Episode Details

[00:00:00] Caleb: Okay. Today. We're going to talk about Livewire the name. Where did it come from? How did how did we get here? What what changed along the way and what are some of the problems that I'm still coming across? So Livewire as you know, it was inspired by a package called Phoenix live. So Phoenix is a framework like laravel for the language Elixir like laravel is to PHP and Chris McCord the author of Phoenix.
He demoed this new tool these working on called live view Phoenix live view and I saw the blog post for this my mind blew up and I spent the next eight months building live where and it started out being really similar to the live view and now it's become something different but similar in some ways and definitely took inspiration from so.

So the first name that Livewire had was Phoenix light was a phoenix live view laravel proof-of-concept not an official name, but that was the first thing I called. [00:01:00] It was just a proof of concept for Phoenix live view inside laravel and I thought that I might just call it laravel live view but I wasn't sure like I thought that might be kind of lame to just steal someone's name for another for a package in another Community.
Like if it was like, I don't know view redox or something instead of view acts like kind of. On spin on it. So that's what it was out of the gate. The first the first name I came up with kind of off the cuff. I think was lightwire so light wire and basically the my goal was I wanted to convey something like electroluminescence electroluminescence.

I don't know like luminescent electric but not I don't know. So I like what I wanted wire. I don't know why I came up with wire. But I wanted wire and because it connects things and it's you know, I want to basically I wanted live where it's funny because I can't think of why I wouldn't pick a live wire but I definitely struggled with it for a while.

I [00:02:00] had tons and tons of names written down on envelopes and paper and whatever like what am I going to call this thing? I just didn't love light. And I think maybe part of why I didn't love it as people kept like Miss stating it. I think they were saying I think maybe they were saying Livewire by accident.
Maybe that was my cue. I forgot the process. Basically it was this process of me like sitting with an idea and brainstorming a bunch and then after a while the right the right name sort of emerges because it's the one with the fewest surprises. It's like the principle of least surprise. It's one of the few surprises.
It meets all the criteria. Is best is anyone else would and probably more so that's kind of how I made the decision. It wasn't an obvious like oh, this is Livewire. It was like it took some tumbling, you know to get there to that point. So I called it live where then the next step is. So live view is capital L and capital V.
And so the question is is it live wire with a capital? W? Or is it just live where one word [00:03:00] and so this is something I struggled with and still do struggle with because people do write it as live where with a capital W from time to time because I think that and that's just kind of tells me like that's what at least some people assume.

It's how you would spell it and I would probably assume that too but here's the reason why I'm sort of sticking with Livewire lowercase. W this is kind of crazy, but it's one of those things that actually matters to me. I'm trying to think of an example. There's other examples of packages sort of named like this like maybe sigh shell the thing under Artisan Tinker.

There's definitely other packages that have how man I can't think of a good one. There are definitely good ones though. Shoot. Anyway when you are if you live where is going to have a classes? It's going to be a namespace in PHP, right and when you import that namespace, is it going to be live?
Capital W wire like if it's if it's live wire in the