Javia blog

It’s a little shame that I don’t have the name of my project yet. Shouldn’t everything start with the name? Well, I started the development when I still didn’t have the name. But at least an internal name is needed in order to be able to talk and think abount something.

So I use the internal name gama. Why gama — because it’s short and easy to type on a phone keyboard. But now the time has come to finally settle the official name. I spent about 2 days thinking about names. One problem is that I seem to focus on names that are directly related to what the product is doing, names that contain inside either ‘java’ or ‘mobile’. It looks like (Igor’s naming guide) that these are not the best names for branding, that the really good names are imaginative, and related to what the product is doing in a subtle or metaphoric way.

A suitable name needs to be:

• available in .com or .eu TLD
• memorable (i.e. you remember it once you see it)
• short, easy to type on a phone keyboard

Of course, these criteria are hard to meet. In the .com TLD, a huge number of domains are owned by the name pirates, who keep them for advertising income or name trading. This situation is really annoying.. I’d say 80% of the domain names are used in a such bad manner.

In order to be memorable, the name has to make associations, and it doesn’t hurt to be melodic, and beautiful. My situation in this area is a bit difficult as English is not my native tongue.

The last criterion — to be easy to type on a phone keypad — is a novel one, I guess. The ideal name would be composed of first-letters on the phone (i.e. A, D, G, J, M, P, T, W), and successive letters in the name should not be located on the same key (because this slows down typing). Yes, I even wrote a small program which, given a text, outputs its cost with respect to the phone-typability metric.

So I put up a short list of candidate names (which mostly suck IMO) and asked my friends what they think about them. Most of them are available only in the .eu domain, not in .com … I’m not sure how serios a problem this is, of course I would prefer a name in the .com TLD.
Now I can’t wait to decide for a name, register the domain, and move ahead with the real work. If the name would be really bad, it will still be possible to change it later, but before the public launch. It’s hard to find a good and available name.. perhaps not a programmer’s job, anyway…

Paul Graham argued convincingly that it’s more efficient to work for oneself, than to work for an employer. Even if a big company with 5000 programmers can create an impressively big product, which is hard to achieve for a small team of 3 developers, the average productivity of a member of the small team is probably much higher than the productivity of one member of the 5000 people team.
If the 5000 people team would be split in groups of 3 people, each group pursuing its own project, they would be working on 1600 projects.
So there is a tradeoff between the efficiency of small teams, and the ‘range’ of large teams.

The small team is efficient not only because of low communication overhead (the classical explanation), but also because each member identifies himself with the project. He works on his project, and the success of the project will be his success too.

I decided to quit my current job, as I want to work full-time on my own project. Of course, there is a lot of social pressure against being ‘un-employed’, without income. So I decided that I give myself a 6 month period, at the end of which I’ll evaluate the success of my project. If there’s no strong indication of success at that point, I’ll take upon a new job as an employee.

So now I have to run. I have to work quickly and efficiently, in order to show that my project can be a viable business. I’ve set milestones: 15 june for the first beta, and 1 july for the public release.
Once the project becomes public, one problem will be to build awareness around it. I decided to play ‘by the book’, so one of the first things I do is to start this blog. Here I’ll follow the project, from this early phase to either success or failure, in this 6 months interval.