Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

We had this debate at my company and the end result was a ban on “random” service names.

So we ended up with “auth service” instead of something like “Galactus”. The problem of course is that “auth service” isn’t searchable in our monorepo and it was a nightmare to find or discuss any info or references to the service itself. Now imagine if docker was called “container manager”. Good luck googling that and disentangling it from all the search results.

The value of a name doesn’t come from it being self-explanatory but rather from it being a pseudo-unique identifier. The small cognitive tax of remembering it serves as a shared bookmark between people that you can refer to when discussing or speaking to others about it - whether we’re talking about docker, Linux, or another person.

It's especially fun once the service is superseded. Guess which one of these services handles MAC address allocation and storage: macaddr_db or atom-util?

"There's a repo called Beyonder. That's got to be what came after Galactus."