Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

The Secret Code-Names of ‘Off on a Tangent’

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I’m deep into the process of developing the next major update to Off on a Tangent, which has been taking up a fair amount of my free time (and is a big part of why I haven’t been posting very much the last couple of weeks). On top of that I’ve been working on two other web development projects—a major update for Melissa’s site, and another little project I’m working on (stay tuned).

Juggling these projects got me thinking about technology code-names. It is fairly commonplace in the tech industry that major projects in development get code-names, and they usually follow a pattern of some sort. For example, Microsoft generally uses the names of ski resorts for major Windows versions. Apple uses the names of large cat species for OS X releases. These names rarely become part of the public marketing of a product. Apple, which started including the cat names in their marketing beginning with Mac OS X 10.2 ‘Jaguar,’ is the major notable exception to this rule.

When I built my first web site, it didn’t have a code-name. In fact, it didn’t even really have a name. It was called Website 1.0, and I continued to refer to my site with little more than a version number through its eleventh iteration. Beginning with its twelfth version, the site picked up the Off on a Tangent moniker it has had ever since, although the version number is always there. You see it even today, tucked down in my footer: Website 23.0. If you peruse the sometimes-embarrassing old versions of my site, you’ll always find it (although sometimes it has been pretty well hidden).

Any of you who have followed Off on a Tangent for some time are probably aware of this. You are probably not aware that, in addition to the ‘public’ Off on a Tangent name and the now-traditional version number, I also refer to each major update of my site (since the eleventh version) with a private code-name while it is in development. For reasons now lost to the dark recesses of my memory, these names follow the pattern of . . . women’s names. I’ll let the armchair psychiatrists among you try to figure that one out.

So, without further ado, here are the code names I’ve used for each version of the site from the eleventh onward. I will update this post when new versions come around.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.