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Spell It Out: spelling out tech acronyms, abbreviations and word shortenings

Michael Lee πŸ• on January 11, 2018

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? D...
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Jason C. McDonald • Edited

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.)

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Great suggestion Jason! Will look into that tonight.

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Ben Halpern

PWA
SPA
SLA

Come to mind

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Michael Lee πŸ•

These are great! Thanks Ben πŸ‘

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

Hell yeah! This is awesome! Love the simplicity it.

Would love an autocomplete search if that's not asking for too much?

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Michael Lee πŸ•

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.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

Hmm how about REPL and REST? I'm sure I have more but I can't think of any right now...

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Boom! Added REPL and REST. Thanks for the suggestions :)

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Jess Lee

Ohhh man, I love this so much!

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Thanks Jess!!! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make it better.

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Andy Zhao (he/him) • Edited

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

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Whoa learned a few new ones. Thanks Andy! They should be online now.

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Andy Zhao (he/him) • Edited

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?

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Michael Lee πŸ•

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.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

Awesome, thanks! Twitter works :)

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Geoff Davis

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!

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Michael Lee πŸ•

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.

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Geoff Davis

I actually already submitted a few, and will do so if I come across some tricky ones πŸ‘

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Angelika Cathor

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.

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Michael Lee πŸ•

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.

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Angelika Cathor

Yes, you can credit me via my Twitter handle. Thanks!

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Pavol Rajzak

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! :)

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Thanks Pavol! Seems to be a common feedback. So search will be the next thing to be implemented :)

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Paul

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.

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Nice! Do you know why your boss made that decision and was there a positive outcome from it?

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Paul

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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Dominic Sears

AWS - Amazon Web Services

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Alfredo Lopez

I’d love to have soundbites for each one. I remember saying pee-and-gee for png files until I finally heard someone say Ping. Same goes for mysql, regex, etc.

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Michael Lee πŸ•

That is a really good idea Alfredo :) Will keep this one in mind.

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Favascript

Great work man!

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Thanks!

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kristian

Love this!

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Thanks Kristian!

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Mark

Good work!

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Thanks Mark!

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Omar Sinan

This is pretty neat, great job on the UI! :-)

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Thanks Omar!

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Gustavo Preciado

Awesome contribution, thank you!

You can add SOLID (Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation and Dependency inversion) and DDD (Domain-Driven Design)

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Thanks Gustavo! Added SOLID and DDD :)