Help Name Our Website

As I work on UI prototypes for the new web venture, I’ve been brainstorming names for the web site we’re building. I’ve surveyed some of the finest minds in the software developer community (for very small values of “fine”), and we’ve come to a collective realization: naming a website is hard. Really, really hard.

You begin to have a new respect for all the crazily-named Web 2.0 startups. And then there are the domain names which must not be named. Some of them are actually serious. What were the people who named experts-exchange.com thinking? I’m not so sure they were.

We’ve racked our collective brains, and this is the best we could do. We’d like your input to see if we’re on the right track. Vote for the name that best embodies what you’d like to see on a software developer community website.

(voting is now over; the winner was stackoverflow.com)

humbledeveloper.com5638%
fellowhackers.com3024%
gosub10.com or gosubten.com3345%
writeoncereadmany.com1572%
humbleprogrammers.com1793%
privatevoid.com93414%
cargocultdevs.com1092%
dereferenced.com75511%
bitoriented.com4927%
algorithmical.com3014%
corecursion.com961%
metaprogramming.com3735%
stackoverflow.com1,72125%
understandrecursion.com351%
shiftleft1.com1021%
(other)4426%
6,895

I can’t quite talk about what this developer community website will do yet, but we think it’s going to be somewhat unique. It sure helps to put a name on it first.

We appreciate all feedback, even if it’s of the “they all suck” variety. In that case, vote for the (other) option and leave your ideas in the comments or email me directly. You can use the clever as-you-type search at Instant Domain Search to figure out what’s available. I’m warning you: it’s a wasteland out there. You’ll have to be pretty clever indeed to come up with an interesting, simple name that isn’t taken – or, worse, domain-squatted.

Update: If you’re curious what the website will do, in broad terms, this recent audio interview I did with Thirsty Developer explains.

Commenters also pointed out some excellent articles on naming:

Related posts

An Exercise Program for the Fat Web

An Exercise Program for the Fat Web

When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it’s also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30. Websites have gotten a lot… fatter.

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

Web Discussions: Flat by Design

It’s been six years since I wrote Discussions: Flat or Threaded? and, despite a bunch of evolution on the web since then, my opinion on this has not fundamentally changed. If anything, my opinion has strengthened based on the observed data: precious few threaded discussion models survive on the

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

Lived Fast, Died Young, Left a Tired Corpse

It's easy to forget just how crazy things got during the Web 1.0 bubble in 2000. That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg] was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped. [http://finance.yahoo.com/

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

The Two Types of Browser Zoom

From the dawn of the web – at least since Netscape Navigator 4.x – it has been possible to resize the text on a web page. This is typically done through the View menu. This was fine in the early, primitive days of the web, when page layouts were simple and

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

Recent Posts

Let's Talk About The American Dream

Let's Talk About The American Dream

A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments
Stay Gold, America

Stay Gold, America

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream.

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments
The Great Filter Comes For Us All

The Great Filter Comes For Us All

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? (Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments