PokéProject Dev Diary: Prologue

I’ve written a little before about my exploits as I try to live in “a constant state of Hackathon” but this time I thought I’d change it…

Cover image from @MindJournal / Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@mindjournals

I’ve written a little before about my exploits as I try to live in “a constant state of Hackathon” but this time I thought I’d change it up a bit and actually write about the process as it goes. You never know, this might be the project which catapults itself into the limelight and becomes a commercial success — and if it doesn’t, well… it might still be interesting to read about.

It all starts with an idea.

Unsurprisingly, you have to wait for inspiration to strike. This time it struck at the office, whilst sitting in a kick-off meeting for a new project.

One of the activities that we do when creating a new project team is give the team the opportunity to give themselves a code name. Picking a good name is crucial because it then becomes the label by which others in the business refer to the project.

Code names should be snappy and imaginative, at least a little related to the project and fun, of course. Nobody likes to be on a team with a dull name.

On this day, names were suggested and ideas bandied about until an inspirational one struck me: “Legendary Metapod.” Unfortunately it didn’t really catch on with the rest of the team (who very nearly called it Project Cocoon) but by this point my train of thought was already hooked on the idea of creating a Pokémon-themed code name generator.

Ah, the code name that nearly was.

So, this is where our story begins. We’re going to create ourselves a Pokémon-themed code name generator, and hope that there are others out there who share the same nostalgic passion for Pokémon and have enough situations where such a tool would be appealing to make it popular.

We’re certainly not the only ones who come up with fancy names for our projects, as this Reddit thread illustrates, but is there any sort of niché market out there for another name generator?

Here goes nothing.

Edit: PokéProject is now online @ https://www.pokeproject.co.uk/