Ooops! You named it wrong. What now?
summary
A practical playbook for renames: concrete failures and fixes. Examples show renaming suggestions to Outreach prompts then to recommended topics, which temporarily breaks a data warehouse until a translation layer fixes ingestion. Steps include dual writing, staged column adds, and strong migrations to avoid downtime; aliases and incremental rollouts save big tables. The claim is that iterative, observable renames work in production but require coordination with data teams and careful handling of external interfaces.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Welcome
- 1:25Bad names in development
- 3:13Context behind names
- 6:01Renaming in growing codebase
- 7:26Naming misstep example
- 10:57External interfaces rename
- 12:01Successful rename case study
- 16:56Safe refactoring dance
- 19:23Accept imperfect names
- 22:56Naming and refactoring lessons
- 25:28Q&A
related talks
26mEven Naming This Talk Is Hard
34mDon't Settle for Poor Names (or for Poor Design)
33mTaylor’s Guide to Big Rewrites
29mWhat's in a Name: From Variables to Domain-Driven Design
29mApps, Stacks, and Frameworks: Avoiding “Shiny Object” Syndrome
01h 10mReal World Iterative Database Development
39mData Corruption: Stop the Evil Tribbles
01h 04mRefactoring Is Not Just Clickbait