Why the names?
Calavera means "skull" in Spanish. I got the idea from Googling "walking skeleton," which is an important concept in Agile development. Many images of skeletons are associated with the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos, and "Calavera" in fact also means the candy skulls traditionally consumed then.
Beyond the idea of skeletons, I have been thinking much of my ancestors. I have done genealogical research over the past few weeks and broken through to lineages dating back to the 1400s - a humbling and moving experience. The association with Dia de los Muertos is apropos for the new style of IT, as it all depends on that which has gone before.
Taking the "Calavera" name for the main project, using Spanish names for other parts of the anatomy seemed apropos:
- Manos ("hands") for the developer node
- Espina ("spine") for the control pipeline
- Brazos ("arms") for the first build slave (Junit/Ant)
- Cara ("face") for the production environment
- Piernas ("legs") for the infrastructure engineering
- Hijo ("boy") for the first project
Other projects (Hija "girl," Gatito "kitten") can exist on the same infrastructure, simulating a shared services environment. This is where it will eventually get complicated...
Thinking about Nervios ("nerves") for the monitoring & service management piece, but that's a ways out yet and I need to figure out the exact scope between Calavera and InsanIT.
To keep things on the light side, Calavera also translates as a rascal or reveller, which also works :-)
If you Google walking skeletons, you also get a lot of skeletons and roses. But I didn't want to name the machines Terrapin, Ripple, Jerry, Phil, etc...
-Charlie Betz
