It is more than a month since the start of global protests for racial justice. At Ably we undertook to learn ourselves and help to promote anti-racism, both within our own organisation and in the wider tech community.
As one step in that effort, we are removing uses of "master", "slave" and other terminology from our software that has the potential to legitimise and perpetuate racist and other non-inclusive culture. The most immediate impact will be the renaming of the "master" branch on our public repositories to "main"; we will roll out these changes over the next few days. Updates to our internal codebases will additionally include replacing master/slave terminology; in some cases these changes will be fairly extensive and will be completed over a period of weeks.
We have prepared a cheatsheet to help adoption of these practices particularly in relation to git, where "master" is expected to remain the default branch name, at least for a time.
Aside from these changes, we will continue learn and promote change in support of the anti-racist movement. The thing that has humbled us most with recent events is how much we need to learn ourselves, and we are committed to that ongoing process.
