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Sometimes it pays to be boring. One of the hardest parts of using AWS is learning all their silly names for everything. I know it's tempting to be cute when nam

Sometimes it pays to be boring. One of the hardest parts of using AWS is learning all their silly names for everything. I know it's tempting to be cute when naming things, but everyone else wishes you would just be clear and descriptive. I've seen this play out at startups that love to name servers after galaxies or cartoon characters. It's all fine until your new employee onboarding guide comes with a massive memorization test before you can be productive. Yes, db-master and db-slave are way more boring names than Saturn and Uranus, but do everyone a favor and express your creativity somewhere else.

sokoloff 6y ago
I think they went through a middle phase of cutesy naming, but this seems to have subsided some (to the good). Simple Queuing Service, Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute Cloud, SimpleDB are names that very much make sense. Greengrass, Lightsail, not so much. EKS, Outpost, Ground Station, and Lake Formation are more toward the usefully descriptive side again, I think.
ggregoire 6y ago
Star Wars still seem to be the greatest source of inspiration for backend engineers when comes the time to find a name for a new microservice.
latencyloser 6y ago
I worked at a company that had names for all the conference and meeting rooms based on various science fiction names and other "nerdy" stuff instead of some sort of building-floor-room_number scheme. It was neat at first, but quickly became agonizing trying to remember what _building_ a conference room was in much less where in that building. It added an extra few minutes to every meeting for me where I had to either look it up on the internal wiki or go ask someone at the front desk where I was supposed to go or make sure at least one person nearby attending the meeting already knew where we were going. It took months to get the hang of for even the more routine rooms.

sokoloff 6y ago

I think they went through a middle phase of cutesy naming, but this seems to have subsided some (to the good). Simple Queuing Service, Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute Cloud, SimpleDB are names that very much make sense. Greengrass, Lightsail, not so much. EKS, Outpost, Ground Station, and Lake Formation are more toward the usefully descriptive side again, I think.

ggregoire 6y ago

Star Wars still seem to be the greatest source of inspiration for backend engineers when comes the time to find a name for a new microservice.

latencyloser 6y ago

I worked at a company that had names for all the conference and meeting rooms based on various science fiction names and other "nerdy" stuff instead of some sort of building-floor-room_number scheme. It was neat at first, but quickly became agonizing trying to remember what _building_ a conference room was in much less where in that building. It added an extra few minutes to every meeting for me where I had to either look it up on the internal wiki or go ask someone at the front desk where I was supposed to go or make sure at least one person nearby attending the meeting already knew where we were going. It took months to get the hang of for even the more routine rooms.