Every Good Name is Taken

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try to build an RSS reader.

I've been waiting for Alcove to be released, but I don't know when that will happen. And to be honest, I'm tired of trying to make peace with all the other tools that gradually became something else.

I wrote about RSS a few weeks ago, where I explained why, since 2007, this format has still been my favorite and how every product built on top of the format has found a way to disappoint me eventually. At some point I stopped waiting for someone else to build what I wanted, so I said to myself: "Why not try and see if I can make something on my own (with the help of AI, of course)?"

So I started to plan everything. Grabbed my notebook and made a list with all the features and options my ideal RSS reader would have. By doing this, I started automatically to imagine the UI and how everything could work. I'm not going into much detail here, because it's not finished, but what is done so far seems promising (at least the core functions are working).

What eventually came to my mind since the beginning was, of course, the name. The plan is to build this for myself, but if it really works and I find the experience good enough, I might consider making it available for free. But going back to the name, when I thought that developing the app would be what would give me the most headaches, naming it surpassed it by far.

Naming something you build sits in a different place from accepting the name on something you buy or use. A finished product arrives (most times) complete - logo, pricing, category, etc. You meet it from the outside. But something you make starts inside your head. The name has to carry what the tool is and what you want it to become, in one or two words, or even made-up ones, and preferably with a .com domain that someone didn't park in 2009.

I checked the domain; it was taken. I tried .app, also taken. I search npm and GitHub; a package exists with twelve weekly downloads and no commits for over four years. Three abandoned repos pollute the namespace. And this pattern repeats every single time.

After much thought I land on a word that feels right. It captures the calm I want the interface to give or the direction I want the project to take. Then I run the checks, and the "graveyard" grows. AI tools launch every week with the same pool of short, calm, slightly technical words, compound nouns, and invented terms that gesture at focus and signal. The domains vanish, and the namespace gets filled with ghosts.

This didn't use to be a problem. Two or three years ago, finding a clean name meant doing good creative work. You had to think hard about what the thing was, what feeling you wanted it to produce, and what word carried that without being generic. That search was mostly internal. Now the search is external first. You do the internal work, land on something, and discover it's already occupied by a half-built app someone spun up in an afternoon with a vibe coding session and then forgot about.

When think about what I'm looking for, it comes down to a few things. The word has to have its own meaning before I attach the app to it. Something a person could hear without context and at least know what territory it's pointing at. It has to be short enough to say out loud without sounding like a product brief. And it has to be available, which used to be the easy part and is now the hardest. That last requirement is the only one I have no creative control over, and it's the one doing most of the damage.

I'm not in a rush; the app doesn't have users. I made it for myself and most probably I'll be the only one to ever use it. And a name isn't blocking anything real right now because I can simply use some totally unrelated personal domain for it. But I notice how much the missing name affects how I think about the project. Without one, it stays abstract, just "the reader", "Project X", or "the RSS thing." A name pulls something out of your head and makes it exist separately, as a thing in the world rather than a folder on your machine.

Eventually I will find a good name. It will probably arrive from somewhere I'm not currently looking, which is how these things tend to go. What I didn't expect was that the harder part would be the availability check, not the thinking.

That's new to me, and from what I'm seeing it's not going away.

May The Code Be With You! 🚀