Finding a Good Project Name

Finding a good project name always seem a complex task.

It’s often the first thing you have to do, before you can write any code, so it’s frustrating to waste time on this.

Generally, you try to brainstorm with several people until you get to a name that satisfies everyone, and then you still have to make sure the name is not taken by something else.

It can be:

• a project that has the same name (Remember Gnu Interactive Tools;?)
• a company (in this case you can have legal issues)
• a domain name. You can workaround that by choosing a different TLD, but then what if someone buys <yourproject>.<new-popular-tld>?

It’s a known fact that people are bad at naming things. It’s often said that it’s one of the hardest parts of computer science. There are tons of literature already about this on the web. Just type “naming things” in a search engine to see what I mean.

Here’s an example : The Ultimate Guide To Naming Your Thing

But in my opinion, there’s a much quicker and easy way.

Just find a random name generator: computers are very good at doing pseudo-random things :)

Take for instance unique-names.com

Here are a few project names that are available for free as my gift to you:

• imocrutch
• kliwak
• shylops

The best thing is you don’t even have to care about search engine optimization. Since these names do not exist, your website will always be the first. (A very good way to be the first at something is to be the only one racing …)

Hope this will help you not waste your time next time you start something new.

Cheers!

Notes:

• If you want to generate your own words, here’s a interesting post (in French): La machine à inventer des mots
• Apparently, some guy made a website for this that even checks for domain names: http://wordoid.com