Talking About System Design
Vocabulary and phrases for design interviews and architecture reviews.
Everyday phrases engineers actually use
Talking about your work day
A practical lesson on the English you reach for during standups, code reviews and after-work chats. No textbook scripts — just sentences you can drop into Slack tomorrow.
24
Phrases
3
Dialogues
12
Vocabulary
5 Q
Quiz
36 min
Everyday situations
Plug-and-play phrases for the moments that happen every day.
Daily standup
Share your update in under a minute.
Yesterday I finished the password reset endpoint.
Today I'll pair with Mai on the rate limiter.
I'm blocked on access to the staging database.
Code review
Give and receive feedback without sounding harsh.
Could we extract this into a helper for readability?
Nice catch on the null check — I missed that.
What do you think about renaming this to make the intent clearer?
After-work chat
Keep the conversation flowing with teammates.
How was your weekend? Did you get up to anything fun?
I've been hooked on a new side project lately.
Same time tomorrow? We can grab coffee before standup.
Sample dialogue
A natural back-and-forth you can shadow out loud.
Mai
Morning! How's the auth refactor going?
You
Almost there. I'm down to the last edge case.
Mai
Need a second pair of eyes before you push?
You
That'd be great. Mind reviewing the PR after standup?
Mai
Sounds good — ping me when it's ready.
Reading
Java is a strongly typed, object-oriented language that runs on the JVM. In daily standups, engineers describe their work in short phrases: "I refactored the user service", "I'm blocked on a flaky test", "I'll review the PR after lunch".
Vocabulary
Words you'll hear in every standup and pull request.
Grammar focus
Use the present perfect when describing work that affects the current sprint: "I have refactored …".
We have migrated the user service to Java 21.
The JVM crashed during the load test.
Could you review the pull request before stand-up?
Quick quiz
Q1. Which sentence best fits a Monday standup?
Lesson path
Practice phrases
Drill the sentences from this lesson with spaced repetition.
Speaking practice
Record yourself running the dialogue out loud — we'll grade your pace.