What’s with the name Sunday?

When I was about to become a father, just like most flustered first-time parents, my wife and I subconsciously opened up our minds to child names that sounded unique. Over time, that subconscious attention evolved into a list with no one name obviously better or worse than another.

It wasn’t very different when Sid and I started working on Sunday. We prepared a list of names that kept hyperbolic pace with the number of lines of code we wrote. As often happens with such long lists, when you revisit the older entries, you can’t help but think “What was I thinking when I wrote this down?”.

Some honourable mentions from that list include amar (which means love in Español and got struck down because who has the energy to explain to people that we don’t mean अमर (immortal)) and Xing (from the movie Hotel Transylvania which got struck down because it’s not like we’re targeting children).

One day, I was reading this beautiful article titled 'The Tyranny of the Marginal User' by Ivan Vendrov. An except from the article reads

What I did not expect was that 2016-era OKCupid was the best that online dating would ever get. That the tools that people use to find the most important relationship in their lives would get worse, and worse, and worse. OKCupid, like the other acquisitions of Match.com, is now just another Tinder clone - see face, swipe left, see face, swipe right. A digital nightclub. And I just don’t expect to meet my wife in a nightclub.

I kinda had an epiphany looking at this beautiful analogy (Tinder ↔ digital nightclub). Somehow, this led me to think in the direction - if dating apps were days of the week, Tinder would be a Friday. And what we had set out to build had to be a Sunday. And since where I grew up, Sundays were meant to be spent with family, this gave birth to our core promise to our users - “Find someone to spend your Sundays with”.

At the end of it all, I wish naming children was as easy as naming products. But products, even unborn ones, have a personality, very much unlike children. So while I do engage in a fair bit of post-rationalisation, the truth is that the name Sunday was the result of an epiphany, and my daughter’s name a result of, mostly, akkad bakkad bambey bo.

- Aashish