Changing our Language

For the past thirty years, I thought nothing of terms like whitelist, blacklist, master and slave. If you built a PC, one of the first things you did was configure the master/slave jumper on the hard disk.

I never stopped to think that the terms might be offensive. But, of course, they are and our industry is finally waking up to using more inclusive language.

If you work in technology, this is something you can fix.

• If you’re a leader, use inclusive language and gently correct your team when they don’t. Put a task in the backlog to change documentation and code.
• If you’re an engineer, commit the changes as you’re working on the codebase and documentation.

We can all engage with the community and update unsatisfactory StackOverflow and Wikipedia articles.

A tiny amount of effort from all of us and we can get this fixed.

Title image CC Joybot