It’s hard to teach and learn things that are as complex as DevOps/Platform engineering. New folks especially have to deal with all the learning curves at the same time. As tool creators and platform builders we’re not making things easy because we name things in weird clever ways and constantly overload terms with multiple meanings (chef knife, garden project, services); and we’ve been doing that forever. This talk is a walk through the biggest communication traps waiting for you on your journey to Platform, DevOps, SRE life. We’ll also touch on terms like “uptime”, “autoscaling”, and “highly available” that can start to seem meaningless the broader your view of a stack becomes. Let’s have a cathartic experience together and see if we can’t figure out what to do about words.