Coding Emoji

🧑‍💻 Technologist is the programmer emoji. Unicode added it in 2017 (Emoji 5.0) as a person at a laptop, with 👨‍💻 man and 👩‍💻 woman versions and five skin tones, and it has become the standard way to write “developer” in a Twitter or GitHub bio, a LinkedIn headline or a Discord role. 💻 Laptop on its own means coding or working; 🖥️ ⌨️ 🖱️ describe the setup. The nicknames developers give themselves have their own emoji: 🤓 nerd, 🧐 the reviewer with a monocle, 🧙 code wizard, 🥷 code ninja, 🕵️ the detective who hunts bugs, and 🤖 for bots and automation.

🐛 Bug is a software bug, full stop. Among programmers it almost never means an insect; a message like “found the 🐛” or a commit beginning with 🐛 says a defect was found or fixed. 🐞 and 🪲 are the same idea with a different drawing, and 👾 alien monster is the glitch, the thing that goes wrong on screen. The tools that follow are literal: 🔧 a fix or a config change, 🔨 a build, 🛠️ maintenance, ⚙️ settings, 🧰 the toolchain, 🧪 tests, 🩹 a small patch, 🧹 cleanup and ♻️ a refactor.

🚀 Rocket is the deploy. “Shipped 🚀” means the release is out; 🚢 is the pun on “ship it”. ✅ is a passing test, a merged pull request or simply “done”, ❌ a failing one, 🟢 🔴 🟡 are the status lights of a CI pipeline, and 🟩 🟥 echo the green added and red removed lines of a diff. 🔥 means two opposite things: in a commit it is code deleted, in an incident channel it is production on fire, often with 🚨 and 🆘. ⚠️ is a warning, 🚧 work in progress, 💥 a crash or a breaking change, ⏳ a build still running.

Gitmoji: git commit emoji and what each one means

Many teams begin every commit message with one emoji that says what kind of change it is, so the history reads at a glance. The best-known convention is gitmoji, an open-source guide by Carlos Cuesta that assigns one emoji to each kind of change. The core of the list: ✨ a new feature, 🐛 a bug fix, 🚑️ a critical hotfix, 📝 documentation, 🎨 improving the structure or format of the code, ♻️ a refactor, ⚡️ performance, 🔥 removing code or files, ✅ adding or passing tests, 🧪 a failing test, 🔒️ a security fix, 🔐 secrets, 🚀 a deploy, 🔖 a release or version tag, 🚧 work in progress, 💚 fixing the CI build, 🔧 configuration files, 🔨 development scripts and 📦️ compiled files or packages.

Dependencies get ⬆️ upgrade, ⬇️ downgrade, 📌 pin to a version, ➕ add and ➖ remove. Code movement is 🚚 move or rename, 🔀 merge branches, ⏪️ revert, 💥 breaking changes and 👽️ changes forced by an external API. The rest cover the long tail of a codebase: 💄 UI and style files, 💫 animations, ♿️ accessibility, 🚸 usability, 📱 responsive design, 🌐 internationalisation, 💬 text and literals, ✏️ typos, 💡 source comments, 🏷️ types, 🗃️ database changes, 🌱 seed files, 🚩 feature flags, 🥅 catching errors, 🦺 validation, 🛂 authorisation and permissions, 👔 business logic, 🩺 health checks, 🧱 infrastructure, 🏗️ architecture, 🧵 concurrency, ✈️ offline support, 🔊 adding logs, 🔇 removing them, 📈 analytics, 🔍️ SEO, 📸 snapshots, ⚗️ experiments, 🍱 assets, 📄 the licence, 👷 the CI system, 👥 contributors, 💸 sponsorship, 🧑‍💻 developer experience and 🦖 backwards compatibility.

A few are jokes that stuck: 💩 bad code that needs improving, 🍻 code written drunk, 🤡 mocking things in tests, 🥚 an easter egg, 🙈 the .gitignore file, 🩹 a simple fix, ⚰️ removing dead code, 🗑️ deprecating code and 🎉 the very first commit of a project. In a commit message the emoji is usually typed as a GitHub shortcode such as :bug: or :sparkles:, which renders as the picture on GitHub and GitLab and stays readable as text in a terminal.

Programming language emoji: 🐍 🦀 🐧 🐳 and the other mascots

There is no emoji for Python, JavaScript or Java, so developers borrow the mascots. 🐍 is Python, named after Monty Python but drawn as two snakes in its logo. 🦀 is Rust, after its crab mascot Ferris, which is why Rust programmers call themselves Rustaceans. 🐹 stands in for the Go gopher, drawn by Renée French, because the hamster is the closest rodent on the keyboard. 🐘 is both PHP, whose plush mascot is the elePHPant, and PostgreSQL, whose logo is an elephant named Slonik. 🐫 is Perl, from the camel on the cover of the O'Reilly book, and OCaml. 💎 is Ruby, ☕ is Java, ⚛️ is React, whose logo is an atom, and λ stands for functional programming and anonymous functions, from Alonzo Church's lambda calculus of the 1930s and Lisp's lambda keyword.

Tools have mascots too. 🐧 is Linux, after Tux the penguin; 🐳 is Docker, whose whale is called Moby Dock; 🐙 is GitHub, whose Octocat is half cat, half octopus; 🐬 is MySQL, with its dolphin Sakila; 🦊 covers both Firefox and GitLab, whose logo is a stylised fox-like tanuki. 🦆 is rubber duck debugging, the method of explaining your code line by line to a rubber duck on the desk until you spot the mistake yourself, described in the 1999 book The Pragmatic Programmer. 🦖 is the dinosaur from Chrome's offline game and, in gitmoji, backwards compatibility. 🪵 is the pun for logs.

Coding symbols: brackets, operators and the characters code is made of

Code is built from the punctuation on an English keyboard, and each sign has a name worth knowing. { } are curly braces (blocks in C, Java and JavaScript, dictionaries in Python), [ ] square brackets (arrays and indexing), ( ) parentheses (calls and grouping), < > angle brackets (generics, HTML tags, comparison). ; the semicolon ends statements, : the colon opens a Python block, ` the backtick wraps a template string in JavaScript and inline code in Markdown, while three of them open a code block on GitHub, Discord and Slack. # starts a Python comment and a Markdown heading, @ a decorator or an annotation, $ a shell variable and a jQuery call, _ joins snake_case names, \ escapes the character after it, | pipes one command into the next, ^ is bitwise XOR and the start of a line in a regular expression, ~ is the home directory and bitwise NOT, * is multiplication, a pointer in C and a wildcard in the shell, % is the modulo operator, ! means not and ? marks an optional or a ternary.

Beyond ASCII, some mathematical signs show up in documentation, slides, type-theory papers and in programming fonts with ligatures, which draw != as ≠, <= as ≤, >= as ≥, === as ≡, -> as → and => as ⇒. ↦ “maps to” describes a function, ∘ is function composition, ∧ ∨ ¬ are and, or and not, ⊤ and ⊥ are true and false (also the top and bottom types), ∅ is the empty set or null, ∞ an infinite loop, ≔ is the := assignment of Pascal and Go, ⟨ ⟩ are the proper angle brackets, ⌊ ⌋ are the floor brackets behind Math.floor.

The terminal has its own characters. The Unicode Control Pictures block gives a visible stand-in for every invisible character: ␀ null, ␊ line feed, ␍ carriage return, ␉ tab, ␛ escape, ␡ delete, ␣ the open box that editors use to show a space, and ␤ newline. Editors that show whitespace also draw a space as ·, and … stands for truncated text or a spread operator in a slide. █ is the block cursor and, with the light shade ░, the progress bar of command-line installers, and the box-drawing pieces ├ └ ─ │ are what the tree command and npm print to show a directory as a tree. ✓ ✗ ☐ ☒ are the plain-text checks of a test runner or a TODO list.

Look-alike characters that break code

Code copied from a web page, a Word document or a chat app often arrives with characters that look right and compile wrong. Word processors turn straight quotes into curly “ ” ‘ ’, which no compiler accepts as string delimiters; they turn two hyphens into an – en dash or — em dash, so a --flag silently becomes one character; and a Chinese or Japanese keyboard produces the fullwidth ； instead of ;. The classic prank is the Greek question mark ; (U+037E), which looks exactly like a semicolon and makes a JavaScript file fail with an error nobody can see. If code refuses to run and looks perfect, retype the punctuation.

Writing emoji in code is the opposite problem: you want the emoji and need to spell it. In HTML, 🧑‍💻 is 🧑‍💻, 🐛 is 🐛 and 🚀 is 🚀; in JavaScript the rocket is "\u{1F680}", in Python "\N{ROCKET}", in CSS content: "\1F680". Every character page on this site lists these codes. Discord, Slack and GitHub also accept shortcodes such as :rocket: and :bug:, and Discord shows code with syntax colours when you open a block with three backticks and a language name, like ```python.