I build software that is used by nearly all engineers in our company. We own hundreds of web applications and websites. We’ve grown by acquisition of smaller companies, and we have an extremely heterogenous environment.

25 years ago, I started my career as a web designer. Today, I’m a Principal Cloud and Platform Engineer. Still to this day, I regularly leverage lessons when building tech that I learned from the world of UX.

“Design is not how it looks. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs

Naming consistency helps to reduce the mental friction that people have when learning how something works. For example, one my projects is a suite of Terraform modules that are designed as building blocks which cover all of the fundamental pieces of any app’s stack. We have designed these 20-ish modules to work well standalone, as well as when used together. Certain patterns are the same across the board.

1. We strongly favor dependency injection, and limit the use of ternary statements. In the world of Terraform, this is via variables or a .tfvars file. Everyone knows that this is how it works, so it reduces the mental friction when adopting a new/additional module.

2. Variable names which do the same thing are named identically across all modules. Their descriptions are identical. For example, tags = [k:v] works exactly the same way across all modules, and people don’t have to think about it.

3. Modules have a naming pattern. Among other things, they begin with the name of the service that the module talks to. (If we find that we’re talking to multiple services, we need to break the module down into smaller chunks.) So aws- or newrelic- or datadog- or github- or pagerduty- are all examples.

This overall “design” has not only helped reduce mental friction and made the modules easier to understand and use, but it also makes them easier to manage across hundreds of repositories supporting hundreds of apps. Collaboration, cooperation, and communication are all improved as a result. And if something is difficult to understand, then it means that we screwed up. We need to do a better job listening to the app-engineering teams and SREs who support them to streamline and clarify as much as possible.

“Customers” come in all sorts of shapes and forms.