What’s with this new fashion of using feminine names for tech products?
Imagine being a woman, working in an office, and hearing your first name in random contexts. I see how that could become annoying.
Ships are given female names too because, apparently, they used to be dedicated to goddesses. I do think even common female names sound more majestic to me than common male names for projects whether that's because of cultural tradition or because women are still abstract mysteries to me (jk).
Fwiw, Travis CI never bothered me despite its ubiquity when I got into software dev. It's not really "random contexts". The context of whether someone is talking about me or CI is actually quite clear. It's 1000x more confusing when someone else shares your name in the office.
My point is, I don’t recall seeing any tech product named “John”. We shouldn’t be using first names for random products regardless of gender. People somehow assume that female first names are somehow better suited as names for some software product, than male names.
It’s new in the sense that I keep noticing them more often lately.