In 2015, blogs were still very much a thing, I built a simple static one with WordPress and became curious about the technical knowledge required to build conversational platforms like lindaikeji.com or the now defunct 360nobs. This was my very first dive into code, and I was all in – enthusiastic, open, maybe even a little obsessive.

I’d spend hours poring over documentation that felt less like English and more like encrypted alien text. YouTube tutorials assumed I already knew the very concepts they were supposedly teaching. It was like trying to navigate a dense fog with a blindfold on.

For a long time, I thought the problem was me with the technical jargon dense for me to parse. I would later drop it and make a short foray into graphic design before eventually circling back into coding in 2022 during a long university break. What I realized over time was that tech often makes itself elusive—not because it has to be, but because it’s easy to gatekeep when we let language become performative.

Language in tech (and many other fields) often gets weighed down by unnecessary ambiguity or performative complexity. Like a job description saying, “must be able to build APIs that can handle complex queries,” emphasizing the need for complexity when what’s truly meant is “robust,” “powerful,” or even “flexible.” Or when we say, “Idempotent microservices architecture,” when what we really mean is: “It doesn’t break when you retry the same request.”

There’s nothing wrong with knowing your stuff. But clarity should never be a casualty of expertise. And I have come to believe that we’re not smarter because we make things harder to understand; we’re just less generous. Language should clarify, not gatekeep, especially in tech, where so many are trying to learn. This isn’t to say jargon is evil, but to emphasize that clarity is always better. And if you’re teaching, mentoring, writing docs, or simply explaining something to a friend or junior dev: you’re not diluting knowledge by making it understandable. You’re making space.

Tech isn’t just built with code. It’s built with words. If we want a more inclusive, collaborative, and welcoming industry, we have to treat communication as part of the craft.