What does “make your code DRY” even mean?! Here is a glossary of some common terms and acronyms used in software development.

• DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself

  • Don’t copy your code (and more importantly, don’t duplicate your abstractions).

• YAGNI: You Aren’t Going to Need It

  • While you are developing, if you think to yourself “I may need this functionality someday,” don’t implement it until you actually need. Because you aren’t going to need it.

• KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid

  • When you have to choose between a simple and a complex implementation, always choose the simple one.

• GIL: Global Interpreter Lock

  • The GIL is used in Python, and is one of the reasons parallelization is difficult/inefficient.

• OBOE: Off By One Error

  • Good luck catching these bugs…

• SCM: Source Code Management

  • Whenever you see this, think git.

• Yak Shaving: Uncover many layers of complexity

  • Have you ever solved a problem only to uncover another problem underneath it? This is also referred to as doing menial tasks that preclude you from doing the real interesting work.

• Bike Shedding: Focusing on the trivial in spite of the essential

  • Imagine you are working on an important building (like a nuclear power plant), spending time discussing the color of the bike shed is trivial compared to the rest of the project.

Bonus, not an acronym, but rather initials:

• DHH: David Heinemeier Hansson

  • Co-founder of Basecamp, creator of Ruby on Rails, and holder of strong opinions.

Extra bonus:

• BDFL: Benevolent Dictator For Life

Guido van Rossum (the creator of Python) was formerly the BDFL. Now Python is governed by a steering council.