3.2. Stop using names New / Latest

There is a problem with the attribute/label New. Anything that is New will become old. With cities, it takes huge planning endeavour. So a New Town and Old Town may make sense. But with software and designs, iterations is very fast many times. New can become Old pretty soon. May be in few days. Definitely in months. Probably in few hours as well. Same issue is with the attribute Latest. One small modification, and Latest is no longer latest.

Imagine you are working on something, as simple as creating a logo. You created the file and you may call it my-new-logo.jpeg. See! There is new in there. You may want to call it something like my-april-22-logo.jpeg (or some variation of that). But please don’t use word new here. When you share the first draft with some of your closest friends, it would be easy to communicate with them regarding your first iterations.

Summary

If you use the name new or latest, stop using that! Stop using all such adjectives.

You may not be do this consciously. But subconsciously, you may be doing it.

As an alternative, use the current year, month, date as your suffix. If you are iterating too much, then add hour and minutes as well. This way you have a relative idea about your iteration. whether this experiment was about something that you did before lunch / after lunch.

In the section Versioning, we would see more structured way of looking at it. (Jump to that section if you feel impatient).