There’s an old joke:
The two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
“Naming things” is especially hard.
Rich Hickey, in his seminal talk Simple Made Easy, discusses names and how they serve the dual role in software of giving something a stable identity while also providing insight into its current value or purpose.
Take this blog, for instance. I originally called it Wunsch Werks Dev Log, thinking it struck the right balance between “this is my company’s blog” and “I’m a tech guy. I like tech.” But it felt off—not quite right.
So I renamed it: /wunsch/log. It’s simpler, more in line with my style, and it nods to the *nix-style logs developers are familiar with—continuously monitored, chatty, and insightful.
Naming is never easy, but it’s worth getting right, even if it takes a few tries.