[johndoughy]

> Those terms are used in relation to dependencies and who consumes what.

I think your response exactly illustrates the point of the post: if upstream and downstream had clearer names, you wouldn't need to define them. And if they indeed mean what you say, wouldn't producer and consumer be clearer?

> I don't really see the point it's trying to make - we use technical terms not to be human friendly but to be technical.

I don't think I can agree that technical terms aren't meant to be human friendly. After all, languages exist to convery ideas to other humans; words aren't opcodes intended to be executed by machines.

If technical terms aren't meant to be human friendly, why did humans invent them at all? And if they are intended to be human friendly, why not optimize them for clarity and precision?

[junon]

> wouldn't producer and consumer be clearer?

Absolutely not. It makes no sense. "There was a producer outage." means nothing. Neither does "I'll have to file a bug with the producer dependency."