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.