A long-standing debate between me and a peer at work has been how we should name services. His position was always that services should be named something descriptive, so that you can infer from the name what it does. My position is that the name should definitely not be descriptive, but should be something cute and wholly disconnected from the purpose. And I think this applies more broadly to projects and companies, too.

Nicholas’ reason for cute names winning comes down to the inevitably of change in a service/project’s function and the difficulty in renaming things. I hadn’t thought of that argument, but I already agreed with the premise.

We also apply this thinking to podcast episode names, which can be a mixed bag because descriptive titles certainly help when it comes to discovery. As Adam and I discussed on our recent State of the “log” episode, if you see use a descriptive title, it’s most likely because we couldn’t think of a good cute/interesting one.

But that’s just our opinion about episode naming. What do you prefer?