Draftsman: What's in a name?

For this particular post, I would like to take you back about one year and three months. It was the beginning of Spring 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and Bo started sharing his new idea and vision for complex transactional serverless applications. We went back and forth for a few weeks discussing his ideas. Some elements that always came back were modeling our software (Model Driven Design) so that a business analyst could create a complex application, by just clicking together what they needed. Naturally, we focused on Domain Driven Design (DDD) since it allows us to focus on the context of the business and in the language the business analysts, domain experts and developers already know.

During these sessions we started to notice that the work we do as software engineers and architects, especially when basing our work on Model Driven Development, had a lot of similarities with the work of an Architect. When we look at the construction of a building, the architect is responsible for creating a solid foundation to build upon and structural integrity, as well as designing the building in such a way that it appeals to its audience. The architect hands his designs off to a contractor who will then begin the building process. In software engineering, specifically at Draftsman, we are trying to do the same. We draw up the designs and architecture of a system, using tools such as DDD, and based on these drawings we generate a fully functioning serverless application. The business analysts, also known as domain experts, design the system (draw) and the Draftsman Engine will turn those designs into high quality functional code.

This analogy with Architects became a theme, so much so that we decided to look in this realm for a good name for our project. Through many searches in OneLook related to architects and the tools they use we landed on some promising names. One of these was Draftsman. A draftsman is, according to the definition on MacMillen, someone whose job it is to draw the plans for something that someone is going to make or build. In other sources a draftsman is considered a master builder, a craftsman or even an architect. We just knew that when we landed on this name that this was the one. I'm sure you can imagine the excitement we felt when Draftsman.io was still available.

We got the name of our project covered and we're very happy with it. But we also have a designer studio that we wanted to build. Like I mentioned earlier, we also searched for tools in an architects toolkit. We came across many different tools, such as a lead holder and tracepaper. Tracepaper is the paper that is used by architects, or draftsmans, to draw their technical designs on. And, if you're catching our drift, it seemed like the perfect fit to us. Without hesitation it just clicked and from that moment on our designer studio was labeled Tracepaper.

What made these two names stand-out to us? Well for one, in Search Engine Optimization it is recommended that your brand name is a unique one-word word. Which narrowed down our options significantly. And from there, we just fell in love with the relation to Architects. On top of that, these are great brand names to carry the message we want to share with the world. Even Papers by Draftsman is a carefully chosen name that fits inside this little ecosystem we created so far.

I hope you enjoyed this different take on our posts this week. For now we are going to continue working on our dream to build the most accessible designer studio that is capable of designing world-class transactional software, in the cloud. Until next time.