Journal · 28 April 2026
Naming events so your future self survives
The most expensive sentence in App Analytics is not a SQL query. It is an event named click in 2024 that three teams later treat as a conversion. Pipeline Nodecore’s Event Taxonomy Clinic exists because future-you cannot interview past-you, and the commit message will only say “analytics.”
We ask students to write names as if a stranger will grep them at 11 p.m. during an incident. That stranger is you, with less patience.
A small house style
Object then past-tense verb — paywall_presented, schedule_retrieved, invoice_exported. Present-tense marketing words (engage, delight) do not survive a warehouse.
Properties carry the adjectives. Do not mint paywall_presented_ios and paywall_presented_android. Use platform. The podcast company in our Funnel Grammar case had two surnames for the same moment and a funnel that looked healthy until it was split.
Forbidden synonyms. If iOS says viewed and Android says seen, you do not have two platforms. You have two products pretending to share a chart. Pick one verb and migrate; do not “map in the BI layer” forever.
Kill dates. Deprecated events stay in the contract with an owner and a date after which they must not fire. Ghost events from a retired Android module showed up in a House Commission last year. They had been inflating a funnel step for a quarter.
What we do not name
We do not name every hover. We do not name every screen if a screen is only a container for a qualifying action. Taxonomy is a product surface. If the dictionary is longer than the onboarding, you are collecting souvenirs.
Paper before pixels: write the contract, then light the SDK. Cohort Signal week two is this essay as homework. If you only need the compressed version, the clinic is six days and engineers attend the last two whether they like it or not.