If you went down the hell hole of microservices please do give descriptive names to services.
I think the point still somewhat stands. Imagine a “UserProfile” service. It’s accessed from everywhere to show the handle name, address, icon etc. of your user. Your application grows and your users want way more customization, now they get personas and avatars and can show different profile to different people. Those are full of breaking changes that you want to isolate from the legacy “UserProfile”, how do you nam…
Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
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Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#22If you went down the hell hole of microservices please do give descriptive names to services.
I think the point still somewhat stands. Imagine a “UserProfile” service. It’s accessed from everywhere to show the handle name, address, icon etc. of your user. Your application grows and your users want way more customization, now they get personas and avatars and can show different profile to different people. Those are full of breaking changes that you want to isolate from the legacy “UserProfile”, how do you nam…
UserPersona, where a single UserProfile may have multiple UserPersonas?
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#23This is terrible advice. Cryptic names are horrible. It's a layer of cognitive overhead that no one needs. Yes if it gets so big that it's out grown it's original purpose that's a problem. But if it's really big people know what it is because it's big. If it's not that big rename it!
I opt to compromise and use middle ground name, which both related and fun.
A tool for sending mails via Mailgun? “Railgun” then, for example.
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#24This is terrible advice. Cryptic names are horrible. It's a layer of cognitive overhead that no one needs. Yes if it gets so big that it's out grown it's original purpose that's a problem. But if it's really big people know what it is because it's big. If it's not that big rename it!
Yes. The advice is contextual. If you're making a public web framework, probably don't call it Web Framework. If you work at a company and you're writing the one and only hotel booking service, do call it Hotels instead of forcing your coworkers to memorize yet another cute name.
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#25I give mine “whimsical” names that have alphabetic first letters, and may correspond to positions in a hierarchy.
For example, I tend to use a “layered” approach to servers. In one of my projects, the DB layer is the lowest, and is unnamed (it would start with “A,” if I had named it), so I named the DB connector “BADGER”[0]. The layer above that, is called "CHAMELEON/COBRA" (They are basically at the same logical layer).
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/forensic-design-docu...
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#26Stop with the cute cryptic names. If you want descriptive names that can be said with one word consider a good acronym, otherwise just say the whole name.
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#27If i see the words "whimsical", "delightful" or {insert emoji} on a project readme, I will instantly dismiss that project. I've learnt not to trust such projects.
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#28Aesthetically, at this point descriptive names almost look unprofessional, or at least quickly made. If you call your thing "ui-state-syncer" I'm going to suspect it's not really a big budget mainstream thing. If it's called Vue, I'm going to think it's big enough that someone thought it was worth it to spend an hour thinking of names. It was intended to get big. This isn't some minimal internal thing for one specifi…
Seems that names for projects follow the same rule as troll names in the japanese light novel Overlord. Short names, like "Gru" were reserved for the most powerful trolls because there were only so many combinations of three letters. Long names on the other hand were a sign of weakness and cowardice - bringing ridicule to those who introduced themselves like that.
Sed and awk kind of sound like high-level troll names.
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#29This is terrible advice. Cryptic names are horrible. It's a layer of cognitive overhead that no one needs. Yes if it gets so big that it's out grown it's original purpose that's a problem. But if it's really big people know what it is because it's big. If it's not that big rename it!
Yes. The advice is contextual. If you're making a public web framework, probably don't call it Web Framework. If you work at a company and you're writing the one and only hotel booking service, do call it Hotels instead of forcing your coworkers to memorize yet another cute name.
I don't even use Serverless Framework that often yet get irrationality annoyed at how generic a name it has.
Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic
#30Aesthetically, at this point descriptive names almost look unprofessional, or at least quickly made. If you call your thing "ui-state-syncer" I'm going to suspect it's not really a big budget mainstream thing. If it's called Vue, I'm going to think it's big enough that someone thought it was worth it to spend an hour thinking of names. It was intended to get big. This isn't some minimal internal thing for one specifi…
As a counter example, there are plenty of successful projects/brands with highly descriptive names: TypeScript, RHEL, GitHub, AWS, GraphQL, HAproxy, Sendmail, QuickBooks, …
What is descriptive about "RHEL" or "AWS"?