If you have ever been in a standup meeting and wondered what the developer actually meant, this guide is for you.
"It works on my machine."
Translation: I have no idea why it is broken and I am terrified to find out.
"That's a feature, not a bug."
Translation: I wrote it wrong but it does something interesting so let us keep it.
"It's a quick fix."
Translation: It will take 3 days, 2 Stack Overflow rabbit holes, and a refactor of the auth module.
"The code is self-documenting."
Translation: I did not write any comments and I dare you to ask me to.
"We should probably rewrite this from scratch."
Translation: I do not understand the existing code and learning it sounds hard.
"I'll add tests later."
Translation: I will never add tests.
"The requirements were unclear."
Translation: I did not read the requirements.
"It passed QA."
Translation: QA did not test the one path that breaks everything.
"We need to pay down tech debt."
Translation: I want to refactor my own code because I wrote it badly the first time but I need a business justification.
"The API changed."
Translation: I hard-coded something I should not have.
"That will break backward compatibility."
Translation: I do not want to do it.
"It's a known issue."
Translation: We all know about it. Nobody wants to fix it. It has been there since 2019.
"I'm blocked."
Translation: I sent a Slack message to someone 3 hours ago and they have not responded so I have been watching YouTube.
"Almost done."
Translation: I am approximately 20% done and the remaining 80% is the hard part.
Recognize yourself? There are more confessions in our articles.