[joemi]

I mostly use shortened versions of my real name. For instance, here it's my first name and the first two letters of my last name. Other places it's my first name and the first 1 letter of my last name. I prefer a short username (jealous of rms and esr and others who "claimed" their initials successfully), so I try to use these two short variations the most. But sometimes they're both already taken or they're too short for the service I'm signing up to, so I might add a few more letters from my last name, or use the first 1 letter from my first name and my entire last name. I'm sure people could figure out who I am, with varying degrees of effort depending on how much I've shared on the site and how long I had to make my username, but at the same time I try to avoid using my name in full without any shortening, to at least make it harder for the laziest bad actors. There are a few niche places (such as boardgamegeek) where I don't mind my full name being out there, because the community is largely pretty focused on a single subject and fairly non-problematic (compared to many other places, including hn).

For the evolution of how I arrived at this: I started BBSing as a teenager in the 90s, and there pretty much everyone used handles instead of real names. So for a while I used a particular handle, until I decided I was embarrassed of the name, so I chose another. Eventually in the late 90s as email (and the internet in general) became a lot more common I was embarrassed a bit when I'd give my <handle>@juno(or wherever).com email address out to people, so I set up an email with my real name. Then I figured since I was already providing an email with my real name when signing up for places, I might as well use my real name for account names. But, like I said before, I prefer a short username, but someone was already using my first,middle,last initials that way, so I started using "joem" as many places as I could, which was easy at first, but became much harder as time went on and I had to expand to my current system noted above.