Ask HN: How do you name your side projects?

[nxtrafalgar]

Any particular name scheme you adopt? Some way of generating project names?

Question inspired by mpj [1], who has some amusing ways of thinking of names for projects in his videos.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/mpjmevideos

[sharmi]

If you are looking for terms related to your core idea, please try NiftyWord.com[1]

Word discovery happens through related words (not restricted to synonyms), Associated/Collocated Words (words that go together), Words formed by prefixing, suffixing etc.

A handy feature could be the 'No of Syllables' Filter in the "Associated Words" section. This is mighty important as shorter names are more memorable.

Disclaimer: This is a service I built for my own necessity. It has been a great learning in shipping a product.

Love to have feedback/critique that can help niftyword.com grow.

[1] https://www.niftyword.com

[wingerlang]

I try to make it related to the functionality but not too direct.

In the scene where I develop, the discoverability is fairly bad so sometimes super-direct names works best.

There was a trend recently where people basically took any random "cool sounding latin word" because.. I don't know.

[itamarst]

Eliot (https://eliot.readthedocs.io) is a causal logging library: it tells a story. Named it after George Eliot, whose novel Middlemarch was in part an attempt at telling a story about a whole society.

Benefits:

* It's nice and short.

* It's relevant.

* I get to give introductory examples, and make inside jokes, based on a classic novel: https://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.0/introduction.html

[michaelflux]

Depends on the target demographic.

If the product needs to be something a bit more serious, e.g. fintech product, then take an existing term in the industry or something that clearly relates to it, and put some small spin on it, and a .co and you're ready to go.

If the people I'm targeting are younger, trendier etc, then take any loosely related word, check Google Translate to see if there are any cool sounding translations of it, find something that is short and catch, add a .io and you're good to go. :-)

[meagher]

At first, I pick a placeholder name. Really what ever comes into my head at first that's remotely associated (notes app ==> jot, etc). Could even just be a few characters. I revisit the name when I launch or prove to myself I am actually interested in working on it.

Naming is tough because it's easy to fall in love with the name and delude yourself about the actual project/progress. That's why it's one of the last things I do. (You could always go with Pied Piper though.)

[Bumerang]

I choose several words describing the project and look them up in a Latin dictionary. These are already a natural sounding words, so you may tweak them a little.

Pros: the domains are almost always available, sounds classy and trustworthy

Cons: it usually doesn't describe what you do just by the name of it.

[soulchild37]

Pokemon name because I like pokemon, you can see a compiled list of Github repo using pokemon name here : https://cheeaun.github.io/repokemon/

[pattle]

I just use a random name generator until I find one that's memorable.

The main benefits to this are there's a high chance a good domain will be available and you've got less chance down the line of running into copyright problems with an existing company / brand.

[spcelzrd]

I made a list of capital cities in the world and work through those backwards alphabetically.

[mattbgates]

As wingerlang said, "I try to make it related to the functionality."

I do this completely. Every. Time. But on the condition that the name is catchy and the domain is available. If I cannot come up with a good name for it or if the domain is not available, I forego the side project.

https://mypost.io

I think I wanted mypost.com originally or post.io but they were taken. After thinking about it, I figured: My Post IO (Input/Output) I spend a few minutes on GoDaddy and usually stop by this website to check domain availability across the board: http://www.domainsbot.com/

I might spend days thinking about the name of it.. if its just not catchy, I really can't continue. Just to name a few that I had come up with that are projects "in the works" and not yet available ... GoMenu, MyBiz, etc.

I used to be afraid to "share the idea" of my side projects with people, or Hacker News, but honestly, I'm pretty sure if you tell two developers to develop the same application.... this application will likely have the same functionality, but the UI and the approach of how it works will almost always be different.

So for example GoMenu is just an idea for restaurants to be able to create menus and put them up online. I brainstormed it and I was thinking, "Menu To Go? Go To Menu? MenuGo? GoMenu?" And I figured: People want a menu on the go and restaurants want to get discovered.. why not? Anyways, this concept is not anything at all out of the ordinary. A search will reveal to you that plenty of these types of websites already exist. So why would I even bother? Because I tend to focus on UI, user-friendliness, and affordability when developing apps.

Got to love that capitalism and competition! At least 3 billion people are currently using the Internet.. if you could get a few thousand to use your web app and pay for it, isn't that enough motivation for you do something? I'm not saying that anyone should build the next Facebook, because you can't. Sure, you actually can, but you cannot become as popular and used as Facebook. And that's totally okay! But you can certainly be the competition! Even if less than 1%.. lets just say, 0.1% of Facebook users decided they did not like Facebook anymore and decided to use your product because it offered something unique, wouldn't that be a win for you to become the competition?

I tend to buy up domain names and most of the time, I do use them, though I have had a bunch that just fell through the cracks, or honestly, I just thought the domain names were not as catchy as I had hoped. So when it comes to my side projects and naming them...

1. the functionality must be in the domain name

2. the domain name must be easy to remember

3. The extension of the domain name must be a fairly common one that is also easily memorable. (while .com is the one I usually try to get, I've been fond of some TLDs like .xyz, .io, .cc, .biz, .blog, .online, etc.)