2-1-naming.qmd

## 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](https://speakerdeck.com/jennybc/how-to-name-files) of bad and good file names:

> #### BAD ❌ {.unnumbered}
>
> -   Myabstract.docx
>
> -   Joe's Filenames Use Spaces and Punctuation.xlsx
>
> -   figure 1.png
>
> -   fig 2.png
>
> -   JW7d\^(2sl\@deletethisandyourcareerisoverWx2\*.txt
>
> #### GOOD ✅ {.unnumbered}
>
> -   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:

-   **Machine readable** 💻
-   **Human readable** 🧐
-   **Optional: Consistent** ⚙️ (decide how you use underscores \_ and dashes -, if you want to use CamelCase or not, ...)
-   **Optional: Play well with default ordering** ⬇ (e.g. start your file names with the creation date `YYYY-MM-DD`)


### Further reading

-   [Naming files, folders and other things](https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/project-design/filenaming.html), The Turing Way
- [Project structure slides](https://djnavarro.net/slides-project-structure/#1), Danielle Navarro
- [File naming slides](https://speakerdeck.com/jennybc/how-to-name-files), Jenny Brian
- [ISO 8601, a standard for dates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601), Wikipedia