In tech, the understanding of concepts such as devops, agile and continuous integration can vary widely between individuals. This happens even when the concept has a public definition put out into the world. We hear these words and concepts at conferences and on podcasts; we read them in blogs and books; we teach them to our colleagues. We do all of this and inevitably we find out that those same people think of these concepts in different ways than we do. Every time, this surprises us. We argue about definitions and meanings and implementations before we start worrying about how we can better communicate these ideas.

Understanding how and why we end up with different notions of these concepts is important if our goal is to share these kinds of concepts with other people. While we could say that someone who does not believe that devops has anything to do with culture has missed the point, it is more impactful to ask why they think that and how we can share devops in a way that gets all aspects of devops across to people.

This talk will explore this notion through a couple of unique angles, pulling on ideas from linguistics and educational theory, with the goal of giving a better idea of how sharing these concepts often goes awry and more importantly giving the audience other mechanisms and ideas for how to share the ideas that they learn at this conference with their colleagues.