Your Projects Need Cool Titles

I’m named after my father, but if I were given a choice in the matter I’d be named Simon. That’s tangentially related to the point here: I’ve found that the easiest motivator I can give myself to working on X, be it a project, paper, or piece of art, is to name it something “cool.”

Instead of working on the implementation file for Homework 3, I work on Titania. Why is it named Titania? Because it sounds nice, I can make it so, and it gives me a reason to read a little Shakespeare. Instead of toiling away at writing LinkedList.cpp, Stack.cpp, or BinaryTree.cpp, I’m making ChainLink.cpp, LunchTray.cpp, and DualSapling.cpp. Does anybody use these files except for me? Nope! That’s where the freedom comes from.

The same principle goes into all my side projects. I could’ve named ELPath(os) something a bit more verbose, like SortingPathing. I could’ve named Melrady something like Song Stat Comparator. The repository for my namesake site is Cjanna, rather than the sensible Cjohanaja. All three choices I made make me feel happy to work on something, like I’m caring for a pet instead of some code.

Imagine waking up and thinking “Oh, I’ve gotta work on the Song Stat Comparator today.” Nah, it doesn’t have that spice to it. That’s what it all is, spice! It comes off as eccentric to others, particularly when I’m demonstrating some code, but it adds some nice energy to what others would find boring.

And honestly, I’m just copying the big guys. Naming your work something oddly overzealous seems to be the name of the game: Palantir is literally named after a Lord of the Rings character. Have you seen what Amazon names their AWS products? Athena, Braket, Cognito, and LightSail are just a few of them. Don’t those just sound cool? I’ve gotta be onto something here.

For now, barring personal projects, I’ve been rotating between planets, Greek gods, and Catholic saints.

This primarily applies to CS-related things, since the transcendent modern tech startup name aesthetic doesn’t fit as well heading a Technical Communications paper. And I can’t ‘re-invent’ Calculus, but if I could I’d name it Integratiometry.