Developer English guide
Coding Acronyms Every Developer Should Know
A practical reference of the most common acronyms used in software teams, from code reviews to standups. Learn what they mean and how to use them naturally in English.
Code reviews
These acronyms appear constantly in pull request comments, commit messages, and review tools like GitHub and GitLab.
“The logic is solid and tests pass. LGTM, merging.”
“WIP: don't merge yet, I'm still refactoring the auth flow.”
“NIT: rename this variable to something more descriptive.”
“RFC: I'm proposing we move to a monorepo. Feedback welcome.”
“ACK. I'll address those comments before re-requesting review.”
“NACK. This approach will break backward compatibility.”
Chat and communication
You'll see these in Slack, Teams, and any async written communication within a software team.
“AFK for 30 minutes, grabbing lunch. Back at 2pm.”
“I'm OOO next Friday. Ping Carlos if anything is urgent.”
“BRB, joining the standup.”
“FYI: the staging deployment is currently down for maintenance.”
“BTW, the API endpoint changed. Make sure to update your .env.”
“Can you review this PR ASAP? We need to deploy before EOD.”
“TBH, I think this solution adds more complexity than it removes.”
“IMO we should start with a simple REST endpoint before adding GraphQL.”
“IMHO the current architecture is already hard to reason about.”
“AFAIK the rate limit is 100 requests per minute, but double-check the docs.”
“IIRC we disabled that feature flag in production last quarter.”
“FWIW, I tried that approach last year and it caused flaky tests.”
“TL;DR: the migration failed because of a missing index on the users table.”
“This config works for me locally, but YMMV depending on your OS.”
“DM me the credentials — don't post them in the channel.”
Project and planning
Common in standups, tickets, and project management conversations.
“What's the ETA on the hotfix? The client is waiting.”
“The release date is TBD — we're waiting on QA sign-off.”
“Let's build a POC before we commit to this architecture.”
“The MVP just needs login, a dashboard, and export. No notifications yet.”
“Can you push the fix to staging by EOD?”
“The design review needs to be done by EOW.”
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