Tech Jargon Decoded

LGTM, ship it — the stuff nobody explains in onboarding

45 terms your colleagues assume you already know

SHORTHAND

Code Review

LGTM · Looks Good To Me
PTAL · Please Take A Look
SGTM · Sounds Good To Me
nit · Nitpick; minor, non-blocking suggestion
WIP · Work In Progress
RFC · Request For Comments

Conversation

IMO / IMHO · In My (Humble) Opinion
IIRC · If I Recall Correctly
AFAIK · As Far As I Know
FWIW · For What It's Worth
YMMV · Your Mileage May Vary
TIL · Today I Learned
TL;DR · Too Long; Didn't Read
ELI5 · Explain Like I'm 5
ICYMI · In Case You Missed It

PRINCIPLES

Design Maxims

YAGNI · You Ain't Gonna Need It
DRY · Don't Repeat Yourself
KISS · Keep It Simple, Stupid
SOLID · Five OOP design principles (Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov, Interface segregation, Dependency inversion)
WET · Write Everything Twice (tongue-in-cheek anti-DRY)
RTFM · Read The Manual (the F is implied)
SoC · Separation of Concerns

Bug Types

PEBKAC · Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
Heisenbug · Disappears when you try to observe it (yes, named after Heisenberg)
Regression · Something that used to work but doesn't now
Flaky · Fails intermittently for unclear reasons (usually tests)
Race condition · Outcome depends on timing
Edge case · Unusual scenario at the boundaries

CULTURE

Processes

Bikeshedding · Debating trivial details while ignoring the important stuff
Yak shaving · Doing seemingly unrelated prerequisite tasks
Dogfooding · Using your own product internally
Rubber ducking · Explaining a problem aloud to debug it (the duck doesn't need to answer)
Ship it · Deploy, release, send it to production
Scope creep · Gradual expansion beyond original requirements

Code

Tech debt · Accumulated shortcuts that slow future work
Greenfield · Building from scratch, no existing code
Brownfield · Working within existing codebase constraints
Boilerplate · Repetitive template code you always need
Spaghetti code · Tangled, hard-to-follow code
Refactoring · Restructuring code without changing behavior
Footgun · A feature that's easy to misuse dangerously

Team

Bus factor · How many people can leave before the project dies (also "truck factor" if buses feel morbid)
10x engineer · Mythically productive developer (often used ironically)
Cargo culting · Copying patterns without understanding why they work
NIH syndrome · Not Invented Here; rejecting external solutions
myapplicationtracker.app@laurikoobas