For quite some time, I was looking for a new name for an open-source project: TYPO3-Analytics.
I am (sadly) not creative in naming things or painting. The most prominent part of creativity is during development and programming. To find a name is (in my point of view) very difficult.
Update (July 2021): The project is not active anymore.
The idea, passion, and motivation are still alive, but I won’t continue TYPO3-Analytics/Jacobine as it is right now anymore.
The project stays open-source on GitHub.
There are some names of projects I like because of the sound, like Flynn. On 3rd March 2014, I wrote a blog post about this challenge to use the power of the community: TYPO3-Analytics is looking for a new name - suggestions welcome!
Next to this blog post, I got on my girlfriend’s nerves with recurring questions like “What do you think about name x? Or y?“. And I asked my Twitter timeline many times and wondered how Apache chose names for their product. They got rules for product names, but I did not find a resource that describes the story about these names. Ingo mentioned that Tika is one of the project founders’ kid’s toy pet’s name. Scott suggested Donk, because it was his stuffed donkey’s name as a kid :D Anyway.
I thought a lot about possible names and talked to many people. Some of the ideas were Vizben, Benvis, Mevis, Pinocchio, Gepetto, Viva con analysis and Knock.io. Nothing special. Nothing “good” enough. Nothing I like at the first time. I continued my search. During a lunch break, I talked to my colleagues Jan and Dominik about this topic. Jan mentioned that I might have to choose a general topic that I focus on for the name search. He suggested mining. I liked the idea and started my research in the mining area …
The new name: Jacobine
I was born and live in Duisburg, Germany. Duisburg is a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia and part of the Ruhrgebiet. Duisburg is very popular for its steel industry and coal mining (see the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord or a list of coal mines in Duisburg). In 1855 an English company started to build a new mine called Jacobine. It was located in Duisburg-Meiderich near to Oberhausen. In 1859 the mine had to shut down because water damaged it. Eleven years later, in 1870, the mine was repaired. In 1871 the mine was put into production again under a new name Schacht 1. Schacht 1 was part of the bigger mine Westende.
Dominik mentioned that the name Jacobine got a bad taste because it was damaged and shut down. Dominik is correct, but the mine was repaired and put into production again. I would agree with Dominik that Jacobine is a bad name for management software or something in this area. But we do not build management software ;) And one important fact: I like the new name. It is unique in the software world (as far as I know). It got a relation to the central area of the tool we build ([data]mining) and a relationship to my lovely town Duisburg.
So let’s try to get not damaged by the water :)
Migrate your TYPO3-Analytics clone
If you got an existing clone of the project with the old name TYPO3-Analytics you must migrate the git repository to keep up to date. Here we go:
$ git remote -v
origin [email protected]:andygrunwald/TYPO3-Analytics.git (fetch)
origin [email protected]:andygrunwald/TYPO3-Analytics.git (push)
$ git remote set-url origin [email protected]:andygrunwald/Jacobine.git
$ git remote -v
origin [email protected]:andygrunwald/Jacobine.git (fetch)
origin [email protected]:andygrunwald/Jacobine.git (push)
Please pay attention to the name of your remote (origin or maybe upstream) and the protocol you use (git:// or https://).
The ecosystem around Jacobine (the web frontend, the vagrant machine and the chef cookbook) will be renamed in the following days.
If you got any problems or need help to migrate your clone, I will help you as much as possible. Just add a comment, send a tweet (@andygrunwald) or send me an email.
PS: Thanks to all people involved in finding a new name and attending all the discussions! PPS: And thanks to Georg, Ben and Ola who attend my last survey on twitter regarding Jacobine or Jacob (self made abbreviation for Jacobine) - 3:1 for Jacobine!