20 Technical Expressions Developers Hear Every Day in English

Let's discuss this outside of this meeting, in a separate conversation.

Said when a topic comes up in a meeting but is too detailed or only relevant to a few people. It is not rude — it is a signal to continue the discussion in a smaller forum.

That topic or problem is extremely complex and could consume a lot of time without a clear end.

Borrowed from Alice in Wonderland. Used to warn teammates that investigating something further might not be worth the time right now.

The team or person cannot move forward on a task because something external is preventing progress.

Very common in standups. A blocker can be a missing dependency, a decision that has not been made, access that has not been granted, or a bug in someone else's code.

Release the feature or code to production. Let's deploy.

Short for 'ship the code'. Used to signal that something is ready to go live. Sometimes used as encouragement to stop over-engineering and just release.

The accumulated cost of shortcuts taken during development that will need to be addressed later.

Short for 'technical debt'. Every time you write a quick fix instead of the right solution, you add to the tech debt. At some point, the interest becomes too high to ignore.

A short, time-boxed research task to investigate a problem or technology before committing to a solution.

Agile/Scrum term. A spike is not about building something — it is about learning enough to make a decision. Common when the team does not know how long something will take.

Explaining your code or problem out loud — to a rubber duck, a teammate, or anyone — to find the bug yourself through the act of explaining.

From the book 'The Pragmatic Programmer'. Often, the act of explaining a problem forces you to see it from a different angle, and you find the answer before the other person even responds.

Spending too much time discussing trivial or easy-to-understand details while ignoring the important, complex ones.

From Parkinson's Law of Triviality. In a meeting about a nuclear plant and a bike shed, people spend all the time on the bike shed because everyone can understand it. The same happens in code reviews or planning sessions.

Doing a chain of small, seemingly unrelated tasks in order to accomplish the original goal — and losing track of what you were trying to do.

From a Ren and Stimpy episode. Classic example: you need to deploy, but first you need to update a dependency, but first that requires a new version of Node, but first you need to update Homebrew... and now you are yak shaving.

The current solution meets the minimum requirements. We can improve it later.

Also heard as 'good enough for government work' (a US idiom). In engineering, this is often used when debating perfectionism vs shipping. It is not about being sloppy — it is about knowing when done is better than perfect.

The single most important metric or goal that guides a product or team's decisions.

Strategic language borrowed from startup culture. You will hear it in product meetings, OKR discussions, and roadmap presentations.

A new project built from scratch, with no existing codebase or constraints.

Opposite of 'brownfield' (working with legacy code). Greenfield projects are exciting but also risky because there are no existing patterns to follow.