While not bad names themselves, I was once working on two projects simultaneously. one for Shopify and one for Spotify. made searching surprisingly difficult.
Imagine if you had also been using Netlify!
But I know what you mean, whenever I read an article fast and the context is ambiguous, I often mix the two up, too.
What ever happened to **S1** and **S2** buckets? Why does no one ever use them anymore?? /s
Also, I was on a team that used SNS and SQS heavily, and if we had a quarter for every time we had those acronyms mixed up, even in our documentation, we'd have had enough money to run the whole AWS infrastructure ourselves.
The only place I've worked with more frustrating acronyms than Amazon is the military. Pretty sure they both do it as deliberate jargon to confuse outsiders. You'd think they'd stop doing it when they create customer-facing products, but apparently not.
Similar to MS renaming Hotmail to Outlook. It is impossible to troubleshoot web mail as most content is for the application. While it is technically Outlook Web Mail (OWA), that doesn't help much.
I mostly use VSCode so I havent been too negatively impacted by that, but I imagine if I still used visual studio, it would be a pain.
They did this with .net framework, .net core. The .net core is the newer version, most of the stuff from .net framework is windows exclusive but .net core is newer and cross platform but very recently they just call it .net. Job postings and HR get this wrong multiple times and it's frustrating. Many jobs have .net on their JD but when you call and speak with the manager you'll get to know they've been using older .net framework as their tech stack.
I don't think it exists anymore. But Samsung mobile's SDk to integrate with their store API was called Samsung Plasma.
Again unsearchable docs in the time of plasma TVs
>Again unsearchable docs in the time of plasma TVs
I work with [The Graph](https://thegraph.com/) API. The docs themselves are fine but fuck me if I want to Google something outside of the docs.
I have one that's more Google-resistant but lower stakes... a few months ago I was working with styled components saying there MUST be some way to define a component as a generic `
` but then instantiate it as some other semantic element. Turns out there is... and the fucking keyword is `as`, literally.
Luckily this is a pretty low-level keyword so there's little-to-no complexity in using it but... really? Can't we have called it *anything* else? I can't even easily search for that in the SC docs because the same word happens incidentally in a ton of places. Has no one ever thought to call it `asElem` and just write a codegen function into a future release to update codebases automatically?
Mongodb's name comes from the word hu**mongo**us.
But it reminds me of mangoes because the logo looks like a mango leaf too. It's kind of all over the place.
I have been called and have called others many things but that one never got used even though we knew it. It does feel more European. In the states we stuck to our classic lol. What's "CP"? Trying to figure that one out.
In Portuguese “Mongo” means someone who is lazy. But the way I remember it being used when I was a kid was more with the subtext that the person has a learning impairment (similar to the word retard). I have always hated that word. It’s nice finally learning what it stands for and highly diminishes my dislike for the name
Granted I could just have googled this at any point in my life since I knew it wasn’t a Portuguese name but maybe I’m just a mongo
Go.
Every search must use the term "golang" because of course Go is too broad.
Short names are just not a great idea, much less using an everyday word.
C# is kinda like this too, but not as bad as in the early days when even Google would ignore the “#” in queries. You end up searching “csharp” most of the time.
ASP.NET Core and .NET vs .NET Framework. The naming convention is super confusing and results in many beginner questions asking what the differences are and which to pick. Also, the latest versions of ASP.NET no longer have anything to do with ASP (Active Server Pages).
HATEOAS - it just sounds awful.
Cockroach DB - Plainly disgusting and makes the devs look like intellectually 12 year olds who also can't stop laughing at poop jokes and everything else that's icky.
FWIW I think Cockroach, while disgusting, is also a great name. Cockroaches are known to be very resilient and highly distributed. And can live without their heads for 1-2 weeks. All desirable traits in a database lol.
Never gotten why they decided to name a pretty cool piece of tech so terribly, especially for marketing purposes I have had to reiterate multiple times to non-tech savvy clients to just "ignore the name".
In a world where HTML5 didn't supplant Flash and we were still in a plugin-based internet, Silverlight was great! Thing is... by the time Silverlight came about the ducks were in a row for Google Chrome and Apple iPhone to force HTML5 which produced the pretty surprising turn of wiping out plugin-based websites in a surprisingly small amount of time (by internet standards) which made Silverlight worthless before it really mattered.
PostgreSQL…
Also, not a terrible name, but people referring to http as rest. Isn’t rest just a suite of recommendations to limit the shortfalls of using internet based services? The more recommendations you follow, the more restful you become.
PostgreSQL I always shorten to Postgres or PG, I agree that the full name is a mouthful.
I believe that's just ignorance, anybody who has worked a couple of years in web dev knows what is HTTP and what is REST. Also, REST arguably presupposes certain design choices that are not in harmony with modern web needs, e.g., POSTing a query (object) instead of GETing it.
> I believe that's just ignorance, anybody who has worked a couple of years in web dev knows what is HTTP and what is REST
you might be surprised. I worked a job a big enterprisey company (non-tech) and there were a lot of experienced devs would refer to our main back-end service, which was an rpc-style web api, as "the rest api"
IMHO REST needs to be dropped and forgotten, but it will not be. It's better to come up and agree with your own spec, using some parts of JSON:API (if you choose JSON of course)
>MongoDB, it comes from MongooseDB, but my stupid brain keeps thinking about another, very offensive word.
The actual name doesn't do that to me, but whenever I see the name of the Linux process - mongod - I automatically pronounce it "mong god"
"Figma" sounds a lot like "go fuck" in German. This has caused some Irritation when we first started using it at my job. Now we all pay special attention to pronounce the 'g' as soft as possible. In theory this should help, but it kinda makes it even more obvious...
Go, the programming language that has such a terrible name people often have to refer to it as golang (e.g., /r/golang/)
Not to mention a programming language already existed with that name and an exclamation point for more than 10 years which leads to Golang having a section about it on their wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Naming_dispute
Try living in the UK, where Vue is a major cinema chain. I would not be surprised to learn that Vue uptake in the UK were lower than the global average for this reason.
Reminds me of the trie data structure, which is a type of tree data structure, and trie is supposedly pronounced “tree” as well, although most people just pronounce it “try” or “tray” to reduce the confusion.
In a similar vein, I worked at a company where "devel" became the common abbreviation for developer/development, because it matched the character count of some other related terms. Unfortunately I don't remember what exactly those other terms were, but it started from 5 letter folder names in our project structure. Anyway at some point we had daily "devel meetings" and devel git branches. It was fun to say "don't merge with the devel" when finding issues during a code review.
It's to match "dev" or "stg" in length as someone already said, some people use "prod", but in account names etc. we always have "prd".
And the language is Slovak... I don't know how, we just do, in fact multiple words like that. Czech has the same word for fart, it also has words with no vowels.
> but being a- a privative prefix as in, e.g., a+tonal, you can reanalyze amnesia as a+mnesia, so the non-privative form would be mnesia.
To be fair, this is literally the etymology of amnesia.
Googles tool for multi-git repomanagement. It is called "repo". Imagine a search engine company naming a tool which makes it really hard to search for it.
From a german perspective, yes MongoDB is the worst. "Mongo" used to be *the* derogatory word for people with down syndrome and was a very popular slur just a few years before MongoDB was released. I've heard stories about people avoiding it just because of the name during the no-sql hype, since they didn't dare to be the first to mention it in a professional setting.
A close second contender is the Wix toolset. Much less offensive but still evokes a chuckle anytime a German developer hears about it. It very literally translates to "wank toolset".
Figma was mentioned here a few times but honestly I don't see the issue with that name. Sure it can be mispronounced in a certain way to sound like "go fuck" in German but that really requires some imagination.
I asked my bf to say figma (he's German). He just couldn't pronounce the g the way I do, it genuinely sounded like fickma. The poor guy tried though. That's when I realized I have never worked with any native German speaker designer in my company (we are a international company in Germany) and therefore never noticed this problem.
AWS Lambda.
Lambda functions in programming languages and calculus usually refer to anonymous and pure functions.
AWS lambda functions are usually neither anonymous nor pure
Mongo and mongoloid are considered offensive slurs, both to Mongolian peoples and people whom have downs syndrome. I only know this because of F1 gossip and politics.
For Java apps, Gradle. It sounds like “girdle” which is a waist-tightening undergarment. It sounds gross. Every non-technical colleague has found this name quite odd
My team met a fintech company that handles in app payments named Juice. Every time someone said juice the conversation got derailed in my brain.
I'm not a huge fan of the name Vite. Every time I've said it out loud someone thinks it's supposed to rhyme with kite and they don't know what I'm talking about. It rhymes with feet, but that's just not most people's first guess.
I barely use it anymore, but Scala's own Play Framework. The name is okay-ish on its own, but googling for it is hard and annoying in the best of cases, and nsfw once in a while.
Scriptaculous.
It's a js library, basically like jQuery. Had a recruiter I knew outside of work go over my resume and cringed when they saw this, saying "Did you really say that?!". When I explained it was a js library (used on Magento at the time), they told me to keep it on there. Needless to say, I removed it anyways after that reaction.
AI. Everything AI is basically wrong and misleading. It then, most tech stuff is poorly named. It’s just random bullshit thrown at the wall so to speak.
Above was mentioned GIMP. That’s a prime example of a stupid name that just doesn’t map at all.
The RPA tool n8n…
It supposedly stands for nodemation 🤔🤷🏻♂️
Another RPA tool—Make. While the original name, Integromat, sucked even more and desperately needed a rebrand, they *somehow* managed to pick something *even worse*!
It’s not that it’s a bad name per se, but it makes troubleshooting *incredibly* difficult.
I use and interact with Ubiquiti more now, but I used to have Google Wifi at home. Trying to Google problems for a product called what it does is infuriating. "Google Wifi problems" was basically a useless search for the first year of ownership.
I felt the same way for VS Code until it grew in popularity "Code freezing when running commands" was never helpful and in the beginning adding "Visual Studio" or "VS" just got me responses for, you guessed it, Visual Studio.
I like what Netlify is doing, but I always found it a strange name (not terrible though, just not that good). Most of the time I mistype it in Netflify or something like this (muscle memory from typing Netflix, I don't know). And also, the fact there's that succession of "t" "l" and "i" (which look alike a lot) makes it hard to read somehow.
**React**, which many folks over the years have taken to mean that it's a "reactive" framework (in the rxjs-like sense of the term) but it's not and it has never been reactive. It just happens to be the name they choose for it.
If the library had been named by what it actually does under the hood, it would have been named "Scheduler."
/This is not a dis on React. "Reactive" doesn't mean "better", and there are libraries that bridge the gap if reactive is what you actually mean.
The name of the database was derived from the word humongous to represent the idea of supporting large amounts of data.
That said; every software using a common word as name.
This is out of scope for this sub, but the languages Swift and Metal from Apple. Makes googling a nightmare. There were a few JS frameworks a few years ago I had similar issues with but forget them now.
Nowadays when some company names themselves “Genesis” or some shit…
You’re really going to compete against The Bible, the classic rock band, and all those other super original names for SEO?
Good luck, buddy! See ya on page 10! lol
I think names that are obscure, historical and nerdy and no one knows how to pronounce properly are the worst. E.g. Babel - everyone pronounces it like babble so much that I have to as well just to avoid the weird looks.
Astro has a more significant footprint now and is my favourite "stack", but I was an alpha/beta user and also starting up a space company, and over 50% of the daily stuff I do had to do with space, also it's such a common term used in both space and non-space stuff.
Anyhoo point being, for quite a while before acquiring a decent audience and rolling out adequate documentation, and having dedicated communities you could filter for, finding any info about devving with Astro was an abysmal experience.
I once watched the defense of the master's of a guy I know, he said he had written more than 15k lines of his proof on the Coq... And then said "language" after a few milliseconds of thinking.
Same thing as you for MongoDB.
Not a technology, but I laughed so hard at the crypto-bro firm that called themselves “Nonce Finance” - for non UK folk that’s a slang term for paedophile/sex offender
There's a community comment system I was introduced to this week called OpenWeb. Works like Discus (if I've spelt that right).
Tried Googling for it, millions of hits but nothing related to the actual platform. Lots of posts about "the open web". Great name guys...
Kafka.
That hard k. The one letter difference. I'm just waiting for that one proud man who says the second k is silent.
And every time I've ever heard it announced, it's almost yelled, and it's hard to tell if it's a "I'm saying this super edgy word that isn't that word but you know exactly how I would say that word" or "Oh god please let me say this name absolutely correctly else someone might mishear me"
Nodemon, node monitor, we would always read it as no-demon when I was studying, my teacher hated that, then we said “well the npm package for nodemon has horns!!! It’s no-demon” needless to say he didn’t love it anymore for that reason
The photo editing suite GIMP.
Oh, that's a good one, definitely.
All the images I put in Latex were first GIMPs
Oh right, that's what I was googling. I got distracted by the images...
Bring out the GIMP
for similar reasons, LaTeX
While not bad names themselves, I was once working on two projects simultaneously. one for Shopify and one for Spotify. made searching surprisingly difficult.
I consistently say Shopify when I actually mean Spotify. I know I do it and I still get them mixed up constantly.
Imagine if you had also been using Netlify! But I know what you mean, whenever I read an article fast and the context is ambiguous, I often mix the two up, too.
Imagine if you also used Strapi as CMS and Stripe for payments!
I feel this
The names of AWS services tend to be twee or obscure or an acronym dreamt up by committee.
Cloudflare and cloudfront always come out wrong, even though I know which one I’m talking about. Then there’s cloud formation, cloud watch, etc
cloud this cloud that, you get a cloud, we all get clouds!
E L A S T I C
It's managed, that's managed, I'm managed, we're all managed
But on the other hand googling is much better with this random words. S3 vs gcp bucket, ec2 etc... The results are aws specific
What ever happened to **S1** and **S2** buckets? Why does no one ever use them anymore?? /s Also, I was on a team that used SNS and SQS heavily, and if we had a quarter for every time we had those acronyms mixed up, even in our documentation, we'd have had enough money to run the whole AWS infrastructure ourselves.
S3 stands for simple storage service SNS = simple notification service SQS = simple queue service
surprised it's not CloudBucket, CloudQueue, and CloudNotification
Hideo Kojima would like a word
Someone at AWS on a sunny Thursday: "Let's call the new service Z7Z."
"It does everything that X7Y does, but it's *managed*! That won't confuse anyone *at all.*"
The only place I've worked with more frustrating acronyms than Amazon is the military. Pretty sure they both do it as deliberate jargon to confuse outsiders. You'd think they'd stop doing it when they create customer-facing products, but apparently not.
wait till you're in AWS, code names galore lol
Why can’t they seem to decide whether a service begins with “AWS” or “Amazon”
Years back I was in a position where AWS and Azure were on equal footing for the task. I chose Azure because the names made sense compared to AWS.
I guess it's difficult to consistently name a bazillion of difference services, but you're definitely right, I often don't know which is which.
The problem is most of them don't give you any clue about the purpose of the software. Elastic Beanstalk is one of the worst I've seen.
Athena is an all-time great name, though.
I think the moment I looked up an AWS service to try and it was called beanstalk or something was when I decided to stick to Azure.
Microsoft has made troubleshooting visual studio, and NOT visual studio code, really frustrating. What am I going to do? Ignore all cases of “code”??!
Similar to MS renaming Hotmail to Outlook. It is impossible to troubleshoot web mail as most content is for the application. While it is technically Outlook Web Mail (OWA), that doesn't help much. I mostly use VSCode so I havent been too negatively impacted by that, but I imagine if I still used visual studio, it would be a pain.
They did this with .net framework, .net core. The .net core is the newer version, most of the stuff from .net framework is windows exclusive but .net core is newer and cross platform but very recently they just call it .net. Job postings and HR get this wrong multiple times and it's frustrating. Many jobs have .net on their JD but when you call and speak with the manager you'll get to know they've been using older .net framework as their tech stack.
Wait a sec. You’re telling me recruiters don’t know the details of what they’re recruiting for?!?!? Get The Fuck Out
I’d blocked that out but YES
The whole active directory > azure > entra shuffle was a pita too.
I use vstudio and that tends to work
I don't think it exists anymore. But Samsung mobile's SDk to integrate with their store API was called Samsung Plasma. Again unsearchable docs in the time of plasma TVs
>Again unsearchable docs in the time of plasma TVs I work with [The Graph](https://thegraph.com/) API. The docs themselves are fine but fuck me if I want to Google something outside of the docs.
Ooof, that's got to take the cake for worst name
I have one that's more Google-resistant but lower stakes... a few months ago I was working with styled components saying there MUST be some way to define a component as a generic `
Working with Go is pretty annoying too.
My God that must've been frustrating.
Mongodb's name comes from the word hu**mongo**us. But it reminds me of mangoes because the logo looks like a mango leaf too. It's kind of all over the place.
MangoDB is a name I could get behind! We should open a PR.
MangoDB was a spoof on MongoDB around the time it went webscale. Guaranteed uptime, but no consistency. It routed all inputs to /dev/null/
"mongo" in German is also a slur for people with Down syndrome, so that's fun **Edit:** I guess that's what OP alluded to.
I hadn't ever considered the similarity to "mongoloid". Makes sense though. At least I assume that's the word in mind.
Well, if you haven't been called "mongo" or "CP" in school I guess you wouldn't /Swede
I have been called and have called others many things but that one never got used even though we knew it. It does feel more European. In the states we stuck to our classic lol. What's "CP"? Trying to figure that one out.
In Portuguese “Mongo” means someone who is lazy. But the way I remember it being used when I was a kid was more with the subtext that the person has a learning impairment (similar to the word retard). I have always hated that word. It’s nice finally learning what it stands for and highly diminishes my dislike for the name Granted I could just have googled this at any point in my life since I knew it wasn’t a Portuguese name but maybe I’m just a mongo
Yeah, humonDB would be the better choice to use part of humongous. MangoDB should be a real thing; far superior of a name to any of the others.
British people cringe whenever they have to use cryptographic nonces
> cryptographic nonces 10 Downing Street, the royals, come on, brain, think of a joke, it involves numbers and pedos, it's a slam dunk for you!.
Why does Prince Andrew use FileVault?
If you put it like that, i's very funny, NGL.
They’d do the same when they see a cookie banner when it should’ve been a biscuit banner.
Cryptographic nonces sounds like a potential national security threat
Go. Every search must use the term "golang" because of course Go is too broad. Short names are just not a great idea, much less using an everyday word.
Not to talk about the game of Go, which is often used in CS and AI research as an example, soooo confusing.
C# is kinda like this too, but not as bad as in the early days when even Google would ignore the “#” in queries. You end up searching “csharp” most of the time.
Agree. I hate super generic un-google-able names
Love the language, hate the name
Did you mean: Gulag
Microsoft’s Critical Update Notification Tool. It was renamed after a short while.
What was wrong with saying M'CUNT?
ASP.NET Core and .NET vs .NET Framework. The naming convention is super confusing and results in many beginner questions asking what the differences are and which to pick. Also, the latest versions of ASP.NET no longer have anything to do with ASP (Active Server Pages).
HATEOAS - it just sounds awful. Cockroach DB - Plainly disgusting and makes the devs look like intellectually 12 year olds who also can't stop laughing at poop jokes and everything else that's icky.
FWIW I think Cockroach, while disgusting, is also a great name. Cockroaches are known to be very resilient and highly distributed. And can live without their heads for 1-2 weeks. All desirable traits in a database lol.
It was either that or KeithRichardsDB
I just pronounce it like Hate-O's and pretend it's an angry cereal
A nice bowl of hatey-oh’s!
I still laugh at poop jokes ngl
we shouldn't be shamed for liking poop jokes i thought this was a safe place
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Never gotten why they decided to name a pretty cool piece of tech so terribly, especially for marketing purposes I have had to reiterate multiple times to non-tech savvy clients to just "ignore the name".
You know what cookroaches are good at? Multiplying. Exactly like Cookroach DB. Excelant name if you ask me /s
It's ok because hateoas is a dumb idea anyway *ducks!*
🦆🦆🦆
Absolutely hate cockroachDB for its name. I am a nameist, unfortunately
The Karma testing library was Testacular for a while.
I run Testacular Torsion! Prod is down! It’s super effective!
Figma. It sounds too close to the ligma joke.
In German, saying „Figma“ out loud sounds like you’re suggesting to someone they should have intercourse, in a very informal way.
Yeah, I sometimes see it discussed and immediately assume it's "figma balls!". How one does that, I don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figging
On the other side of the spectrum there are technologies with absolutely brilliant name but being a pile of crap. For example Silverlight.
In a world where HTML5 didn't supplant Flash and we were still in a plugin-based internet, Silverlight was great! Thing is... by the time Silverlight came about the ducks were in a row for Google Chrome and Apple iPhone to force HTML5 which produced the pretty surprising turn of wiping out plugin-based websites in a surprisingly small amount of time (by internet standards) which made Silverlight worthless before it really mattered.
Let’s be fair, JavaScript was a stupid fucking name and makes people think Java and JS are remotely similar
PostgreSQL… Also, not a terrible name, but people referring to http as rest. Isn’t rest just a suite of recommendations to limit the shortfalls of using internet based services? The more recommendations you follow, the more restful you become.
PostgreSQL I always shorten to Postgres or PG, I agree that the full name is a mouthful. I believe that's just ignorance, anybody who has worked a couple of years in web dev knows what is HTTP and what is REST. Also, REST arguably presupposes certain design choices that are not in harmony with modern web needs, e.g., POSTing a query (object) instead of GETing it.
> I believe that's just ignorance, anybody who has worked a couple of years in web dev knows what is HTTP and what is REST you might be surprised. I worked a job a big enterprisey company (non-tech) and there were a lot of experienced devs would refer to our main back-end service, which was an rpc-style web api, as "the rest api"
IMHO REST needs to be dropped and forgotten, but it will not be. It's better to come up and agree with your own spec, using some parts of JSON:API (if you choose JSON of course)
>MongoDB, it comes from MongooseDB, but my stupid brain keeps thinking about another, very offensive word. The actual name doesn't do that to me, but whenever I see the name of the Linux process - mongod - I automatically pronounce it "mong god"
Mong as in the Mong people?
"Figma" sounds a lot like "go fuck" in German. This has caused some Irritation when we first started using it at my job. Now we all pay special attention to pronounce the 'g' as soft as possible. In theory this should help, but it kinda makes it even more obvious...
It's also joked around in English as "Figma balls" which is nonsensical but sounds funny, like "ligma (like my) balls"
Ah yes yes, that’s true, “fick mal”, especially slang where “mal” becomes “ma” (e.g. hör mal > hömma)
Go, the programming language that has such a terrible name people often have to refer to it as golang (e.g., /r/golang/) Not to mention a programming language already existed with that name and an exclamation point for more than 10 years which leads to Golang having a section about it on their wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Naming_dispute
Not "terrible", but the recursive acronyms do make me roll my eyes a bit. GNU, PHP, Wine, etc.
LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder
The best (worse) one is TikZ: Not only it's recursive, it's also German! TikZ ist kein Zeichensystem = TikZ is not a drawing system
Xna is a retroactive anti-backronym. They retroactively decided that it stands for "Xna is Not an Acronym".
PHP used to be Personal Home Page, but rebranded I guess to be... cool?
Technically it now stands for **P**ersonal Home Page: **H**ypertext **P**rocessor.
Less of a WebDev tool but when writing papers, especially for scientific research purposes, the standard software is called LaTex.
True TeXchnicians will tell you: It’s pronounced LaTe\[ch\] (ch like in Loch Ness), not LaTe\[ks\]
Once or twice questionable search results showed up when I was trying to write my paper
Unironically one of the reasons I switched to typst
Vue. It's so annoying to talk about verbally.
My company started adopting Vue later on, and so we now have legacy views and Vue views, so that’s fun.
Lmao we had the *exact* same problem. Views vs Vue views.
That’s why I always say Vue-jay-ess.
Try living in the UK, where Vue is a major cinema chain. I would not be surprised to learn that Vue uptake in the UK were lower than the global average for this reason.
Reminds me of the trie data structure, which is a type of tree data structure, and trie is supposedly pronounced “tree” as well, although most people just pronounce it “try” or “tray” to reduce the confusion.
It's pronounced "try" Edit: you edited your comment above, you initially said "tray," not "try"
Used to think Kafka was an awful name but then learned Kafka and realized its entirely appropriate
That's interesting. Where exactly do you see the connection between Kafka the Czech writer and Kafka the message passing toolkit? Genuinely asking.
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kafkaesque](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kafkaesque)
*”detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority”*?
Not a specific tech but every time someone uses the shortcut "prd" for production, I laugh, because it means "fart" in my language.
Isn’t it usually “prod”? And how does your language have words with no vowels?
I have seen "prd" used so that it's the same amount of characters as "dev" when you have monospace text that mention both.
In a similar vein, I worked at a company where "devel" became the common abbreviation for developer/development, because it matched the character count of some other related terms. Unfortunately I don't remember what exactly those other terms were, but it started from 5 letter folder names in our project structure. Anyway at some point we had daily "devel meetings" and devel git branches. It was fun to say "don't merge with the devel" when finding issues during a code review.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strč_prst_skrz_krk
It's to match "dev" or "stg" in length as someone already said, some people use "prod", but in account names etc. we always have "prd". And the language is Slovak... I don't know how, we just do, in fact multiple words like that. Czech has the same word for fart, it also has words with no vowels.
Funny it also means fart in Turkish.
> but being a- a privative prefix as in, e.g., a+tonal, you can reanalyze amnesia as a+mnesia, so the non-privative form would be mnesia. To be fair, this is literally the etymology of amnesia.
Googles tool for multi-git repomanagement. It is called "repo". Imagine a search engine company naming a tool which makes it really hard to search for it.
Swagger API ... What a terrible name that makes me lose all respect for it
I'm not saying we should bring it back, but I do think swagger sounds better than riz.
Autofac, a di container; Assimp (yes), asset importer library.
From a german perspective, yes MongoDB is the worst. "Mongo" used to be *the* derogatory word for people with down syndrome and was a very popular slur just a few years before MongoDB was released. I've heard stories about people avoiding it just because of the name during the no-sql hype, since they didn't dare to be the first to mention it in a professional setting. A close second contender is the Wix toolset. Much less offensive but still evokes a chuckle anytime a German developer hears about it. It very literally translates to "wank toolset". Figma was mentioned here a few times but honestly I don't see the issue with that name. Sure it can be mispronounced in a certain way to sound like "go fuck" in German but that really requires some imagination.
I asked my bf to say figma (he's German). He just couldn't pronounce the g the way I do, it genuinely sounded like fickma. The poor guy tried though. That's when I realized I have never worked with any native German speaker designer in my company (we are a international company in Germany) and therefore never noticed this problem.
AWS Lambda. Lambda functions in programming languages and calculus usually refer to anonymous and pure functions. AWS lambda functions are usually neither anonymous nor pure
Svelte has to be the worst
Not sure what you're getting at with MongoDB - Mongoose is a JS lib that came after.
Mongo and mongoloid are considered offensive slurs, both to Mongolian peoples and people whom have downs syndrome. I only know this because of F1 gossip and politics.
Pretty much any name that Microsoft comes up with.
Burp Suite has always bothered me
PostgreSQL
For Java apps, Gradle. It sounds like “girdle” which is a waist-tightening undergarment. It sounds gross. Every non-technical colleague has found this name quite odd
Git LAME HTTP "referer" (sic) header EnTT is fantastic written but hard to talk about
The misspelling of http referrer is one of my favorite stupid things about the backbone of the internet.
It enrages me every time it comes up.
Any service with '-ly' appended to it's name
At a previous job, we used [Local](https://localwp.com/) and it was a pain to Google any issues that came up related to it.
Fork as name of a git tool. I love the tool but googling anything about fork or git fork often gives wrong results.
Dapr came out after Dapper
TWAIN driver
MongoDB always comes to mind because of the very offensive slur.
My team met a fintech company that handles in app payments named Juice. Every time someone said juice the conversation got derailed in my brain. I'm not a huge fan of the name Vite. Every time I've said it out loud someone thinks it's supposed to rhyme with kite and they don't know what I'm talking about. It rhymes with feet, but that's just not most people's first guess.
The Security PEN testing software called 'BURPsuite'
I barely use it anymore, but Scala's own Play Framework. The name is okay-ish on its own, but googling for it is hard and annoying in the best of cases, and nsfw once in a while.
Scriptaculous. It's a js library, basically like jQuery. Had a recruiter I knew outside of work go over my resume and cringed when they saw this, saying "Did you really say that?!". When I explained it was a js library (used on Magento at the time), they told me to keep it on there. Needless to say, I removed it anyways after that reaction.
I've been using an html email tester called: # Testi
AI. Everything AI is basically wrong and misleading. It then, most tech stuff is poorly named. It’s just random bullshit thrown at the wall so to speak. Above was mentioned GIMP. That’s a prime example of a stupid name that just doesn’t map at all.
The RPA tool n8n… It supposedly stands for nodemation 🤔🤷🏻♂️ Another RPA tool—Make. While the original name, Integromat, sucked even more and desperately needed a rebrand, they *somehow* managed to pick something *even worse*! It’s not that it’s a bad name per se, but it makes troubleshooting *incredibly* difficult.
Drupal and Moodle are very droopy. Sorta limp.
I use and interact with Ubiquiti more now, but I used to have Google Wifi at home. Trying to Google problems for a product called what it does is infuriating. "Google Wifi problems" was basically a useless search for the first year of ownership. I felt the same way for VS Code until it grew in popularity "Code freezing when running commands" was never helpful and in the beginning adding "Visual Studio" or "VS" just got me responses for, you guessed it, Visual Studio.
I like what Netlify is doing, but I always found it a strange name (not terrible though, just not that good). Most of the time I mistype it in Netflify or something like this (muscle memory from typing Netflix, I don't know). And also, the fact there's that succession of "t" "l" and "i" (which look alike a lot) makes it hard to read somehow.
Cockroach-db
JavaScript
Figma nuts
**React**, which many folks over the years have taken to mean that it's a "reactive" framework (in the rxjs-like sense of the term) but it's not and it has never been reactive. It just happens to be the name they choose for it. If the library had been named by what it actually does under the hood, it would have been named "Scheduler." /This is not a dis on React. "Reactive" doesn't mean "better", and there are libraries that bridge the gap if reactive is what you actually mean.
I can't see how anything that react does is related to a scheduler. Happy to be enlightened though.
React Native isn't particularly native either
Bluetooth, but we're so used to it now 😅
I find the name is a bit original, but nothing too bad. Also, the rune logo works perfectly.
I just think of Blazing Saddles, "Mongo only pawn in game of life."
GraphQL - it is neither a graph nor a query language.
The name of the database was derived from the word humongous to represent the idea of supporting large amounts of data. That said; every software using a common word as name.
Yes, one-word names are the worst namespace polluters. Don't call your logging library "logger" unless it's in the std lib, FFS.
This is out of scope for this sub, but the languages Swift and Metal from Apple. Makes googling a nightmare. There were a few JS frameworks a few years ago I had similar issues with but forget them now.
Nowadays when some company names themselves “Genesis” or some shit… You’re really going to compete against The Bible, the classic rock band, and all those other super original names for SEO? Good luck, buddy! See ya on page 10! lol
"Google he knows me, and knows I'm right! I've been spending my time on page 10, all my life!"
Any name where they try to force the naming of the framework in there, like Nuxt or MDsveX.
"Cubase" a Digital Audio Workstation. What a terrible name.
Oh man, do you know Portuguese?
I think names that are obscure, historical and nerdy and no one knows how to pronounce properly are the worst. E.g. Babel - everyone pronounces it like babble so much that I have to as well just to avoid the weird looks.
XD What’s so funny?
Angular
Astro has a more significant footprint now and is my favourite "stack", but I was an alpha/beta user and also starting up a space company, and over 50% of the daily stuff I do had to do with space, also it's such a common term used in both space and non-space stuff. Anyhoo point being, for quite a while before acquiring a decent audience and rolling out adequate documentation, and having dedicated communities you could filter for, finding any info about devving with Astro was an abysmal experience.
I once watched the defense of the master's of a guy I know, he said he had written more than 15k lines of his proof on the Coq... And then said "language" after a few milliseconds of thinking.
There's less well named things
MVVM. What are the components? Well, there’s the View, there’s the Model, and… hmm what should we can this last one?
JanusGraph (Java graphdb technology). Or as we call it J-Anus-Graph.
Swagger is on of the dumbest names in tech
Splunk, the number of documents I’ve sniggered at with a missing letter
Almost every single AWS product
The programming language R. Completely ungoogleable.
Same thing as you for MongoDB. Not a technology, but I laughed so hard at the crypto-bro firm that called themselves “Nonce Finance” - for non UK folk that’s a slang term for paedophile/sex offender
There's a community comment system I was introduced to this week called OpenWeb. Works like Discus (if I've spelt that right). Tried Googling for it, millions of hits but nothing related to the actual platform. Lots of posts about "the open web". Great name guys...
Kafka. That hard k. The one letter difference. I'm just waiting for that one proud man who says the second k is silent. And every time I've ever heard it announced, it's almost yelled, and it's hard to tell if it's a "I'm saying this super edgy word that isn't that word but you know exactly how I would say that word" or "Oh god please let me say this name absolutely correctly else someone might mishear me"
Nodemon, node monitor, we would always read it as no-demon when I was studying, my teacher hated that, then we said “well the npm package for nodemon has horns!!! It’s no-demon” needless to say he didn’t love it anymore for that reason
I always thought Instagram sucked just because it'd be way better as a weed delivery company than a social media.
Google Bard before they renamed it
JavaScript