Project Wagtail: The Origin Story

We have a name for our tech platform! Project Wagtail!

Thomas Lord, The Water Wagtail, Hand-colored engraving, 1791 From Lord’s Entire new System of Ornithology or Oecumenical History of British Birds.

Some background first.

We have embarked on a complete overhaul of our tech backend. We are integrating our various bits and pieces software and tools under one system, codenamed Project Wagtail.

The new system will integrate Sales and CRM, employee management, R&D management and finally the most important piece: our teacher coaching framework. It will support not only internal users like coaches and managers but also external users like school management.

All of this will be bundled in a very elegant and simple setup. User access is possible through a desktop app and a mobile app depending on the use case.

Everyone knows that one of the hardest tasks in software development is naming things. After the last few days, I concur readily. At our last team meeting, our team, in a Machiavellian turn of events delegated the naming task to me.

Like any proper Bestower of Appellations, I procrastinated for a few days. Whereupon, the next order of business was to establish boundary conditions for the new name. Constrained creativity.

Our three naming criteria turned out to be:

1. Should have a Smooth Mouthfeel: The name should ideally be one word with one or two syllables at the most. Should be easy to use in everyday conversations and work planning.
2. Should be Irreverent: Our team culture is quite irreverent and some might say, we look up to a rather motley pantheon of role models. The name for the new “System” should reflect this flippancy. We do not need grandiloquent, high brow names with a lot of frippery.
3. But should have a bit of history: The history should not only be general macro history, but also preferably something that has a personal connection, an anecdote, a story.

For all the above reasons, names like Krakatoa, Tyrannosaurus and Lutra sumatrana were out of the question.

When he began implementing Python, Guido van Rossum was also reading the published scripts from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. Van Rossum thought he needed a name that was short, unique, and slightly mysterious, so he decided to call the language Python. Source

Finally, after countless minutes of deliberations (or actually only 10 minutes), The Bestower of Appellations has delivered: Project Wagtail it is.

“Wagtail” fits all our criteria perfectly.

1. The Wagtail phoneme does have a great bouquet with a full bodied, balanced mouthfeel.
2. The very word Wagtail is quite cheeky conjuring images of hip hop and others.
3. Wagtails in real life are small birds, passerines to be exact and were the first birds that got me into birding almost 10 years ago after I lost a dubious bet at identification. Moreover, Wagtails rather curiously, feature in many creation mythologies from around the world. In ancient Egypt and Greece, the yellow wagtail is believed to be the inspiration for the legendary “Phoenix”. In a meta-meta connection, the Phoenix represents “version 2.0” which is what Project Wagtail is to Accelerated. Version 2.0 here we come.

Some say that birding is a very zen, perceptive and mindful activity. This whole naming process has been nothing less.