Programmers have a difficult job. To feed your creative spirit, it is sometimes necessary to be distracted. For example, we in JetBrains select code names for future product releases. Here are a couple of funny stories of their appearance.

Intellect from God

For eleven years on the information technology market, our best example of the IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment has changed several goddess names: Stella, Vista, Pandora, Ariadna, Aurora, Pallada, Irida, Demetra, Selena, Diana, Maia, Nika, and the most recent - Leda.

Codnames are also reflected in the splash screen for products. Here, for example, Aurora. If we were to make a Russian-speaking product, the cruiser Aurora would probably be portrayed, but he is international ... and Aurora, in addition to the goddess, also means “northern lights” in English. Here is such a calico!

Nothing human is alien to us

From the very beginning, the name of our YouTrack bug tracker asked for human character traits, qualities and emotions. For a long time, the alpha version was called Charisma, until we found out that this name is commercially unavailable. When the bug tracker finally went on sale under the name YouTrack, the following code names arose, alphabetically: Daring (“courage”), Energy (“energy”) and Fascination (“passion”). What will the next version be called Generosity (grotesque), Grotesque (“absurdity”) or, perhaps, Grandeur (“greatness”)? We will find out soon!
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How about an excursion into the history of art?

There are a lot of fans of classic art in the .NET development team of the profiler dotTrace . Therefore, the releases are named after Italian architects and sculptors, also in alphabetical order: Arabella, Bernini, Canova and Donatello. The design of the screensavers of all minor versions of dotTrace formed the work of these masters. Who would have thought, right?

Legendary Islands

When the Kotlin project began to take shape, we thought that the name of an island would do for it. Well, Java, Java and all that. And we decided to go far: in St. Petersburg, where IntelliJ Labs is located, there are at least 33 islands with unique names. Because of the ease of pronunciation, our choice fell on Kotlin - an island in the Baltic Sea, 32 km west of St. Petersburg, where the fortress city of Kronstadt is located. Voila!

Forest kingdom

The RubyMine team quite recently began using codenames and decided to pay tribute to the Japanese origin of Ruby. The latest version 4.5 is called Nire, which in Japanese means "elm". Before that was Tōhi - "spruce." Let others practice with the alphabet, these guys have gone a new way: the number of letters that they use in the title coincides with the version number! Let's see how much they have enough ...

There is always a place of geography

The names of the TeamCity versions traditionally feature Indian cities: Agra, Benares, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Eluru and Faradi. At first glance, the selection of names in alphabetical order is simple, isn't it? In fact, there are no problems with the first letter, but over some developers were forced to break their heads.

Last year, to find the name on the letter F, while still simple to pronounce, the developers had to shovel a bunch of geographical atlases, maps, and even Google Earth. When the team focused on the search, a strange letter arrived. In it, an Indian university promised to buy any number of TeamCity licenses if the next release is called Falna - after the city in which the university is located. Apparently, they found out how we come up with code names, and decided to advertise our city and ourselves!

Suddenly the insight came: the letter came on April 1st - the day of the draws! Only the identity of the joker is still covered in mystery.

Share your stories!

And what interesting codes or ways of naming have you come across?