Some of the machines in my house have names. Some have numbers.
nebula-1 is a number with a hostname stapled on. It does its job, and if it died I’d feel nothing; I’d just stand up another. But Blippström, the home-automation umbrella I named for the sound a sensor makes when it triggers, I would mourn a little. Same kind of box. Same kind of work. The only difference is that I gave one of them a face.
Sysadmins have a phrase for this: pets and cattle. Cattle are numbered and interchangeable, and when one gets sick you replace it rather than nurse it. Pets get names, and vet bills, and grief. Running servers well is supposed to be the art of turning your pets into cattle.
I spend my evenings doing the opposite.
Lichtspiel, Hauswart, Piepmatz, Funkturm. A cinema, a janitor, a little bird, a broadcast tower. All built in the cracks: Sunday morning, the hour between dinner and bed, the train back from Berlin. None of them would be alive in the same way if I’d called them node-red-flows or bird-cam. I’d have built those too. I just wouldn’t have cared about them.
The question I keep circling is why. Why does a name change anything, when the code and the bugs and the unfinished tests are all identical?
I’ve found three answers. The longer I sit with them, the more they look like one.
The first is grip. An unnamed thing has no surface you can hold. A function-name tells you what the code does; a real name tells you what the work is to you. There’s an old idea in philosophy that a hammer you’re using disappears into the swing, while a hammer you’re only looking at is just an object on the bench. A name is what lets the work disappear into the swing.
The second is company. We personify what we build because building alone summons the wish for someone to build beside. There’s research on this, and it’s almost rude in its accuracy: we anthropomorphise most when we’re reaching to feel competent and when we’re short on connection. Which is a clinical way of describing a man writing Swift on a Sunday while the house sleeps. Piepmatz keeps me company in a way bird-cam never could. I didn’t decide that. It’s just true.
The third is the contract. A named character with a one-line story asks something of you that a folder doesn’t. Besserwisser, my finance cockpit, named for the know-it-all who corrects your pronunciation, asks whether I did the thing I said I’d do. finance-app asks nothing. The name is a small promise to my future self, the way saying a goal out loud makes it harder to quietly drop.
(There’s a fourth thing underneath the other three: we love what we make simply because we made it. Psychologists call it the IKEA effect. Not flattering, but real. The name only gives that love somewhere to live.)
Grip, company, contract: three doors into one room. Each one turns a thing into a someone.
For a long time I thought the names were about starting. Clarity before the first commit, motivation through the boring middle. And they are.
But that isn’t why I keep doing it.
You can’t miss cattle. You can switch off a numbered box and feel nothing at all. The whole quiet, slightly ridiculous point of a name is that it makes the thing missable. And only a thing you can miss can be properly let go.
I have a board full of dead projects. BjörnAgain, a video pipeline named after a Swedish bear, I closed last month. Canceled, not done, because I stopped wanting the thing it was for. Closing it wasn’t deleting a folder. It was a small you served, thank you, that’s enough to a character that ran for a while and then didn’t need to anymore.
That moment costs almost nothing, and it leaves the rest of the work clean.
So here’s the answer I’ve landed on. We don’t give our projects names so that more of them ship. Most of them never will; that was always true. We give them names so the ones that die can be missed for a second, honestly, and set down.
A pet, you can bury. Cattle, you just count.
🌈
The companion to this is The graveyard is the point, which is about the technique. This one is about why the technique works on us at all.
PASS IT ON.