But Y tho?

I needed a unique name generator, so I built one.

I had used the Heroku unique-name generator before, when building bad ideas. I loved how it removed a mental hurdle from getting something out the door; coming up with a name. Personally, I’m horrible at naming things, so this was a necessity. I don’t want to get hung up on picking a good name, and the defaults are equally as bad (ConsoleApplication23, anybody?).

I’d also been wanting to get back to dot net core. The last time I had played around with it, they were still using the dnx command line tool and project.json files. So this project seemed small enough, and valuable enough, to actually keep me on task for the duration of v1.

The command line

I was stoked to be able to layout the project structure from the command line. I’m just so much more optimistic about a tool when there’s a CLI behind it. Even if I’ll never script it, the idea that i could is very appealing.

I scaffolded the whole project via the dotnet new and dotnet add commands. I was also able to build and test in the same manner. It was a nice break from VS 2017.

Structure

I found lists of adjectives and nouns online. And thank to some recent practice with regex crosswords, quickly stripped everything but the words themselves.

I added some tests for uniqueness, which is about 99.985%. I also added protection for never getting the same name twice in a row.

I was able to create a CLI for OS X, which was came in handy when publishing to Azure, and needing names for everything.

For the web app the dotnet help lists a template called razor with the description “mvc with razor pages.” I’ve used the Razor syntax since it debuted, and thought, “of course I want razor, not aspx.” Apparently though, Razor Pages is a new thing. I actually really liked it for build the web app component. I still created a controller for the API, but was happy I stumbled onto this new paradigm.

I really went over the top with the completeness. Azure for hosting. Custom domain through NameCheap. SSL through CloudFlare.

Next Steps

The README has a roadmap, which includes packaging the CLI and improving the site. PRs are welcomed.