Week 1 Lab: Evidence of Naming

A short survey of your own files, finding where you've used a filename to do version control's job, and what it was standing in for

22 February 2027

Before the session#

Go looking, not guessing. Check a downloads folder, a shared drive, an email thread with attachments, a folder of assignment drafts: anywhere files accumulate without anyone enforcing a naming policy. Bring three real filenames that carry some version-like signal in the name itself: a trailing number, “final,” “old,” “backup,” a date, a set of initials, a (1) a browser added on your behalf.

Do not invent examples. The point is that this is common enough that you won’t have to.

In the session#

Each signal gets read out and sorted: what problem was it solving? Some are answering “which is current,” some “who touched this,” some “am I allowed to delete the other one.” A few will turn out to be answering nothing at all: noise left over from a system that auto-renamed something and nobody noticed.

Afterwards#

Keep the three filenames. Later weeks ask what a version-control system would have recorded automatically, for the same three files, and how much of your naming scheme survives once it does.