As a writer, I’ve always been fascinated with names. How people get their names, what they mean, whether they like them or not. When I was twelve, I bought a baby name book and spent hours poring through the various sections trying to decide on names for characters in short stories I was working on. Is this florist more of a Veronica or a Jane? What signal would it give the reader that the main character has a name that is Germanic origin versus one from Morocco? I was particularly interested in how names traveled between different cultures, where Yonatan, Ivan,João, and John all came from the same root but have entirely different connotations and contexts.

As with most things in literature, there was never a right answer, but there were names that felt right, and names that didn’t. Many years later, when I started writing code, I assumed that naming conventions were rigid and that the RectangleBoxBuilderFactory class had existed in perpetuity through eternity.

A fantasy every developer has probably had at some point was, “What if you could entirely rewrite the current codebase you’re working on from scratch and pick the names and the logical mappings yourselves.”