What’s in a name?

The two hardest problems in software engineering are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors

Leon Bambrick via Two Hard Things by Martin Fowler

This is a recurring joke in software engineering, and I feel like the longer that I’m in the industry the more truely I feel it.

It shoudn’t matter what I call the project really, but I do want to start talking about it more publicly soon. I’d like to have a name that I can settle on, even if it does get replaced.

Up until now I’ve called it Airplan 2000, but the name is too simple to describe what it is. In some search engines Airplan corrects to “airplane”. Airplan is also used a lot by many other products, so even with the 2000 moniker, it could do more to describe what it is.

Flight dispatcher

The role you are effectively taking on mostly is that of a flight dispatcher. That would be a great name by itself, but I’ve really enjoyed the role-playing aspect of the game that the level of immersion is that you are actually downloading the software that a flight dispatcher uses. So keeping with a theme of keeping things simple, I’ve just dropped the last two letters: Flight Dispatch.

Having recently (yesterday) decided upon a year, why not include it in the name to give a little bit of curoristy to the name: Flight Dispatch 98. It also gives a hat-tip to the first flight simulator I ever played, Microsoft Flight Simulator 98.

So that’s it really, that’s the whole post, the game is called – at least until I get bored again – Flight Dispatch 98.