Naming things is hard

One of the hardest parts of any project seems to be naming things. In Retrospective Timelines this problem surfaces when trying to communicate the purpose of event fields.

An event record consists just a handful of fields

• Name: A string describing the event. All events must have a name.
• Date / Start Date: All events must have a date in this field. It’s name changes though. If an event has an end date, then this needs to be displayed as “Start date”, otherwise it should just say “Date”
• Include end date: This is a Boolean toggle that can show and hide an end date picker and field.
• End Date: A second date that is only visible when the bool above is toggled to true.
• Notes: An optional notes field. I may or may not include this in the shipping version.

This all seems straightforward to me, but I’m the one who made it so… It seems a bit inelegant.

Then there are the names of the entities themselves.

• Timeline – this is a great name for the list item. Each timeline has minimal data and a list of related events.
• Event – this one I’m not so sure of. At it’s core this app tracks important dates, but does the word “event” really convey this? Are all of my important dates really events? Sometimes I use the word “milestone” but that seems too descriptive of a subset of records.

Naming things is HARD.