Have you ever been in a situation where a colleague, speaker or organizer in the tech industry used an acronym as if everyone knew what it meant? Did you feel like you were the only one who wasn't in the know because you didn't know what it meant?
Yeah, I've been in that situation far too many times. Although I've been in the tech industry for many years, there has been many times where I didn't know what an acronym meant. Heck I still run into acronyms to this day that still puzzle me.
It's for this reason I created Spell It Out. A site that spells out acronyms, abbreviations and word shortenings often used in the tech industry.
Would love for the dev community to check it out and if there are any abbreviations you see missing from the glossary, suggest it in the comments below or on the site's form :)
Top comments (39)
THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU! This will be great.
Can you possibly replace that animation on the front page with an actual webform that automatically searches your glossary? (Mess with the JS a little bit, and you can probably still have it animate like that until someone clicks it.)
Great suggestion Jason! Will look into that tonight.
PWA
SPA
SLA
Come to mind
These are great! Thanks Ben 👍
Hell yeah! This is awesome! Love the simplicity it.
Would love an autocomplete search if that's not asking for too much?
Thanks @andy ! It is definitely on the list of things to add :)
Thanks for checking it out. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see or any acronyms I'm missing.
Hmm how about REPL and REST? I'm sure I have more but I can't think of any right now...
Boom! Added REPL and REST. Thanks for the suggestions :)
Ohhh man, I love this so much!
Thanks Jess!!! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make it better.
Just thought of a few more:
CAA
CSRF
DDOS/DOS
DMARC
DNS
IE
IDOR
iOS (not sure if this really counts)
MS-DOS
OS
SSRF
XSS
Some of these are not really well known, I think (like IDOR).
Certificate Authority Authorization
Cross Site Request Forgery
(Distributed) Denial of Service
Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance
Domain Name System
Internet Explorer
Insecure Direct Object Reference
(iPhone Operating System?)
Microsoft Disk Operating System
Operating System
Server-side Request Forgery
Cross Site Scripting
Whoa learned a few new ones. Thanks Andy! They should be online now.
Oh also AFK, BRB, and WFH :)
Away from keyboard
Be right back
Work(ing) from home
And nice search form! I think a cool next step would be to add in "Submit an acronym" if there are no results listed.
Oh, I just realized; should I be using your submit form instead?
Added (AFK), added (BRB) and added (WFH). I've been also trying to add credit to folks who submit new acronyms. I linked it to your Twitter if that's ok.
Added. Also thanks :) Your feedback has been awesome Andy!!! Keep them coming.
Feel free to use whatever channel works for you :) I've been keeping track everywhere.
Awesome, thanks! Twitter works :)
This is awesome. Was thinking about this when on IRC, and seeing some library-specific acronyms; for a seasoned dev, it's trivial to parse through what a comment is saying. For a beginner, they may have no idea.
Great site!
Thanks a lot Geoff for checking out the site :) I just included IRC cause you mentioned it in the comment above.
Definitely a reason why I created Spell It Out, since in different contexts we will find ourselves as "beginners" and don't know what an acronym means.
Let me know if you can think of any other acronyms or if you have any other suggestions.
I actually already submitted a few, and will do so if I come across some tricky ones 👍
YEEEES!
I just submitted MR (like PR but on GitLab), KISS and IR.
I wish I had this website when people at my new job were talking about using a CV library and I was scratching my head as to why they work with resumes when they should work with image recognition.
Thanks Angelika! I saw those submissions and have just pushed it up :)
Would love to give you and other submitters credit. Should I credit you via your Twitter handle on Spell It Out?
Your CV example is exactly what I'm hoping Spell It Out can help folks avoid.
Yes, you can credit me via my Twitter handle. Thanks!
First thing I tried was clicking on the "animation" where I wanted to type my acronym. It would be cool to have something like this with auto-complete and "I feel lucky"-like hints. Version 2.0 maybe :)
Anyway, looks cool! :)
Thanks Pavol! Seems to be a common feedback. So search will be the next thing to be implemented :)
During one team meeting, the boss declared that we could not use any acronyms for the duration of the meeting. That was a hard meeting.
Nice! Do you know why your boss made that decision and was there a positive outcome from it?
If I recall correctly, it was around the time we'd just hired a new dev. Most of the acronyms we use are in reference to the websites we manage, so it was for clarity's sake. Once the new guy was used to the names, we reverted to using acronyms again. :)
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