New Name?

[bpholt]

So… I think "feral" and the project description are pretty clever, but I'm concerned about the word's negative connotations. I've told several people offline about the project and all of them gave me a raised eyebrow or otherwise recoiled a bit at the name. It feels like kind of an unintended dig at the whole serverless concept.

@armanbilge @djspiewak What do you think about changing the name to something more boring, like cats-effect-serverless or something like that?

[bpholt]

Also, once this is settled, we need a Discord room for this project. 🙂

[armanbilge]

😕 I'm sad to hear that cause I thought it's a cool name and the project already has some name-recognition in the typelevel community ... but yeah, if it's rubbing some people the wrong way that's no good.

Vanilla is fine as a last resort, maybe something that's not specific to CE? It would be cool if this project could also appeal to people who don't worship IO 😆 Edit: well, I guess this depends on whether #33 is viable or not.

[ChristopherDavenport]

Jellyfish and Starfish have no heads. Throwing ideas.

[djspiewak]

That makes me sad! I really like the name. Actually the dig is semi-intentional, since there's a part of me that will always be grumpy "get off my lawn" about serverless, since it's basically just cgi-bin with a fancy pricing model. :-) With that said, I want to be sensitive to folks, and if people find it in any way offensive then we should change it.

"Starfish" is pretty great. No "cats" linkage, but that's alright. I'd rather steer clear a bit of the purely factual nomenclature (e.g. "cats-effect-serverless") since catchy names are better marketing on this kind of thing.

[armanbilge]

Somebody will have to explain "starfish" to me (all I can think is, feral could eat starfish for lunch 😆 ) but Chris has awesome names on his projects and Daniel likes it so I'm 👍

[kubukoz]

catchy names are better marketing on this kind of thing

I have an entire Slack workspace full of people who disagree 😅

I'd vote for cats-serverless, people are going to google for "scala cats serverless" anyway

[SethTisue]

There may be a danger of confusion between feral and alleycats?

[armanbilge]

@kubukoz no idea how to do a "clean/unbiased" Google search but feral is the top result for scala cats serverless in my browser and in a fresh cloud instance:

$ googler scala cats serverless

 1.  typelevel/feral - GitHub
     https://github.com/typelevel/feral
     Feral cats are homeless, feral functions are serverless - GitHub - typelevel/feral: Feral cats are
     homeless, feral functions are serverless.

[armanbilge]

I'm sad we couldn't all agree initially, but I hope more folks have warmed to the name since, I think it's going to stick. The good news is that AFAICT our SEO seems to be working :)