How to name your next open source project
Coming up with names for software projects is always a challenge and each team has a different approach
Our naming story
Every now and then, we develop projects that we’d like to open source. Coming up with names for these projects is always a challenge and each team has a different approach. I’d like to describe how we named a couple of our projects and what we learned along the way. One of these projects was initiated by our data engineering team and another by our back-end team. Despite having different use cases, both of these projects have a similar theme — they enable developers to efficiently process data from different sources and pipe it to different systems.
Naming is hard but important
Coming up with a name is never an easy decision. Babies, bands, top-secret projects, new products, and companies — someone, somewhere has to name them. Naming an open source project isn’t quite as “high-stakes” as naming a baby but it ain’t a walk in the park either.
You can give an internal development project whatever crappy name you want, but if there’s a chance you’re going to go public with it, there are several reasons why you should put some effort into a decent name (besides…
