If you scroll through my ~/Code folder you will not find awesome-data-pipeline or nextjs-starter-v2. You will find garoa, compota, papagaio, folha, tomatte.
This is not an accident. It is a system. (Everything is a system, if you stare at it long enough.)
The rule
Every project gets a Brazilian Portuguese word that describes what it feels like, not what it does. The README explains what it does. The name explains why I care.
- garoa — the fine drizzle São Paulo is famous for. A tool for open source community management: it doesn't storm, it accumulates. Community health is garoa, not thunderstorm.
- papagaio — parrot. A speech-to-text app that listens and repeats. It runs Parakeet from NVIDIA completely offline, in Brazilian Portuguese, because dictating code reviews in my own language should not require a cloud.
- tomatte — a Pomodoro timer for macOS, with one extra "t" because
tomatewas taken and because the timer judges me, so it deserves a slightly wrong name. - compota — fruit preserved in syrup. A project for preserving things that would otherwise rot. You get the metaphor.
Why bother
Naming is the first design decision of a project, and the cheapest one to get right. A name like data-sync-tool tells you nothing about intent. A name like garoa forces me to answer "what is the soul of this thing?" before writing a line of code.
It is also, honestly, a way to keep Brazil in my terminal. Every cd garoa is a tiny trip home.
The exception that proves the rule
There is one repo called tmp. It contains, of course, the most load-bearing code I own. Some traditions are universal.