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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

> Names should make you smile. Yes, you, specifically. You should get a dopamine hit whenever something you created comes up, even when it’s in a sentence like “Shelob has broken again.” Fun is one of the most important things there is.

I'll never understand this mentality, where a silly project name is a source of "fun." I would never dare tell anyone what should be fun for them... except in this case, where I will say that funny names are not actually fun.

I can only imagine working in the author's ideal company:

"Hey, does anyone know why Shmoop is down? I know I updated the BoomBoom and reconfigured Thanos, but now Klomgan is reporting a series of Lemonhead warnings. Should I talk to Meep team or the Chumbawumba admins?"

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> I'll never understand this mentality, where a silly project name is a source of "fun." I would never dare tell anyone else what should be fun for them... except in this case, where I will say that funny names are not actually fun.

I worked in a company that would "break ground" a new microservice every other week with overlapping scope of other microservices. (poor planning in resource allocation), which lead to some services named after Greek mythology that loose describes what service does...sometimes... Then they started giving more descriptive names, services that just do X and named X, except later they started doing Y, and now it's confusing.

Then we had service XYZ (abbreviated from what it supposed to do), it took too long to build, so naturally management decided to make a Z service and remove functionality from XYZ.

I think the author comes from a similar place where scope for service is constantly changing, and silly names are the only source of dopamine.

>I think the author comes from a similar place where scope for service is constantly changing, and silly names are the only source of dopamine.

Upon the recognition of this is the time you should have your resume updated and you start responding to some of those LinkedIn reps that have been emailing you.

I know this doesn't really advance the discussion that much, but... if you haven't seen this Krazam video, it's a sketch about that exact sentence there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

I'm completely with you that name choice is not necessarily where something needs to be fun, and most people don't realize that once you name something, it's probably around for 5-10 years whether you like it or not. Or if it succeeds or fails.

"I've lost the bleeps, I've lost the sweeps, and I've lost the creeps.

The what?

And the what?"

You chose childish names one'd presumably be embarrassed to say to an outsider, but... Assuming you can stomach saying the project's name out loud, what's to lose?

What method would you propose teams used to name a project, in which "fun" names are discouraged?

Klomgan? This argument is a straw man because those names are all ridiculous and defeat the purpose of the naming strategy. If a real organization adopted the naming strategy described by this article, reason would quickly become a part of it, and all those names would therefore be disqualified. Nobody knows what a Klomgan is and it's a made-up word that's difficult to pronounce. Why would anyone suggest it? How about marshmallow, lemonade, candlestick, or zephyr? Those are some simple dictionary names that are easy to say and aren't overly distracting or offensive.

Maybe "whimsical" isn't an accurate moniker. Generic or Common is how I would label the naming strategy described by this article. "Whimsical" is just asking for trouble and opens you up to overtly stupid names like "Chumbawumba."

I think Chumbawumba would be a good name. Just nickname it Chubby or Chewy. It's not significantly worse than Kubernetes.

Well, Shelob has no meaning to me. And yes, I know now where it comes from, but I haven't read the books.

The article says "names should make you smile." And really, does anything make a person smile more than Chumbawumba? They get knocked down, and they get up again!

The article specifically uses "Shelob" as an example of a desirable name. The comment you are replying to is not a straw man.

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