I worked at a startup company in Anacortes, Washington, and since it was located on Fidalgo Island, one of the San Juan Islands, we decided to use that island group as our set of internal project names. The first project was called Orcas and the second Lopez. The marketing folks liked the names so well they decided to use them for actual public product names. They changed Lopez to Cypress, however, as it was a bit catchier.
At the same company, we initially named our servers after Disney characters: Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Donald, etc. As soon as we hired a real network administrator, he chose to abandon these cool names in favor of boring names like mailserver1, fileserver1, etc.
The elements from the periodic table: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, etc (http://www.webelements.com/). You even have abbreviations already: h, he, li, be.
Not computer related, but I used to work for a games company where there was one particular designer was upset that his internal code-name for a previous project ended up as the public name. He had always hated the name, wasnât responsible for its initial creation, and only used it under duress and the promise that it wouldnât make the final public release.
To avoid it happening again, he made sure his next project was code-named âPig Wankâ, and thatâs how he always referred to it in printed material, meetings, etc.
In my company, our serverâs names come from Kill Bill characters. At first we used only women names, but after Yubari and Elle we ran out of names and had to move on to male characters. Curiously, we donât have a Bill server yet
At work weâre using characters from great literary fiction for our iterations, e.g., Athos, Beowulf, etc.
Iâve always been a fan of naming my machines after bad action film and TV stars. Some of my favorites include CHUCKNORRIS, CHRISLAMBERT, STEVENSEAGAL, LUCYLAWLESS. You get the drift.
We choose the boring - âwhat it doesâ way
Though I think Iâll start to name my projects after 80âs pop groups - âSpandauBalletâ, âIggyPopâ etc
How are GUIDs or unicode characters good project name ? Nobody will be able to memorize GUIDs, and even if they did, nobody would easily recognize a name as they start their 5-minute-monologue just to pronounce the name, and nobody could pronounce all the unicode characters (nor TYPE) at all. Horrible, horrible ideas.
previos firm used names of islands.and the 80âs band names(Camper Van B). US submarines are named after: Sturgeon class= fish Los Angeles class=cities OHIO classâŚ
As a humorous aside, one place where this was prominently done was in the case of nuclear testing. The first nuclear test was given a secretive code name (Trinity) by the enigmatic Oppenheimer; the next test series (run by the less enigmatic military) simply used military A-B-C codenames (Able, Baker, and Charlie, though the latter was not fired). After going through a number of these more âboringâ military sets, and as testing became more plentiful they started giving them more creative names. The names werenât supposed to have any correlation to the weapons being tested, but in some cases they were mnemonicsâKing was K for Kiloton, Mike was M for Megaton, both of which being special âsuperbombsâ of Operation Castle; some were named after the code-names of their component parts, e.g. shot Harry tested the âHamletâ device, shot Climax tested the âCobraâ device, etc. Anyway, later test series took their inspiration Native American tribes (either ironic or in bad taste, given the history of Native American interactions with government uranium mining, testing, development, etc.), scientists, wildflowers, insects, mountains, rivers, gods, etc.