Names are important. Apparently it is also difficult to chose names for things.
This is very much evident for software engineering in the many horror stories that are being peddled on blogs and forums about legendary badly named code.
So much so that I have experienced many a discussion about naming or improving the practice of naming things within an organization.
While there is good cause in discussing about how to name things I feel we often miss the opportunity to talk about whether we actually have to give names to everything.
Often, a certain system will have a way of naming things and then a secondary
way to give these things a nicer name. These systems often exist for a good
reason. Usually UX related. I for example much prefer to chat with user Judy
instead of 68f9f267-c7c2-445a-8d41-963e2a239822. As long as one is on a
formal domain though, source code, having this sort of feature only will lead
to unnecessary complexity.
Take github actions for an example. They allow you to name pretty much every level on the workflows yml structure. In each case what on the surface sounds like a UX improvement, hey nice names for looking at, ends up introducing redirection where you really do not want it. All of a sudden questions arise about which job this was or which task, etc. Sure, that thing that ran now has a nice human readable title with an emoji next to it but while you initially could directly understand which step/job/workflow it was, now you have to do a fulltext search on your repository to find out.
So for the sake of your own sanity, think twice about going all in with that nice names strategy
This rant was mainly triggered by seeing too many projects waste way to much time by giving nice names to things that shouldn't have them.
