Respectful Naming Conventions

This is my first post here on Medium. I’m not usually a blogger, I’m not after fame and fortune 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 for these 3 things but am looking to crowd-source other naming conventions people are using out there

1. Renaming “master” branches to “main”.
2. Renaming whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/denylist.
3. Renaming master/slave in Jenkins to organizer/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.

Connect or Support?

If you like this or want to check out my other work, please connect with me on LinkedIn or GitHub. I’d love it if you’d consider supporting me too, all I’ll ever ask for is $1 on GitHub Sponsors or Buy Me a Coffee.