On Naming Schemes

Posted on 23 March 2012 by Nick Boyce. Find me on Google+

There has been some debate internally about how naming our systems and applications. On the surface it may seem trivial, I find having a naming scheme really helps for:

Discussing how systems relate to one another. It’s much easier to talk about Bootstrap than “The Twitter CSS Framework”. Significant advances in the application may result in new names, meaning less talk of “the new system” and “the old system”.
Organising Git repositories. Calling things “API” or “CSS framework” is boring and not specific enough to be useful.
Every project deserves a little personality of its own.

Naming schemes

So, with that in mind, we have decided to use movie directors as the naming scheme for our systems, starting with our new API-driven platform, Kubrick. So if “there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”, perhaps we have reason to celebrate!