Why
I spent a decade doing full stack web development and always enjoyed the frontend side of it. These days the work leans elsewhere with Platform Engineering/DevOps/SRE/Data Engineering stuff.
So! I built “namegen” to freshen the skills that don’t get used regularly to scratch an itch. I love using codenames to remove the paralysis of naming stuff and to get down to business, and wanted to put something together for that for years.
It’s also important to me to exercise my brain and stave off to any brain rot from the current AI boom. No AI was used for the code. Only for generating lists of nouns/adjectives.
What
It is a small web app that generates ‘codenames’ based on a format introduced to me by someone I worked with at Bushel: adjective-noun.
(Ok well, it was actually noun-emoji if I recally fully, but I made it a bit more broad).
I love simple web tools with a single purpose and a bit of silly utility. But, this was more of an excuse to work with AlpineJS again and to catch up on Tailwind, which I had not used in a while. Keeping the scope small meant I could focus on the parts I wanted to practice: Alpine data binding, a tidy component structure, and themes driven by CSS variables. The output is more than a plain list too: names can be copied as JSON, XML, or YAML, which makes the tool genuinely useful for scripts and config files.
Fun Highlights
- Settings live in the URL, so you can share a specific configuration as a plain link.
- There’s multiple output types for giggles (mostly to exercise some Javascript and UI design skills).
- Multiple styles, e.g.:
kebab-case,camelCase, etc. (for same reason as above) - The color themes are pure grayscale too, which means Dark Reader renders the dark mode cleanly on its own, no toggle needed.
- (Minor peeve of mine is when themes sometimes interfere with Dark Reader giving ugly color hues)
Tech
Built with plain HTML, AlpineJS, and Tailwind CSS. Try it: namegen.
What’s Next?
Scratching this itch was cathartic. I think next I might put together something to scratch another itch: a spin on cron expressionfor
various syntaxes (not all cron expression syntaxes are the same, e.g.:
Spring Boot @Schedule vs k8s CronJob, etc.).