistent build for the whole window.
Acronyms (2)
SLO
Service Level Objective. A reliability target the team commits to, such as 99.9 percent availability measured at the load balancer.
MTTR
Mean Time To Recovery. How long it takes to restore service after an incident; the checkout group targets 30 minutes.
Proper nouns (1)
Helios
The observability dashboard where the canary gates are evaluated and rollout metrics live.
The arrow jumps to where each term appears in the document.
Notes is in the full product
Save any cited passage from a chip and it lands here, ready to revisit.
The jargon is the part that slows you down.
Every field has its own shorthand. A research paper drops a dozen acronyms before page two; a runbook assumes you know the service names; an onboarding doc is half abbreviations. You can read the words and still not follow the argument, because the vocabulary was never explained.
A glossary fixes that, but building one by hand means re-reading the whole document and hunting for first mentions. Sidenote does that pass for you, and ties each definition back to the line it came from so you can check it in a click.
How Sidenote builds the glossary.
It reads the whole document.
On the Glossary tab you click Build, and Sidenote passes over the full text (not a sample), pulling out the acronyms, domain jargon and proper nouns that a reader would actually need defined.
It defines each term in plain English.
Definitions come from the document first, using its own first-mention expansions where they exist, and fall back to a short general-knowledge definition for widely-known terms the text leaves unexplained.
Every entry cites its source.
Each term is anchored to the passage it was found in. Click an entry and Sidenote scrolls the live document to where the term first appears and highlights it, so you verify the definition in context.
Acronyms, jargon and proper nouns.
Sidenote sorts each term by kind, so a glossary reads the way you'd expect: the abbreviation tells you its expansion, the entity tells you who or what it is. Common words and bare numbers are left out unless the document gives them a specific meaning.
Acronyms
The abbreviation plus its expansion: “GLP-1” becomes “Glucagon-like peptide-1”, pulled from the document's first mention.
Domain jargon
The field-specific vocabulary that carries the argument, defined in one sentence and grounded in how the document uses it.
Proper nouns
The people, products, places and named entities the document references, so you know who and what it's talking about.
One glossary across a whole Collection.
A single document's glossary is useful; a shared vocabulary across a project is better. Bundle your papers, wiki pages or specs into a collection and Sidenote merges a single, deduplicated glossary across all of them, each entry still naming the document it came from, so the citationtrail never breaks. It reuses any per-document glossary you've already built, so only the new documents do fresh work.
Merged and deduplicated
A term that appears in three papers shows once, not as three near-identical entries cluttering the list.
Each entry names its document
Every definition tells you which document it came from, so you can trace it back across the whole collection.
Reuses prior work
Per-document glossaries you've already built are reused from cache; only new members trigger a fresh build.
And when a glossary is worth passing on, send it as a share link: snapshot-frozen, revocable, and readable without a Sidenote account.
A glossary from every kind of document.
The same builder works wherever Sidenote reads: browser PDFs and articles, your wikis, your docs, and files you upload. Pick a source:
Common questions about the glossary builder.
Decode the jargon. In one click.
Add Sidenote to your browser, open a document, and hit Build on the Glossary tab. Watch it pull out every term, each one cited to the line it came from.
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