For as much as I want to take Twitter breaks, let’s be honest: I’m not. I’m going to fall sleep with my phone clutched in my right hand and wake up shining blue light into my precious orbs first thing. So, yes, I saw you manager-types. I saw you sharing your READMEs with delight - a cheeky throwback to how you used to operate as a developer. Get it? It’s technical documentation, but instead of for an API or open-source project it’s for me.

Throughout my software engineering career, I’ve struggled with and against jargon. Intellectually, I understand jargon as a set of specialized terms meant to facilitate smooth and precise communication, particularly in a professional context. It binds groups together: it’s the secret handshake, the side-long wink, the showing that yes, you’re in the club too, you belong. Experientially? I know the ways jargon can keep you out as you feel along, grasping for knowledge in the dark.

“The Ancient Library,” Oliver Weigel. BY-NC-SA As a software engineer, I write a lot of changesets. Changesets are an “indivisible group”¹ of individual code changes (“commits”) meant to be treated as one. It’s the sentence of software engineering — and, just like a sentence, the goal of a changeset is to convey a full thought or idea. Presenting a well-thought out idea is the result of practice, honed through repetition and iteration.