When picking clever pun names, it's important to choose words that executives won't feel silly saying.

Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, created the GIMP in college.

Years ago I worked on a project where a lot of the code was done in Tcl (pronounced "tickle"). Management would not say "tickle", instead they insisted on saying T-C-L. Tcl is a pretty neat language, and while I was on the project, I couldn't help but wonder how much it's name had held it back.

I call it 'T-C-L' despite being a programmer, because calling it 'tickle' just sounds stupid to me. 'Sequel' for 'SQL' similarly sounds weird so I just say 'S-Q-L'.

Maybe that's just me.

"Kubernetes" can also be considered silly. The industry as a whole tends to not be good at naming.

Have you ever been in a place where you turn on the light in the kitchen at night and what you see is a zillion cockroaches all over the place, on the floor, the walls, cupboards, everywhere, starting all at once to run and seek a dark place to hide in the moment you hit the light switch? Well I have. Looking at that is like looking at "replication" and "resiliency" in liquid state.

Call it CRDB then, which is also used in dev discussions. Perhaps they should officially rebrand it to that.