Look, I get it. The Nazi bar cleaned up its act. A few years, maybe even just a few months ago, it was full of Nazi bullshit and propaganda, and run by a clear Nazi, and that sucked, as it was the only bar in town that showed sports.

So you left. Because fuck Nazis and who in their right mind hangs out in a Nazi bar, right?

I mean, other than Nazis.

But honestly, the other places you tried with your friends showed different sports, or no sports at all. And a lot of the conversations you had were just about how bad the Nazis are, and isn’t this a better place than the old Nazi bar, and thank goodness we’re not Nazis, and hey, fuck those Nazis right? Who needs sports anyway?

But then a couple of people mentioned the Nazi bar again, and you got curious. You went along, eventually, because you’ve got to check your assumptions every so often. And yep, still Nazi bar.

So you go back to the other bars, but they all seem to be defining themselves by how not a Nazi bar they all are. Like even when you leave the Nazi bar, it’s really all any conversation comes back around to.

And still, no sports.

So you check out the Nazi bar again. And wait a minute, what’s this? The Nazis all seem to have gone away! No Nazis anywhere you can see (and fair, you look). Sure, the owner is still very clearly a Nazi, but maybe he’s just got bored (wouldn’t be the first time). So maybe actually the old staff are running the show again, keeping it on the down-low, and it’s no longer really a Nazi bar. I mean it doesn’t look like a Nazi bar, and there really do seem to be no Nazis here any more.

And, you know: sports!

So you tell some friends, on the quiet, and they come with you and hey! No Nazis? They look pretty thoroughly too, since they’re skeptical (rightly so! It could be a fucking Nazi bar), but no. No Nazis.

And sports!

So you all settle in a bit, and start to spread the word, more confident that the Nazis have, indeed, fucked off.

And some more friends join you. Some stay, but some still get creeped out. Some even get so creeped out they accuse you of being a Nazi. They say nothing has changed, that they still get abuse when they go, that they still feel in danger, or threatened, and that the place is still full of Nazis. But that’s not what you see. You can’t figure it, so you figure instead that spending all the time in those other bars has made them paranoid. Has made them so focused on everything being about Nazis that they’ve lost their minds.

Because for real, there are no Nazis here. Just lots of folks watching sports.

---

Which is of course the whole point, because the bit where you and me and everyone else noticed that the Nazi bar was a Nazi bar was a bug. People like us aren’t supposed to notice it’s a Nazi bar, since we’re the people they want to come and spend our money. It’s the others that are supposed to notice that it’s a Nazi bar. The ones the Nazis don’t want. They get the hostile bouncer, the rude bartender. They get the toilet attendant that shuffles them off to the back stalls where the Nazis have scrawled what they really think of them.

And when you ask them why they don’t want to come, they tell you, and you can’t believe them. So you assume they’re nuts.

And suddenly you’re not in a Nazi bar, not really: you’re just in one that weirdly seems full of people that all seem like you, watching sports and talking about sports and glad that nobody’s talking about Nazis any more.

Because a Nazi bar that everyone can see is a Nazi bar is just a bad Nazi bar. The successful ones convince their wealthy patrons that it’s just a regular bar. A good one even.

Just one that keeps all those crazy people out.

Hang around a group of engineers for any amount of time, and eventually one will tell you how hard it is to name things.

This might seem obvious, even to non-engineers. Good names are tricky. Maybe you think about a good product or brand name, and how hard that is to come by. How many times have you been put off buying something, for example, because it has a bit of a rubbish name?

But it’s not a challenge confined to engineers and product designers, or marketing and branding gurus. We all name things, especially now that computers and related devices are such an integral part of our lives. We name folders and files in Google Drive. We name photo albums. We title posts on social media and email subject headings. We give our devices names (whether we know it or not, judging by the number of “[first name]’s iPhone” devices on this coffee shop network).

And naming those things, we agree, is hard.

But why? What makes it hard? Our first thought was that good names are tricky, but what if we don’t set the bar at “good”, but rather just “not bad”. Does that make it easier?

Turns out not really. See, the problem isn’t really that naming things is hard, it’s that naming things badly is very easy. You only have to see the number of meeting rooms in offices that have cutesy “on-brand” names relevant to the company, but give you no information about where the room is when you’re in a hurry. If you have a meeting in “The Last Resort”, what floor is it on? Names can be fun, sure, and fun is important, but fun is also tricky to not do badly. Maybe there’s another article in that thought…

But let’s complete this one first. Bad names are easy. So what makes “The Last Resort” a bad name? It’s not obvious, it doesn’t tell you anything about the thing that it names. Ultimately, it’s only good as a placeholder to better information about the room.

Okay, so what is this better information, and why is it better? Well, knowing what floor it’s on would be good. Knowing something about capacity would help too, if you were booking it say, or if you were prepping for the event. Perhaps knowing something about what facilities it had?

Now, you can go overboard on this. Maybe you want to know if it’s a “quiet” room, or maybe you want to know if it has windows. Or a presentation display. Or what colour the carpet is. There’s obviously a limit. How do you know what’s relevant?

Well, one way is to think about what you want to assist with. Generally, good names make two things easy: location and decision. You want to locate the thing named, and you then want to make a decision about it. Consider this variation of the name:

The Last Resort (L2-conference)

Better, right? Still fun, but good grief look how much additional information has been packed into that name! You know where it is and roughly how big it is, and we haven’t lost the fun. You can probably infer the kinds of facilities it has from the “size” as well, which is handy.

So, we’re sorted, right? Let’s see. Scan this list and tell me how many rooms are on the first floor:

The Last Resort (L2-conference)
No Exit (first, meeting)
(1) Show don't tell (5)
Bar the shouting (1-3 - large, quiet 4/5)
Who's the boss? (L4-personal)

Two? Three? So what’s the matter here? Consistency. Consistency here doesn’t just mean that they’re all the same, it means that if two people are given the same challenge (e.g. “name this room”) they come up with answers that are broadly similar. Not the same, mind you. Consider Raj being asked to rename the rooms above consistently:

The Last Resort (L2-conference)
No Exit (L1-meeting)
Show don't tell (L1-small meeting)
Bar the shouting (L1-large social - quiet from 4-5)
Who's the boss? (L4-personal office)

A bit clearer, no? But what about Alice? Alice hates the existing names, as they remind her of an earlier time in the company’s history. She’s also CEO. Her list:

Big conversation (L2-conference)
The gathering (L1-meeting)
Feedback central (L1-small meeting)
The social (L1-open, quiet from 4-5)
Alice's office (L4-office, doors open 1-4)

Different names, but the two lists are broadly compatible. If Raj named some of the rooms, they wouldn’t stick out.

This kind of consistency has a third benefit: while ensuring location and decision remain easy, it also allows for creativity and speed. It reduces the number of decisions to be made while also not punishing individuality. Raj and Alice can pick completely different names, might even pick different names on different days of the week, without compromising the name’s location and decision qualities.

This is convention, and it’s a freaking superpower. Here’s my convention for naming files:

[YYYY-MM-DD] - [context] [description].[filetype]

A date, a context (e.g. where it came from, or who sent it), a description (what it is), and a filetype (usually set by the computer itself). This is super-fast to set, and puts the thought where it needs to be: the description, which gets picked by considering how I’m likely to search for this in future. Examples:

2026-09-30 - hmrc tax repayment calculation.pdf
2025-01-01 - reflection new year's resolutions.txt

It even extends to variations. If time is important, I can extend YYYY-MM-DD to include _hh-mm without compromising readability. And it even sorts by date order, just by sorting “alphabetically”. But what if some days the date is the date I received the letter, others it’s the date of the letter, others still it’s the date I scanned it? Probably doesn’t matter that much - I’m still going to find it when I need it.

So you’re sold, but where do these conventions come from?

One of the lovely things about conventions is that they can be descriptive rather than prescriptive. You probably already follow some sort of unwritten convention when giving things names. Start by figuring out what that is, then what’s missing (just as we did with the room names above). This is one of the best things about conventions: you can discover them, rather than having to come up with them up front.

This also points to a warning, which is not to decide to come up with conventions for everything. It’s reasonable to say that conventions should only be discovered. Conventions that are designed rather than extracted from existing practices are called “standards”, and if naming things is hard, standards are harder.

I’ve written before about my computing origin story, and it’s still true. These boxes of sand, they can change the world, but only with the right programming. On its own, a computer isn’t even a fancy calculator. With software, it can be whatever it needs to be.

Who wouldn’t want to write software that could change someone’s life for the better? It’s still the dream.

I moved into management when I remembered that programming was a means to an end. I had become enamoured with programming as its own craft, but I knew I was never going to be that one programmer that you’d give an impossible problem to, only to have them come back two weeks later with a performant solution and a conference talk ready for you to help them edit. My interests are too varied for that.

I realised that I would be better placed to make computers do amazing things as a translator. As the engineer in the team who could speak Engineer, but also Product, Test, Metrics, Sales, Marketing, Economics, HR, Psychology, Productivity, Science, Design, Philosophy, and Pragmatism. I was the person who could go into a room of disagreement and come out with a plan that everyone got behind, not because I wrote it, but because I could help people cut away the distractions and focus on what they were all there for in the first place: getting things done.

I love aligning people, understanding their motivations and pointing them in the right direction. Watching as their enthusiasm for the work grows as we build and ship. Hearing their excitement when the thing succeeds, or helping them rediscover their grit when the thing fails. It’s a huge part of who I am.

But now? Now I have a legion of tireless engineers at my disposal. They produce pretty good code, exactly to spec, and their enthusiasm is boundless. They work all day, every day, and will never need an encouraging word or a frank conversation that makes us both feel rough for a few days afterwards. And not just engineers, but designers, product managers, security experts, sales and marketing teams, finance departments, operations. All there, ready for me to point them at the problem and to go get it.

And I stand here, with this limitless potential, paralysed.

See, every new disruptive technology has this effect: it shifts things in ways that are both obvious and subtle. The obvious change that these agents bring is that the cost of production – of simply producing things – rapidly drops towards zero. That’s obvious, and scary if you’re in the business of producing things in order to pay the mortgage.

But the subtle effect is that everyone gets to level up.

What does that even mean? Well, for those that haven’t made the transition before, it can feel utterly terrifying. It can make these coding agents seem new and weird and alien and like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And we get the fear. We try to find new words for them, and build out new tools, and treat them like new problems to solve.

But I think that’s missing the point. These are not new problems to solve, they’re just problems from the level above where we’re each used to sitting. Engineers don’t have to invent new ways to figure out how to use these agent swarms, they just now get to think like managers: what’s in the way of these swarms delivering what they need to? What’s unclear? How do I maintain quality when I can’t review all the code? How do I keep track of more work than I can store in my head? How do I think ahead to what problems we might be creating in the process of building?

These are manager problems, and we already have solutions, in practices, processes, and tooling.

And what about my problems. My paralysis? See, I’m very used to building a shared understanding of a problem, then working to produce a deliverable plan that everyone gets excited about. I’m not used to pulling those problems out of thin air (at least not the product problems).

My comfort zone is walking into the room, helping people figure out what problems they need to solve to win, and then rallying the troops to solve those problems with excitement and as much fun as possible.

But now I need to move to that level. I get to be the room with the problems.

Not everything has to be a long meditation on creativity or what it means to be productive while maintaining a healthy balance between what you need to do and what you want to do. Sometimes, I’m allowed to just point you at stuff I like.

Like You are listening to, a wonderful only-the-internet-could-do-this old-school mashup website combining a curated, chilled playlist (rotates regularly) with live public feeds from air traffic control, shipping forecasts, transit authorities. Hauntingly beautiful and a reminder that even on the internet, stuff is happening right now that may never happen again.

Identity is weird. I’m a writer, but saying that casts this weird spell on people. I think the spell comes from a good place, a place of compassion and curiosity.

But it’s a deadly spell.

“So… how’s the writing going?”

Immediately I feel a fraud. How is the writing going? I haven’t published to the blog for ages, haven’t sat down to actually put an essay together for weeks.

No, months.

Who says I’m a writer?

“Oh, you know. It’s going”

The deflation is palpable. They’re rooting for me, they want to hear about the progress on the novel, or the collection of short stories, or the self-help book, or the… something. Anything.

How can you be a writer without something to show for it?

And yes, that’s a point of view, but what they’re really looking for is whether my writing has become work yet. Am I cranking out words every day? Am I doing the reps? Am I putting in the hours? Do I have projects and goals? Am I going to do NaNoWriMo this year?

What’s the plan?

And there is no plan. Writing is not a job, for me. Making it a job will make it lesser. Neither is it a hobby.

It’s just a thing that makes me feel at home.

Sometimes in my life, I don’t feel at home. I feel washed away, adrift on someone else’s idea of what my life should be. In some seasons, that’s necessary, a journey away from home that brings with it some worthwhile reward, or some unquantifiable progress in some part of my life.

In others, it’s just exile. A meaningless drift away from what I hold dear. A drift of inches and degrees, where I’m suddenly in the middle of the ocean, lost, before I notice I’ve left the shore.

How does one become lost at sea? Two ways, slowly then suddenly.

Writing can sometimes be a lifeline in those drifts, a way to set sail for home, to remember the route, to follow the compass and spy land. But sometimes I’m so far from home that the writing itself feels alien and unfamiliar.

And there is nothing I’d rather be doing less in those moments than writing.

Does that mean I’m no longer a writer? Do we stop breathing between inhale and exhale?

Writing is home. Sometimes it can bring me home, but sometimes I have to fight to return before the writing can come.

And so I fight.

And then, I write.