Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

It is easy to use vocabulary that is popular at this moment. It is a bit more difficult to explain the situation in plain English. That exercise, however, is often well worth the effort.

Here is some popular vocabulary in the endeavor of software development:

• DevSecOps
• Kubernetes
• Git
• Aggregation
• Anonymization
• and so on

It’s nice to toss out one or two of these per sentence. It’s a shorthand. Say one word that is short of 1,000 more words. All good.

Then there is, “Please explain what you mean when you use that word.”

Gosh, what are you, stupid? Don’t you recognize the currently popular vocabulary currently used by the currently recognized experts? Why if you were in the know, you would know.

Perhaps I am a bit slow. Still, I would appreciate someone explaining all these things in plain words commonly found in the English dictionary. Sure, that is difficult, but it shows a fundamental understanding of what is happening, and a fundamental understanding is usually worth the effort.

Many years ago, a much younger version of myself asked a person developing software if his group used Design Reviews. He wrinkled his brow at the question. We walked down the hallway to a room. “We all sit in here,” he started. “When we are about to work on something new, we stand at this white board. Someone draws a few figures with boxes and arrows. We talk about the figures and redraw them until we all seem to understand and agree that we have a pretty good notion of how things will work and how to build them.”

Ah. Plain English. They didn’t know the then-popular vocabulary, but they knew what they were doing. Yes, they succeeded.

We can all do better. Let’s skip the popular vocabulary and speak English. Please.