5  Naming things

This chapter shows you how to pick good names.

Good names for files, folders, functions and other things can make a research project (or any project on your computer, really) more pleasant. Both for yourself and any people you work with.

Let’s be kind to ourselves and the people around us and get into naming 🙌!

A few examples from Jenny Brian’s slides of bad and good file names:

BAD ❌

  • Myabstract.docx

  • Joe’s Filenames Use Spaces and Punctuation.xlsx

  • figure 1.png

  • fig 2.png

  • JW7d^(2sl@deletethisandyourcareerisoverWx2*.txt

GOOD ✅

  • 2014-06-08_abstract-for-sla.docx

  • Joes-filenames-are-getting-better.xlsx

  • Fig01_scatterplot-talk-length-vs-interest.png

  • Fig02_histogram-talk-attendance.png

  • 1986-01-28_raw-data-from-challenger-o-rings.txt

Names should be:

Further reading