Improper nouns
Myles wrote a great post about standing up and scaling our nascent recommendation engine. Buried in the middle is an aside which, as you might suspect, is near and dear to my heart:
There are effectively seven separate medium vocabularies in our system... Netflix has a taxonomy team of 30 people whose entire job is maintaining genre tags.
Words are tricky and important. Words are weightless and load-bearing.
I wrote about the "newsletter" problem last week in how-id-grow-buttondown: if you say newsletters, it's a very specific word that works for some of your customer cohorts but turns off your business users; if you say campaigns, you alienate the prosumer cohort. Yuck!
And this week I was dealing with another such problem, one I have been dealing with for years: Email somehow means both of our most important primitives at once: an email is a broadcast sent out, and an email is also the thing that a subscriber has. At least in this case we can save ourselves a bit of pain and refer to emails in the past tense as archives in some places. But then you run into inconsistency, and users start thinking that an "email" in our parlance is something different than an "archive." Lest you think this is a theoretical example, I can point you to dozens of actual tickets as exhibits that it is not.
In the codebase about which Myles writes, the core user — an art gallery — is referred to as one of a platform, a widget, a gallery, a user, an admin, and probably three or four others that I'm forgetting. I have a Sapir-Whorf-esque belief that how you architect code — from big lofty ERDs down to individual variable names — influences how users experience that code. All the more reason that durable abstractions are extremely, extremely important.
And there is no stronger abstraction than a word.