As someone who watched the proceedings I can confirm that the only dead things were our interest in using Ruby 1.8 and a rather large slab of smoked meat.

Pretty standard terminology. circa 2006: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/the-project-postmor...

That's generally the term used when someone is looking back and writing about something.

Don't quote me on that though.

Not just "something", but something that has "died" or ceases to exist in its prior form and the "postmortem" is generally the detailed analysis of what happened.

Also, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/postmortem

The second definition given does not refer to "death" at all and is commonly used in science and business contexts. It usually refers to the project (or the "event") being over at the point of discussion.

The term is overloaded nowadays, as can be seen on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_%28disambiguation%2...

Now it typically connotes a post-event review using the metaphor of the autopsy.

"retrospective" is better.

You may be correct. I tend to use the term loosely when looking back on an event and discussing it. Regardless of whether it was good or bad.

I felt that their actual blog title, "Eating the 1.9 Elephant," didn't reflect the content of the post.