Originally written on the 16th of June in 2020. I'm moving this post from Medium to here as I'm going to write things here instead of there now. This is a light touch on a heavy topic, but I'm genuinely interested how other engineers are approaching this topic more than a year later. Would love to hear other suggestions or how your codebases have changed or not changed.
This is my first post. I’m not usually a blogger, I’m not after attention and I’m not trying to jump to a new job or career. I’m a regular old software developer, who’s been at it for over 15 years, and I still love what I do every day.
The reason I’m writing this now is that I’m thinking through and processing all the events following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I’m just a software engineer in Australia who is far removed from the whole situation, but I figured there are things I can do in my life to break down barriers no matter how small. After reading about GitHub moving away from naming the main branch in a repository “master” and being a Jenkins user seeing the terms master and slave every day, I figured I could do something along those lines too.
I have a starting point of these 3 things but am looking to crowd source other naming conventions people are using out there
- Renaming “master” branches to “main”.
- Renaming whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/denylist.
- Renaming master/slave in Jenkins to organiser/worker.
I’d like to know what other naming conventions people are using to remove less respectful naming in their systems.
As a footnote, this is the article I read about GitHub changing their naming.
Top comments (2)
Not specific to code, we could also start using gender neutral terms like:
he / sheThese are good point but honestly I have only been thinking about what terms in code and tools that could use an adjustment