I remember the days before I was a software engineer and I lived in a world where Python was a snake and not a programming language, where Java was just another word for coffee, and Cassandra was a person from Greek mythology. Most people live in my former world. If you talk to non-technical people about what you do - I mean, what you REALLY DO, no holds barred, describing all the tools and languages and processes you use every day - they will think you are speaking Klingon.

One of my coworkers set up a meeting with me next week because they wanted to better understand git branching and how it affects QA and production deployments. It took me a few months on the job after graduation to truly understand git. Local vs. remote, pushing, pulling, merging, branching, commits - it’s confusing to most beginners. So, I feel like I really need to prepare for this meeting and think about how to explain aspects of git to someone on the outside. I thought that coming from a teaching background would help me describe to my non-technical coworkers about my daily challenges. Now I realize I am entrenched in tech-speak. I’ve become the very person I didn’t understand before starting my computer science degree.