Dialogue from a big group meeting at work the other day:
V.P. [a former programmer]: That's why they don't let engineers name products. We'd end up with products called "Product 1," "Product 2,"—
me [and half a dozen others, in ragged chorus]: You forgot "Product 0"!
But maybe you had to be there.
One of our customers allows its engineers and product team leaders to name their own product development programs. You get things like magic bus, cerebus, hatrick, and voodoo.
I love working on their programs, just for the names.
My team has: Disco, LSD, GUAM, ICE (a security product), Apollo, Rio, and Alegre.
All the ones in caps are ostensibly acronyms :).
At Amazon, many products are named for places in Brazil and South America: gurupa, iquitos, obidos, varzea… That’s where we got “Rio” and “Alegre”, in fact.