A letter from Faugra to @brane

[zvictor]

Hello @brane!

First of all, I am sorry for contacting you in such an unusual way, but I could find no other way to reach you. Let me explain why I need your help and how you can be of extreme importance to an upcoming (and possibly big) open source project.

A bit of context to start.

I'm Victor Duarte. I have been independently working on a new open source tool for the last 2 years called Faugra: it means FAUna + GRAphql, plus it was intended as a pun with the word "Foie gras''.

The name sucks tbh, but it has been fine as a codename until I properly launch it with a better name.

Besides the name issue, it has proved to actually be quite a good piece of software as I have collected very promising feedback from the community and the developers who tried it out.

I've managed to help developers create fully featured backends in record time (or kinda skip it completely, in some ways), giving me the feeling that I should bring this project to the masses as early as possible. Thus, I started getting ready for a great launch soon!

But back to the name problem: many test users got confused with how the names fauna and faugra are used in different places and made it clear that we need to find a more suitable, less confusing name. That's how we, together, started seeking a new name and eventually landed at "brainyduck" as the new name for it.

Since then we have been talking to multiple developers in the JS community and, with their help, I might be able to free up the "brainy" handler in NPM. I will be able to create an organisation and publish my software as "@brainy/duck" in the NPM registry (and all the upcoming different @brainy/** flavours/animals in that same organization as well).

I am also working towards a nice domain name for it (I've asked the holders of brainy.sh to hand it over to us, so we might have brainy.sh/duck available soon).

The last piece of the puzzle is the handler (username) we will be using at Github. We would love to be able to host the project at github.com/brainy/duck to match the pattern in all the other places, avoiding making users confused. And that's where you play a crucial role to make it all possible!

We didn't manage to convince the user brainy to change his username to something else and then hand it over to us. He is a nice guy willing to help, but he has accumulated lots of work and historical contributions in the open source community since the early 2000s, even before Github existed. To him, changing an username is not easy and can possibly lead to some problems.

However, he is willing to make all that effort if we find him a better fitting username, such as @brane.
And that's why, as I mentioned, you are the only person who can help us to make all of that happen.

For that reason, I would like to make you a special invitation to go and check out Faugra and give it a try!

If you like what you see, I would then kindly ask you to consider how you could give us some help. Would it be possible for you to hand over the @brane handler here in github to us, helping us achieve the name transition we planned? How can we retribute in any way to make it interesting to you as well?

I didn't mention before, but I will of course include your name and future github url in the acknowledgment section of the project, next to all future sponsors and contributors.

I am also open to suggestions of other alternative names, in case you are not willing to give up on the name you own.

I am aware that holding a username/handler feels very personal and intimate, and that transferring it to someone else can be frustrating to say the least. But I would like to hear from you how that makes you feel, and, if possible, what I could do to make it easier on your side.

Please consider my request and let me know if there is anything I can do to help you make the adjustments needed. I am really looking forward to hearing your opinion on all of this!

[zvictor]

hi @brane

Just an update in case you are still thinking about it.
We are working hard and getting a lot of things prepared for a strong launch in the near future!
Our CLI has been redesigned and we have just released an independent service to provide the missing pieces in the build chain.

Having the names and domains figured out would allow us to publish the right endpoints.
Here is how I envision it working:

NPM package	@brainy/duck
Repository	brainy/duck
Website	brainy.sh/duck
Schema Import	duckpuke.brainy.sh

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Did you have the chance to check the project out? 🙂