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Be Sharps Naming

We need a name that's witty at first, but less funny every time you hear it.

I have a real soft-spot for softly meaningful names for servers, usually also pop-culture references.

I also, strongly, discourage clever names at work.

We have a long-standing “no clever names” policy, called the “Be Sharps” policy, because at my previous job they allowed unchecked proliferation of clever developer names for things and it became a problem.

After a while, you get mad at a server called dryad that runs all of your loggers. Sure, it’s cute, but do you know what it could have been? It could have been useful and descriptive.

You could have named that server log_server_01 and saved everybody a bunch of time looking up what each server does.

Once every service and tool has a name like this, you introduce the problem that new folk have to spend weeks learning the too-clever-by-half ha-ha naming rules behind everything at your company.

Even worse, if you have a lot of services like this - well, I also discourage wild microservice proliferation, and a big part of both the “clever names” restriction and the “microservices” restriction is because I have actually lived this sketch, and it is not pretty:

So galactus won’t be able to find our new birthday boy provider, which means wingman won’t know how to talk to anybody, which means I won’t be able to find true love and I’ll die alone.

Every time a creatively named variable comes down the pipeline, I have to tap the sign - but at home, the gloves come off.

Letting The Gremlin Free At Home, Where it Belongs

So, “Scratch” is the little box running in my house, and “Sovereign” is the dirt-cheap gateway VPS running on CanHost pointed at it.

  • sovereign, obviously, because it’s running in Canada
  • sovereign, because I love The Venture Bros, and the sovereign was a shadowy figure that ran the Guild of Calamitous Intent but nobody knew who it really was and then eventually it turned out it was David Bowie - so, an okay pick for a server who’s purpose it is to be the front of a shadowy secret society:

I’m connecting to that from my new linux computer, asceticbot, which is named that because

  • Originally the windows computer was named hedonismbot because I wildly overprovisioned it with a threadripper and 256GB of RAM, and I apologize for nothing.
  • But 5-6 years later, the threadripper is starting to show its age, windows is starting to suck, and instead of upgrading I’m choosing the more efficient path: moving to linux and embracing the life of a cold, lonely Linux pervert. Thus, the opposite of hedonismbot, asceticbot.

Other computers of note as of recent:

  • The soon-to-be-decommissioned girlboss is my nginx load balancer, as it replaced gatekeep, the first nginx load balancer - if I launched another one it would of course be gaslight. (ref. Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss)
  • marquee is just my favorite HTML tag
  • Tiff’s old computer was beast because it was huge, and she was the beauty I built it for.
  • Her current computer is archiebee, because she explicitly requested RGB lighting elements in its design.
  • My laptop is thermidor because I bought it in november and it runs pretty hot.
  • The NAS is stacks because that’s the name of the God Of Data Storage from my elaborate personal mythology.
  • The phone is fourteen because it’s a OnePlus 13

this is very satisfying

But wouldn’t it be impossibly frustrating if you had to work with me? Think about it.