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Brett Martin
Brett Martin

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How Do You Name Projects?

A commonly quoted joke about programming:

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors

And that is talking more about naming variable and functions - not to mention naming a project!

I am curious what everyones strategy is when it comes to naming a new library, or website, or app?

My personal blog was just a silly observation of my cat, who I wanted to make the mascot so I called it CatStache!

Top comments (1)

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Andrew McIntosh

I guess it depends on my audience. When building some sort of library, I'll generally stick to something properly descriptive.

For an app, it depends if it's public or not. I get much more creative if no one else has to care.

At my work there's been a history of some very obtuse backend service names, so the pendulum has swung hard in the other direction for many teams. I prefer a little bit of fun, but still making it fairly easy to associate service with function. For example the mileage tracking service we named "trippy", and the marketplace backend "bazaar".