Naming things
[Ed: I've been on holiday and both ends of it have been sandwiched with more work than my team can handle - they got 4 websites live last week alone! I'm slowly clawing my workload back down - yesterday I built a functional equivalent of the Wufoo form builder. Anyway - back to your scheduled program]
One massive advantage of my current job is that I work two desk’s down from a team of copy writers. Over the last couple of years I’ve come to realise what an asset this is. There’s a famous quote along the lines that there are only two unsolved problems in computer science. Cache invalidation and naming things.
Often when I’m working on a feature I get stuck with what to call a class, interface, feature, UI element etc. Previously when this happened I’d talk it through with another dev/project manager/product owner. Sometimes this helps and they’re able to provide just the word your looking for. Other times it doesn’t.
About a year ago - I realised that the copy writers whole job is finding words to fit concepts that other people describe.
Now I just walk 10 steps and describe the type of word (phrase/whatever) I’m looking for and they start giving me alternatives. I pick one I’m happy with and I’m on my way.
e.g. Yesterday - I needed to describe an attribute of a Question in this form builder thing (the wufoo like beast mentioned above). The properties of this type of question are that there is a correct answer/s. If you don’t answer the question correctly - then “something” happens. I was flailing around trying to find a succinct way of describing this in my model (IsFailableQuestion, PassFail etc.. ) after an unsuccessful conversation with another developer and the product manager - I asked one of the copywriters and they said: ummm… killer question?Perfect!
(If this seems like a strange naming choice then it’s because of the specifics of the domain that this makes sense - no - no one ever dies).
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