Start / The Bike Shed / 356 the value of specialized vocabulary

356: The Value of Specialized Vocabulary

39 min • 27 september 2022

Guest and fellow thoughtbotter Stephanie Minn and Joël chat about how the idea of specialized vocabulary came up during a discussion of the Ruby Science book. We have all these names for code smells and refactors. Before knowing these names, we often have a vague sense of the ideas but having a name makes them more real. They also give us ways to talk precisely about what we mean. However, there is a downside since not everyone is familiar with the jargon.

This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack.

Transcript:

JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined with fellow thoughtboter Stephanie Minn.

STEPHANIE: Hey, Joël.

JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. Stephanie, what is new in your world?

STEPHANIE: Thanks for asking. I am on a new project I just started a few weeks ago, and I'm feeling the new project vibes, I think, kind of scoping out what's going on with the client with the work that they're doing. Trying to make a good impression. I think lately I've been in that mode of where can I find some work to do even when I'm just getting on boarded and learning the domain, trying to make those README updates in the areas that are a bit outdated, and yeah, just kind of along for the ride.

One thing that has been surprising already is that in my second week, the project pivoted into a different direction than what I was expecting. So that has been kind of exciting and also pretty interesting to see sometimes this stuff happens. I was brought on thinking that we were working on rebuilding the front end in React and TypeScript, pulling out pieces of their 15-year-old Rails monolith. So that was kind of one area that they decided to start with.

But recently, they actually decided to pivot to just revamping the look of the existing pages in the Rails app using the same templates and forms. So it's kind of shifted from more greenfield-esque work to figuring out what the heck's going on in this legacy codebase and making it a little bit more modern-looking and cleaning out the cobwebs, I suppose as we find them.

JOËL: As a consultant, how do you deal with that kind of dramatic shift in expectations?

STEPHANIE: I think it's tough because I necessarily wasn't in those conversations, and so I have to come at it with the understanding that they have a deep knowledge of the business and things that are going on behind the scenes that I don't, and I am coming in kind of with a fresh set of eyes. And it definitely raises some questions for me, right? Like, why now? What were the trade-offs that were made in the decisions?

And I hope that as a consultant, I can poke and prod a little bit to help them with the transition and also figuring out its impact on the rest of the team in a way maybe someone who is more familiar with the situation and more tied to the politics of the org might not have that perspective.

JOËL: I have a lot of questions here. But actually, I'm thinking that onboarding as a topic would probably make a good standalone episode. So maybe we'll have to bring you back for a future episode to talk about how to onboard well and how to deal with surprises.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that's a great idea. What about you, Joël? What's going on in your world?

JOËL: I'm doing an integration with a third-party gem, and I am really struggling. And I've gotten to the point where I'm reading through the source of the gem to try to figure out some weird errors, some things that come up that are not documented. I think that's a really valuable skill. Ideally, you're not having to bring it out too often, but when you do, being able to drop into the code can really help unblock you or at least make some amount of progress.

STEPHANIE: Are you having to dig into the gem's code because you weren't able to find what you needed from the documentation?

JOËL: That's correct. I'm getting some cryptic errors where the gem is crashing, and I'm finding some lines in my logs that point back to the gem. And now I'm trying to reconstruct what is happening. Why is it not behaving the way it should be based on the documentation that I read?

STEPHANIE: Oh, that's tough. Getting into gem code is uncharted territory.

JOËL: It's nice when you're working with an open-source gem because the source is there, and you can just follow the stack trace and go through the code. Sometimes it's long and tedious, but it generally gives you results. It definitely is intimidating.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. When you're facing this kind of problem where you have no idea where the light at the end of the tunnel might be, how long do you spend with it? At what point do you take away with what you've learned and try to figure out a different approach?

JOËL: That's a good observation because digging through the source of a gem can definitely be a time sink. I think how much time I want to budget depends on a variety of other factors. How big of a problem is this? If I can't figure it out through reading the source, do I have alternate approaches to debug the problem, such as asking for help, opening an issue, reaching out to somebody else who's used it, complaining about it on The Bike Shed and hoping someone responds with an answer?

There are other options that I can do that might leave me blocked but maybe eventually give me results. The advantage with reading the source is that you're at least feeling like you're making progress.

STEPHANIE: Nice. Well, I wish you luck on that journey. [laughs] It sounds pretty tough. I'm sure that you'll get to one of those solutions and figure out how to get unblocked.

JOËL: I hope so. I'm pursuing a few strategies in tandem. So I've asked for help, but I'm also reading the source code. And between the two of those, I hope I'll get to a good solution.

So, Stephanie, last time you were on the show, you talked about your experience creating talk proposals for RubyConf. Have you heard back from them since then?

STEPHANIE: I have. I will be speaking at RubyConf Mini this year. And I'm really excited because this will be my first IRL conference talk. So last time, I recorded my talk for RubyConf, and this time I will be up on a stage in front of real people.

JOËL: That's really exciting. Congratulations.

STEPHANIE: Thanks.

JOËL: What is the topic of your talk?

STEPHANIE: I will be talking about pair programming and specifically pair programming through the lens of a framework called Nonviolent Communication, which is a framework I learned about through a friend who recommended the canonical book on it. And it's a self-help book, to be totally frank, but I found it so illuminating. It really changed how I communicated in my relationships in my personal life.

And the more time I spent with it, the more I realized that it would be a great application in pair programming because it's so collaborative and intimate. I've experienced the highs and lows of pair programming. You can feel so good when you are super connected with your pair. You make a lot of progress. You meet whatever professional goals that you might be meeting, and you have someone along for the ride the whole time. It can be just so rewarding.

But it can also be really challenging when you are having more of those interpersonal conflicts, and navigating that can be tough. And so I'm really excited to share this style of communication that might help others who want to take their pair programming to the next level and get the most out of that experience no matter who they're pairing with.

JOËL: I'm excited to hear this talk because pair programming has always been an important part of what we do at thoughtbot. And I think now that we're remote, we do a lot of remote pair programming. And the interpersonal interactions are a little bit different there than when you're physically in a room with each other, or you have to maybe pay a little bit more attention to them. I'm really excited to hear that. I think that's going to be really useful, not just for me but for a lot of the audience who are there.

STEPHANIE: Thanks. Joël, you have a talk accepted at RubyConf Mini too.

JOËL: Yes, I also had a talk accepted titled Teaching Ruby to Count. And it's going to be all about series, enumerators, enumerables, and ranges in Ruby and the cool things that you can do with them. So I'm really excited to share about that. I've done some deep dives on these topics, and I'm excited to share that with the broader Ruby community.

STEPHANIE: Nice. I'm really excited to hear more about it.

JOËL: Did you submit more than one proposal this year?

STEPHANIE: This year, I didn't. But I would love to get to a point where I have a lot of content on the backburner and can pull it out when CFP season rolls around to just have some more options. Yeah, I have all these ideas in my head. I think we talked about how we come up with content in our last episode. But yeah, having a content bank sounds really nice for the future, so maybe when that season rolls around, it is a lot easier to get the ball rolling on submitting. What about you? Did you submit more than one?

JOËL: I submitted two, but this is the one I was most excited about. I think the other idea was maybe a little bit more polished, but this one was a newer one I came up with towards the end of the CFP period. And I was like, ooh, I'm excited about this. I've just done a deep dive on enumerators, and I think there are some cool things to share with the community. And so that's what I'm excited to share about, and maybe that came through the proposal because that is what the committee picked. So I'm super happy to be talking about that.

STEPHANIE: Nice. Yeah, I was just thinking the same, that your excitement about it was probably palpable to the committee.

JOËL: For any of our viewers who are interested in coming to watch the talks by Stephanie and myself and plenty of other gifted speakers, this will be at RubyConf Mini in Providence, Rhode Island, from November 15th to 17th. And if you can't make it in person, the videos will be published online early in 2023. And we'll definitely share the links to that when they come out.

So as we mentioned in your last episode, thoughtbot has a book club where we've been discussing the book Ruby Science, which goes through a lot of code smells and talks about some various refactoring patterns that can be used to fix them. Most recently, we looked at a code smell that has a very evocative name; it's called shotgun surgery.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, it's a very visceral name for sure. I think that is what prompted this next topic that we're about to discuss because someone in the book club, another thoughtboter, mentioned that they were learning this term for the first time. But it made a lot of sense to them because they had experienced shotgun surgery and didn't have the term for it previously. Joël, do you mind giving the listeners a recap of what shotgun surgery is?

JOËL: So shotgun surgery is when in order to make a change to a codebase, you have to make a bunch of little changes in a lot of different files, a lot of different locations. And that means that all of these little pieces are weirdly coupled to each other in a way that to make one change, you have to make a bunch of little changes in a lot of places. And that results in a very high churn diff, and that's a common symptom of this problem.

STEPHANIE: Nice. Thanks for explaining.

MID-ROLL AD:

Debugging errors can be a developer’s worst nightmare...but it doesn’t have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half.

So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking!

Airbrake’s debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted.

In addition to stellar error monitoring, Airbrake’s lightweight APM helps developers to track the performance and availability of their application through metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction.

Finally, Airbrake Deploy Tracking helps developers track trends, fix bad deploys, and improve code quality.

Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in the Ruby community and has grown to cover all major programming languages. Airbrake seamlessly integrates with your favorite apps to include modern features like single sign-on and SDK-based installation. From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back.

Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today!

STEPHANIE: I think I came away from that conversation thinking about the idea of learning new terms, especially technical ones, and the power that learning those terms can give you as a developer, especially when you're communicating with other people on your team.

JOËL: So you mentioned the value in communication there. Some terms have a very precise meaning, and so that allows you to communicate a very specific idea. How do you balance having some jargon and some terminology that allows you to speak very precisely versus having to learn all the terms? Because the more narrow the term is, the more terms you need to talk about all the different things.

STEPHANIE: That's a great question. I don't know if I have a great answer because I think I'm still on my journey. I have always noticed when developers I work with have that really precise, articulate technical vocabulary, probably because I don't. I am constantly referring to functions or classes as things, like, that thingy over there talks to this thing over here, and then does something. [laughs]

And I think it's because I maybe didn't always have that exposure to very precise technical vocabulary. And so I had an understanding of how things worked in my head, but I couldn't necessarily map that to words. And I'm also from California, so, I don't know, maybe some of that is showing through a little bit. [laughs]

But I've been trying to incorporate more technical terms when I speak and also in written form, too, such as in code review, because I want to be able to communicate more clearly my intentions and leave less room for ambiguity. Sometimes I've noticed when you do speak more casually about code, turns out other people can interpret it in different ways. And if you are using, like you said, that narrower technical term for it, that leaves less room for misunderstanding.

But in the same vein, I think a lot of people are like me, where they might not know the technical terms for things. And when you start using a lot of jargon like that, it can be a bit exclusive to folks earlier in their career, especially since software as an industry we have folks from all different backgrounds. We don't necessarily have the expectation of assured formal training. We want to be inclusive of people who came to this career from different places and make sure that we are speaking the same language. And so it's been top of mind for me thinking about how we can balance those two things. I don't know, what do you think?

JOËL: I want to speak to some of the value of precision first because I think there are a few different points. We have the value of precision, then we have the difficulty of learning vocabulary, and how are we inclusive of everyone. But on the topic of precision, I don't know if you saw not too long ago, another fellow thoughtboter, Matheus Sales, published an article on the thoughtbot blog about the concept of connascence. And he introduces this as a new set of vocabulary, not vocabulary that he's created but a vocabulary that is out there that not that many developers are aware of for different ways to talk about coupling.

So it's easy in a pull request to just say, "Oh, well, that thing looks coupled. How about this other way?" And then I respond, "Well, that's also coupled in a different way." And then we just go back and forth like, "Well, mine is more coupled than yours is," or whatever. And connascence provides a more precise, narrow vocabulary to talk about the different ways that things are coupled and which ones are more coupled than others. And so it allows us to break out of maybe those unproductive discussions because now we can talk about things in a more granular way.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I loved that blog post. It was really exciting for me to pick up a new term to describe something that I had experienced, or seen in codebases, or felt the pain of, and be able to describe it more accurately. I'm curious, Joël, if you were to use that term next time, how would you make sure that folks also have the same level of familiarity with it?

JOËL: I think on a pull request, I would link to Matheus' article depending on...I might give a little bit of context in a comment. So I might say something like, "This area here is coupled. Here's a suggested refactor. It's also coupled but in a different way. It's because we've moved up this hierarchy of connascence from, you know, connascence of names to some other form" (I don't have them all memorized.) and then link to the article. And hopefully, that becomes the start of a productive discussion.

But yeah, having the resources you can link to people is great. And that's one of the nice things about text communication on a pull request is that you can just link to external resources that people can find helpful.

STEPHANIE: To continue talking about the value of precision and specialized vocabulary, Joël, I think you are a very articulate communicator. And I'm curious from your perspective if you have always been this way, if you've always wanted to collect technical terms to describe exactly what you want to convey, or if this was a bit of a journey for you to get to this level of clear communication in your technical speaking and writing.

JOËL: It's definitely been a journey. I think there are sort of two components to this; one is being able to communicate clearly to others; make sure that they understand what you're talking about. So for that, it's really important to be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes.

So when I'm building a conference talk or writing up a blog post, I will try to read it or go through my slide deck and try to pretend that I am the audience. And then I ask myself the questions: where do I get confused? Where am I going to have questions? Maybe even where am I going to roll my eyes a little bit and be like, eh, I didn't agree with that leap of logic there; where are you going? And then shift back in author mode and say, how can I address these? How can I make my content speak to you in an area where maybe you disagreed, or you were confused?

So I kind of jump between moving from the audience seat to back to the author and try to make that material as much as possible resonate with those people.

STEPHANIE: Do you do that in more real-time communication, such as in meetings or in pairing?

JOËL: I think that's a little bit harder to do. And then it's maybe a little bit more of asking directly, either pausing to let people interject, or you can ask the question directly and say, "Are you familiar with this term?" That can also sometimes be tricky to manage because you don't want to make it sound like you think they don't know anything.

But you can also make it sound really natural in a conversation where you're like, "Oh, we're going to do this thing with a strategy pattern. Have you seen a strategy pattern before? Are you familiar with this? Great, let's keep moving." And if not, maybe it's like, "Hey, let's take a few minutes to talk about what the strategy pattern means."

STEPHANIE: I think you are really great at asking the audience about their level of familiarity with the content, especially in book club. I have definitely experienced just as a developer pairing, or in meetings, or whatnot times when people don't pause and ask. And usually, I have to muster up the courage to interrupt and ask, "Hey, what is X, Y, and Z?" And that is tough sometimes.

I am certainly comfortable with it in a space where there is trust developed in terms of I don't feel worried that people might question my level of familiarity or experience. And I can very enthusiastically say, "Hey, I don't know what this means. Could you please explain it?" But sometimes it can be a little tough when you might not have that relationship with someone, or you haven't talked about it, talked about assumptions about your knowledge or experience level upfront.

And so I have found that to be a really good way to build that trust to make sure that we aren't excluding folks is to just talk about some of that stuff, even before we start pairing or before a meeting. And that can really help with some of those miscommunications that might come down later in the process.

JOËL: It's interesting that you bring up miscommunication because I think sometimes, even though certain jargon can be very precise, sometimes people will not use it to mean exactly what its dictionary definition is. And so sometimes two people are using the same term, and you're not meaning quite the same thing.

And so sometimes I'll be pairing with someone, and I'll have to sort of pause and say, "Hey, wait a minute, you're using the term adapter in a certain way that seems to be a little bit different than the way I'm using it. Can you maybe tell me what your personal definition is? And I'll tell you mine, and we can reconcile those two together."

Sometimes that can also feel like a situation where maybe I'm hazy on the topic. Like, I have a vague sense of it, and maybe it does or does not align with the way the other person is using it. And so that's an opportunity for me to ask them to define the term for me without completely having to say, "I have no idea what this term is. Please, oh, great sage, explain the meaning."

STEPHANIE: Are there times that you feel more or less comfortable doing that kind of reset?

JOËL: I think sometimes the fear is in breaking flow. And so you're doing a thing, and then somebody is trying to explain something, and you don't want to break out of that. Or you're trying to explain something, and you have to decide, is it worth making sure to explain a term, or do you keep moving? So I think that is a big concern.

And there is just the interpersonal concern of if there is less trust, do I want to put myself out there? Does somebody else maybe not feel comfortable you asked them to explain a term? Maybe they're using it wrong. It's not always good in a pairing situation to just come up and say, "Hey, that's not technically the adapter pattern; you're wrong. Let me pull out The Gang of Four book. You see on page 54..." that's not productive.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, for sure.

JOËL: So a lot of it, I think...and maybe this ties into your topic of communication while pairing. But ideally, you're working constructively with a person. And so debating definitions is not generally productive but asking someone, "What do you mean when you say this?" I find is a very helpful way to lead into that type of conversation.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great strategy because you're coming from a place of curiosity rather than a place of this is my definition, and it's the right definition, and so, therefore, you are wrong. [laughs]

JOËL: It's interesting the place that jargon occupies in our imagination of expertise. If you've ever seen any movie where they're trying to show that somebody is technically competent, they usually demonstrate that a person is competent by having them just spout out a long chain of jargon, and that makes them sound smart. But I think to a certain extent; maybe we believe it in the industry as well. If somebody can use a lot of terms and talk about a system using this very specific jargon, we tend to think that they're smart or at least look up to them a little bit.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, which I think isn't always the best assumption because I've certainly worked with folks who did throw out a lot of jargon but weren't necessarily, like you were saying, using it the way that I understood it, and that made communicating with them challenging.

I also think what true expertise really is is having the knowledge that when you use a jargony term that not everyone might be familiar with it, having the awareness to pause and ask someone how they're doing with the vocabulary and be able to tailor how you explain that term to that other person. I think that demonstrates a really deep level of understanding that doesn't get enough credit.

JOËL: I 100% agree. Jargon, vocabulary, it's a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. So the goal is to communicate clearly to others and maybe to help yourself in your own learning. And if you're not accomplishing those goals, then what's the point? I guess maybe there is another personal goal which is to sound smart, but that's not really a good goal, [laughs] especially not when the way you do that is by confusing everybody else in the room because they don't understand you, to make you try to feel smarter than them. Like, that's bad communication.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, for sure. I've definitely experienced listening to someone explain something and have to really think very hard about every single word that they're saying because they were using terms that are just less common. And so, in my brain, I had to map them to things that made sense to me, and things that I was familiar with that were the same concepts.

Like, I was experienced enough to have that shared understanding, but just the words that they used required another layer of brain work. Maybe we could have found a happy medium between them communicating the way that they expressed themselves the best with my ability to understand easily and quickly so that we could get on the same page.

JOËL: So you mentioned that there are sometimes situations where you're aware of a particular concept, but maybe you're just not aware that the term that somebody else is using maps to this concept you already understand. And I know that for me, oftentimes, being able to give a name to something that I understand is an incredibly powerful thing.

Even though I already know the idea of passing objects to another object in this particular configuration, or of wrapping things in some way or whatever the thing that I'm trying to do, all of a sudden, instead of it being a more nebulous concept in my head or a list of 10 steps or something like that, now I have one thing I can just point to and say it is this.

So that's been really helpful for me in my learning to be able to take a label and put it on something that I already know. And somehow, it cements the idea in my head and also then allows me to build on it to the next things that I want to learn.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. It's really exciting when you're able to have that light-bulb moment when you have that precise term, or you learn that precise term for something that you have been wrestling with or experiencing for a while now.

I was just reminded of reading documentation. I have a very vivid memory of the first time I read; I don't know, even the Rails official docs, all of these terms that I didn't understand at the time. But then once I started digging into it, exploring, and just doing the work, when I revisited those docs, I could understand them a lot more comprehensively because I had experience with the things (There I am using things again.) [laughs] and seeing the terms for them and that helping solidify my understanding.

JOËL: I'm curious, in your personal learning, do you find it easier to encounter a term first and then learn what it means, or do the reverse, learn the concept first and then cap it off by being able to give it a name?

STEPHANIE: That's a good question. I think the latter because I've certainly spent a lot of time Googling terms and then reading whatever first search results came up and being like, okay, I think I got it, and then Googling the same term like two weeks later because I didn't really get it the first time. But whenever I come across a term for a concept I already am familiar with, it is like, oh yes, uh-huh! That really ends up sticking with me.

Matheus Sales' blog post that you mentioned earlier is a really great example of that term really standing out to me because I didn't know it at the time, but I suppose was seeking out something to describe the concept of connascence. So that was really cool and really memorable. What about you? Do you have a preferred way of learning new technical terms?

JOËL: I think there can be value to both approaches. But I'm with you; I think it generally is easier to add a name to a concept you already understand. And I experienced this pretty dramatically when I tried to get into functional programming.

So several years ago, I tried to learn the language Haskell which is notorious for being difficult to learn and very abstract and technical. And the way that the Haskell community typically tries to teach things is learn the fundamentals first, very top-down, learn the theory, and then, later on, you can do things in practice. So it's like before you can write an actual program, let us teach you about applicatives, and monads, and all these things that are really difficult to learn. And they're kind of scary technical terms.

So I choked out partway through, gave up on Haskell. A year later, got back into it, tried it again, choked out again. And then, eventually, I pivoted. I started getting into a similar language called Elm, which is similar syntax but compiles to JavaScript for the front end. And that community has the opposite philosophy when it comes to teaching. They want to get you productive as soon as possible. And you can learn some of the theory as you go along. And so with that, I felt like I was learning something new all the time and being productive as well, like, constantly adding new features to things in an application, and that's really exciting.

And what's really beautiful there is that you eventually learn a lot of the same concepts that you would learn in something like Haskell because the two languages share a lot of similar concepts. But instead of saying first, you need to learn about monads as a general concept, and then you can build a program; Elm says, build a bunch of programs first. We'll show you the basic syntax. And after you've built a bunch of them, you'll start realizing, wait a minute, these things all kind of look alike. There are patterns I'm starting to recognize.

And then you can just point to that and say, hey, that pattern that you started recognizing, and you see a bunch of times that's monad. You've known it all along, and now you can put a label on it. And you've gotten there. And so that's the way that I learned those concepts. And that was much easier for me than the approach of trying to learn the abstract concept first.

STEPHANIE: Monad is literally the word I just Googled earlier this week and still have a very, very hazy understanding of. So maybe I'll have to go learn Elm now. [chuckles]

JOËL: I recommend a lot of people to use that as their entry point into the statically typed functional programming world, just because of how much more shallow the learning curve is compared to alternatives. And I think a lot of it has to do with that approach of saying, let's get you productive quickly. Let's get you doing things. And eventually, patterns will emerge, and you can put names on them later. But we'll not make you learn all of the theory upfront, all the jargon.

STEPHANIE: Now that you do understand all the technical jargon around functional programming, how do you approach communicating about it when you do talk about Elm or those kinds of concepts?

JOËL: A lot of it depends on your audience. If you have an audience that already knows these concepts, then being able to use those names is really valuable because it's a shortcut. You can just say, oh yeah, this thing is a monad, and so, therefore, we can do these actions with it. And everybody in the audience just already knows monads have these properties. That's wonderful. Now I can follow to step two instead of having to have a slow build-up.

So if I'm writing an article or giving a talk, or even just having a conversation with someone, if I knew they didn't know the term, I would have to really build up to it, and maybe I wouldn't introduce the term at all. I would just talk about some of the properties that are interesting for the purpose of this particular demo.

But I would probably have to work up to it and say, "See, we have this simpler thing, and then this more complex thing. But here are the problems that we have with it. Here's a change we can make to our code that will make it work." And you walk through the process without necessarily getting into all of the theory. But with somebody else who did know, I could just say, "Oh, what we need here is monad." And they look at me, and they're like, "Oh, of course," and then we do it.

STEPHANIE: What you just described reminds me a lot of the WIRED Video Series, five levels of teaching where they have an expert come in and teach the same concept to different-aged people starting from young kids to an expert in their field as well. And I really liked how you answered that question just with the awareness that you tailor how you explain something to your audience because we could all benefit from just having that intentionality when we communicate in order to get the most value out of our interactions and knowledge sharing, and collaborative working.

JOËL: I think a theme that underlies a lot of what you and I have talked about today is just that communication, good communication is the fundamental value that we're going for here. And jargon and vocabulary can be something that empowers that but used poorly; it can also defeat that purpose. And most importantly, good communication starts with the audience, not with you. So when you work back from the audience, you can use the appropriate vocabulary and words that serve everybody and your ultimate goal of communicating.

STEPHANIE: I love that.

JOËL: So, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on The Bike Shed today. And as we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, what is a really fun piece of vocabulary that you’ve learned that you might want to share with the audience?

STEPHANIE: So lately, I learned the term WYSIWYG, which stands for What You See Is What You Get to describe text editing software that lets you see and edit the content as it would actually be displayed. So that was a fun, little term that someone brought up when we were paring and looking at some text editing code. And I was really excited because it sounds fun, and also, now I had just an opportunity to say it on a podcast. [laughs]

JOËL: It's amazing that an acronym that is that long has enough vowels in the right places that you can just pronounce it.

STEPHANIE: Oh yeah.

JOËL: WYSIWYG. That's a fun word to say.

STEPHANIE: 100%. I also try to pronounce all acronyms, regardless of how pronounceable they actually are. [laughs] Thanks for asking.

JOËL: With that, shall we wrap up?

STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up.

JOËL: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm.

This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore.

If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show.

If you have any feedback, you can reach us at @_bikeshed, or reach me at @joelquen on Twitter, or at [email protected] via email. Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!

ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.