5  The Name

For about a month, the little program I had written to check my notes 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 folder with four files in it. The notes had been a shoebox, then a spreadsheet, then a program, and each had grown too big for the one before. This was the first of them that needed a name.

It needed one because it was about to become a repository: a place that keeps every version of a program, so you can always go back to an earlier one. I made every change to the program at night, and some of them I could not undo in the morning. I had been meaning to give it that kind of home for about a month.

You can name a folder 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 the list filled a whole page.

Most of them were puns, names that played on two meanings at once. Punctuation makes puns easy, and it 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 word 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. Every time you save a change to a repository, you write a short note saying what you did. My first note said Name it.

I have written better notes since. Not many.

In the morning I gave it a README, the page that tells a stranger what a tool is for and how to use it, because a repository without one looks abandoned. I gave it a version number too, because a tool without one looks like a little program somebody wrote on a Sunday. 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 program stopped being a little program. 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.