My Naming Scheme
Today I read my friend Temmie’s blog post on her schemes for picking names for stuff. Reading her naming convention has motivated me to share one of my own naming conventions.
Carbohydrates⌗
Summary⌗
| Item | Name |
|---|---|
| Laptop 1 | starch |
| Laptop 1 (again) | amylose |
| Laptop 2 | glycogen |
| Phone | galactose |
| iPad | fructose |
Story⌗
It all started back in late 2018 when I was trying to learn Arch Linux. As I was learning the manual install process of Arch, a Discord user called Rosa suggested to me that I should call my system “starch linux”. I liked the name so much, that when I finally gathered the courage to install Arch on actual hardware (my laptop), I set my system’s hostname to “starch”.
From 2018 until mid-2020, that was what my laptop’s hostname was. Due to some inexplicable event (I actually don’t remember why), I decided to pick a new hostname for my laptop. I decided to go along with the theme of my last hostname and used “amylose”.
In 2021, I got a new laptop. Once again, I installed Arch on it. Once again, I had to give my system a hostname. This time, I went with the hostname “glycogen”.
By this point, I was quite committed to the act of naming my laptop after various carbohydrates. This gradually extended to all of my electronics. I named my phone galactose and my iPad fructose.
Pet names versus cattle names⌗
Compare my naming convention with the naming convention that AWS uses for its EC2 instances. AWS’s naming convention, although useful and straightforward, doesn’t imbue any sense of personality. My naming convention makes my devices seem almost cute in comparison.
This sort of represents how computers can either be pets or cattle. To AWS, EC2 instances are cattle, they are practically treated the same as each other. To me, my personal devices are pets, each one is different and each one serves a particular purpose for me. That’s why I give them nice names.
Should I adopt a naming convention?⌗
There are possibly actual benefits to doing this, although I haven’t looked into if science backs this up. Personally, I’ve found that assigning names to things gives them more sentimental value, which leads me to take better care of them. You should try it. If nothing else, it’s a bit of fun!