Plain-Language Copy Helps People Understand Technical Work

This sentence stopped us while we reviewed our portfolio:

"Production-grade reliability: circuit breaker, retry logic, request deduplication."

It was accurate. It was not clear to a business reader.

The site sounded like a resume for engineers. It needed to speak to the people who choose the work.

The Jargon Trap

Technical teams often describe how they built something.

Visitors usually need to know what it does for them.

A term can be precise and still fail to communicate.

For example, RAG and pgvector explain implementation. They do not explain the customer-facing result.

What We Changed

We rewrote the portfolio, contact page, and about page.

The code change was small. The reader-facing change was clearer.

Before: "Production e-commerce platform serving real customers. Built from scratch with Next.js 14, TypeScript, and a microservices architecture connecting Medusa, Supabase, Stripe, and Redis.".

After: "Online store and business platform built from scratch. Handles payments, bookings, email campaigns, and customer accounts in one place.".

The second version describes the work in terms of what it does.

A technical reader can still find the stack in separate badges or notes.

Rewrite the Impact Bullets

Before: "1,300+ commits in under 3 months of intense development".

After: "Built from zero to production in under 3 months".

Before: "Production-grade reliability: circuit breaker, retry logic, request deduplication".

After: "Built-in safeguards help the system recover when something goes wrong".

Before: "AI chatbot with RAG (pgvector + OpenAI) answering customer questions from indexed site content".

After: "Chatbot that uses website content to answer customer questions".

The translations keep the underlying ideas intact.

They give a reader a reason to care before naming the implementation.

Three Rules

Describe outcomes, not ingredients. People order cake. They do not order flour arranged in layers.

Replace terms that need a parenthetical. Use the result when the pattern name adds no value.

Keep technical details available. Put stack names in a separate place for readers who want them.

Fix the Heading Order

Clear headings help people scan a page.

They also help screen-reader users build a page outline.

We fixed pages that jumped from H1 to H3.

The component now uses H2 for project titles and H3 for subtitles.

The Takeaway

You do not need to hide impressive technical work.

You do need to translate it.

Describe the outcome first. Keep the recipe available for people who need it.