Hi everyone,
I'm unfortunately, quite late to this conversation. But I'd like to quickly chime
in in case it's still relevant.
For the last 23-28 years (depending on how you count), my career has followed some
combination of Dev, Sysadmin, DevOps and SRE. Throughout most of that time, my job has
involved having to communicate about how multiple technologies, often in the same
sentence, relate and connect to each other. When different projects use different
terminology, that makes that communication much harder, and much more likely to have a
critical failing, that occasionally won't be caught and will make it to a production
outage or data loss. The impact is real.
One of the things the old master/slave terminology had going for it was that it was
universally understood, and universally used the same way. There was no need to context
switch and think about the terminology multiple times within a single sentence. It just
worked. My goal is that the replacement terms around the industry achieve this.
If it's still possible, I'd like to encourage you to unify your terminology as
much as possible. Preferably to be as close to the "rest" of the industry as
possible, but at the minimum, within the project itself. (I put "rest" in quotes
because at this point in time, it's very much not unified yet.)
Whether you agree with me or not, it would be really cool to get your input on a survey
that I'm doing about it. The purpose is to have data that we can point to when having
these conversations. If you disagree, that's a data point that's just as
interesting as if you agree, and would be really valuable. If you're interested,
it's here:
https://forms.gle/7Feaszh2NbYZqgop8 (A google account is required for
de-duplication, but no identifying information is visible to me.) I will publish the
results at
http://www.randomksandom.com/betterTerms/
While skimming through this conversation, it really struck me how civil and constructive
it has been. - Keep that up. And please do continue with this work. It's important.
- Kevin :)