011 - Words Have Power, Even In Code
Words have power, and a lot of it. I sat down to write a blog post for this week and originally wanted to follow up on my Git Guide for Beginners post by sharing some more advanced user flows. As I started writing the post, I couldn’t in good conscious include another post about git without writing or addressing the current conversation related to Black Lives Matter around using main instead of master as the name of your main branch. I pivoted and wrote a guide on renaming your master branch to main instead.
I’m a big believer that if something is simple, easy or not a huge convenience for me to do, but could help someone else, then I should just do it. I’ve seen people expell more energy fighting this change than they would have spent just making it. The entire process of changing the branch from master to main took less than 5 minutes. It’s such a simple, low-effort change that most people will likely adjust to in a few days, but could have a huge positive impact on someone else.
Going back to the idea that words have power, there are a few other terms that I’ve seen starting to change or get replaced with more inclusive alternatives. One that comes to mind are master and slave with relation to a database or server being replaced with worker and helper. Another pair of words is blacklist and whitelist, with the inbuilt ratial undertones that white is good and black is bad. A really great substitue I’ve used in the past is allowlist and denylist. Dino makes a great point that aside from removing ratial undertones, using allowlist and denylist is actually easier to understand for non-native English speakers as well - double bonus!
Words are extremely hard, and with the added complexities of nuance, tone, and cultural backgrounds it’s even harder to communicate without offending someone. But just as easy as it is to offend someone, it’s equally easy to make them feel good about themselves too. Words have power, let’s start wielding it for good.
New Blog Posts
Rename Your Git Branch from Master to Main
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