Naming Things Is the Hard Part

There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. The naming one is the one that quietly eats your afternoon while pretending to be trivial.

I have spent longer naming a function than writing it, and I regret none of that time, because the name is the part the next person actually reads. utils2, temp_final_v3, dataManagerManager — these are not names. They are confessions. They tell you exactly the moment someone gave up.

A good name is documentation that cannot drift out of date, because it is welded to the thing it describes. The code says what it does; the name says what it is for. Spend the extra minute. The next person to open this file might be you, at 2am, with no memory of any of it.