The Buckblog

After a pretty wild 72 hours of brainstorming, googling, and searching through registered trademarks via the USPTO, a winner has emerged in the search for a name for the software formerly known as SwitchTower.

Ah, Capistrano!

On Friday, Marcel Molina IM’d me:

marcel: name idea
marcel: Capistrano
marcel: as in, the swallows of Capistrano
marcel: http://www.sanjuancapistrano.net/swallows/

The name clicked for me right off, but at the time I wasn’t making any real judgement calls regarding the names—I was just adding them to a great big list.

By late Saturday, we had several names that we really liked. My wife had suggested “Roundabout”, which won the heart of many on the core team, but unfortunately was already a registered trademark. Other names we liked, but which had to be discarded were “Switchyard”, “Metro”, “Sherpa”, and “Remote Control”. We rapidly discovered that the descriptive names were already trademarked. We considered various others from the railroad theme, but decided it was being overused, and we also wanted to emphasize that this software was really independent of Rails.

Tobias Lütke really liked “Reploy”, but it felt awkward to me. Scott Barron suggested both “Deployinator” and “Vlad the Deployer”, the latter of which I really liked, but couldn’t picture showing up on the cover of a book. (“Agile Web Deployment with Vlad the Deployer”...)

Several of us liked the name “Sherpa” enough to try looking for alternative ideas related to that theme. “Porter”, “envoy”, and the like were all considered. I took quite a shining to “Pemba”, which is apparently the traditional given name for Sherpa males born on Saturday. It also happens to be Chad Fowler’s Tibetan name, given to him by a Tibetan monk. From that association, I added “Chad” as a possible name for the program, and Marcel promptly found a t-shirt proclaiming “Chad is Rad.” Wouldn’t it be great to have a ready-made shirt for this thing?

Eventually, I made an executive decision and narrowed the list down to “Pemba”, and “Capistrano”. Putting it to the core team:

So, Capistrano it is. I’ll be going through and changing all references I can find and control from SwitchTower to Capistrano over the next day or two.

“All rails go to Capistrano.”

“Just cap it.”

Done.