5  The Name

For about a month the script was called check.py. That was what it did, and I was the only one who ever had to say it.

Then it was notes-check, which was more accurate and no better.

Then it was a directory with four files in it. The notes had been a shoebox, then a spreadsheet, then a script, and each had outgrown the one before. This was the first of them that needed a name.

It needed one because it was about to become a repository. Every change I made to the script I made at night, and some of them I could not undo in the morning. I had been meaning to put it under version control for about a month.

You can name a directory anything. You can’t call a repository “the thing for chapter four”.

So I set aside an evening for names. I wrote them in pencil, and by midnight they filled a page.

Most of them were puns. Punctuation rewards a pun and shouldn’t. One had the word colon in it, and I had not thought it through.

None of them was a name. They were jokes I would have to explain every time I typed one.

I kept going, which is how two in the morning happens. The last line on the page, at ten to two, was quire: the folded gathering of pages a book is sewn from.

At two I gave up on the page and opened a chat with Otto, meaning to ask something else entirely. I typed “quire”.

Otto finished it as “quirework”.

For a year I told people Otto named it. Then I found the page.

I looked at the word for a while. It was not a pun. It sounded like something that should already exist, and as far as I could find, it didn’t. I checked.

I liked it better than anything on the page.

I don’t remember what I meant to ask.

I made the repository that night, before I could think better of it. The first commit message was Name it.

I have written better commit messages since. Not many.

In the morning I gave it a README, because a repository without one looks abandoned, and a version number, because a tool without one looks like a script. The version number was zero point one, which promises nothing. The README was a page long. It was the shortest it would ever be.

Chapter four had not changed in weeks. It had never been so consistent.

That week the script stopped being a script. It had a name, a repository, a README and a version number. It was a tool.

I was the only person who had ever used it.