The Other Hard Problem: Lessons and Advice on Naming Things

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton This quote finds its way into many-a-talk about caching systems (including my own), and sometimes we as developers will recall it when we spend an hour to name that one nebulous variable. But why is something so difficult as nomenclature also thought of as too simple to actually talk about? In this talk, I'll review what has been written in the last few decades on naming, go over the easy parts of right or wrong as defined in PEP8 and other style guidelines, and finally suggest some patterns and anti-patterns found in in today's Django and open source environment for us to adopt (or avoid!) in our everyday naming of variables, libraries and other "things".