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Fellow Developers, What Should Our Last Name Be?

Audrey Roy Greenfeld on March 07, 2020

When @DanielRoyGreenfeld and I got married, I took the "Greenfeld" part of his name, and he took the "Roy" part of my name. We thought it was a n...
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Alex Kadis

My thought is Royfeld. It’s one word and the .com is available (obviously the most important reason to choose a name).

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld • Edited

I like this because it's the first part of my surname and the last part of his, and it keeps the interesting "feldiness" quality. I bought royfeld.com.

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Alex Kadis

Yay!!

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Ben Halpern

the .com is available

greenroy.com too!

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Valentin Prugnaud 🦊

Definitely the option I would have gone for! 🤘🏻

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Daniel Starner • Edited

This is the wholesome content I came to dev.to to see 😃 Why not mix it up with Feldroy? Seems cool and science-fiction-y.

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

There is something futuristic and 22nd-century about Feldroy. I could see our grandkids learning to walk on their smart walkers and having that last name. I bought feldroy.com.

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Daniel Starner

Wait, did you actually change your name to Feldroy? 😮 This is wicked....after all the problems and questions posed to me that I've somehow manged to solve, this is by far the coolest and most unique that I will tell people about. Congrats on the new name!

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

Yep, we're in the process of changing it! It's a bit complicated with COVID-19 closures shutting down much of Los Angeles government, but we're starting with the things we can change, like online profiles and our website. Your suggestion was a huge help to us, and your little explanation was what tipped the scales toward us making the move to Feldroy, so thank you so much for that. 🙏🧡

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rhymes

+1 for Feldroy. Feels like the name of a hypothetical protagonist of a book by Aldous Huxley

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Ben Halpern

Greenroy?

Similar convention to the name "Elroy" or "Conroy"

At least nobody in this mix will end up being named Brogan BamBrogan

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld • Edited

I like it a lot...it came up in brainstorming but we hadn't considered it seriously until now. I bought greenroy.com.

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Daniel Feldroy • Edited

I'll switch to greenroy if the next book we write together lists you first as the author. ♥️♥️♥️

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Daniel Elkington

If you decide to change tack completely and cause the most system errors possible, you could always change your surname to ’;DROP DATABASE
😉

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Peyton McGinnis • Edited
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Jennifer Davis

Growfield combination of both names, does add that i and w in exchange for dropping the een. It could just be Growfeld as well since feld is german for field anyways but may be more likely to get misspelled. Symbolizes a new tomorrow of combined families.

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

This is beautiful and so clever. I love the symbolism! I found growfield.com was taken, but I bought growfeld.com.

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Shannon Crabill

I lost it at the "this is your chance to save our family from system errors" picture.

😂

I like RoyGreenfeld.

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld • Edited

Thanks for the feedback, that's helpful as RoyGreenfeld looks a bit weird to my eye still when I see it in the Dev.to sidebar as I type. But we're trying it out to see if it grows on us.

I'm happy you liked the picture 😊

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

Haha, thanks for taking the time to share that. Gallant-King is an amazingly fun name, I love that.

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Daniel Feldroy • Edited

What if they named a son Arthur?

They could also change King to Queen and name a daughter Victoria!

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Swastik Baranwal

I liked how you and your husband changed your last name to show each other your love! Guess I will try this I will get married! 😂

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Chris Bohn

I recommend against camelCase for family names.
A few years ago, on the first day of class, I'm calling roll.
...Davis, Edwards, Holdridge...
One student starts to look nervous.
...Vinton, Wendt, Wilson...
He's dancing in his seat.
...Zrust, and finally
deMayo
He relaxes.
And that is the day I explained the ASCII table to freshmen on their first day of college.

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

Great story! Okay, royGreenfeld is ruled out.

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Chris B

roy_greenfeld

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Mehdi M.

You both keep your own names: this merge feature doesn't bring any value to the software.

As for your daughter name, unless you can rollback the migration, you can still decide her last name by playing shifumi, which is both modern and bold.

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Theresa

I came to suggest Greenroy (first choice) and Royfeld. I see those have already both been suggested, so just count this as my additional vote for either of those options!

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

Just to commiserate with you, my daughter is originally from another country which uses 2 last names as common practice. This is too confusing for most American systems (human and computer). It seems the first last name is usually assumed to be a 2nd middle name. And she is usually referred to by the last last name. Even though historically the first last name is considered the primary one.

Probably obvious to you already, but I think there is additional confusion in your particular case because Roy is a common American first name. So, Roy Greenfeld sounds like its own first/last name combo. And it looks like an accidental name nested in another name. I had a moment of confusion myself when I saw your post.

I like the other suggestions of "Greenroy" "Feldroy" "Royfeld". On cursory lookup, Roy means "king" and Greenfeld means "green field". So you could also go with something like Kingfield. :)

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Ryan Brown

Greenfeld[Roy]

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Jake Wesorick

Feldroy?

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SyntaxSeed (Sherri W)

I have heard of some couples tracing up both their family trees far enough till they find a common last name & use that. But that's rare.

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

This is a really interesting idea. @danielroygreenfeld this could be fun for us to do 😄

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Aaron Crosman

This is a great post. Now we just all have to remember that the bug is not the name being used, but the systems that cannot handle expected input in name fields.

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Thorsten Hirsch

Seinfeld. It still has the "feld" in it.

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Saurabh Daware 🌻

greenroy? please tell us when you decide the final name cause we all are into this now🥺

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Terica

Really great, novel read!

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

A quick update: @danielfeldroy and I have changed our last names to Feldroy on DEV. We also updated our company org name.

We're testing it here on DEV first to see how it feels before we deploy the change to our GitHub, Twitter, and other online profiles. Then after we see how that goes, we may gain the courage to move roygreenfeld.com to feldroy.com. So yeah, you heard it here first and were a part of making this change in our lives 💗

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Alexandre Plennevaux • Edited

GreenFieldOfJoy ? :-)

Or you make it sound like you are French aristocrats ? Audrey and Roy du Champs de La Joie Verte

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Michael Jolley

If someone is changing their name, why would it ever be anything but Inigo Montoya.

Think of all the masterful introductions you'd have the rest of your life.

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Lorraine Lee

I guess one famous example that comes to mind is Jennifer Mulhern Granholm and her husband Daniel Granholm Mulhern, the former governor and former first gentleman of Michigan, respectively.

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Liana Felt (she/her)

Froyd?

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Chris B

My wife took my surname but kept her Chinese name. So she uses either.

Our daughter has my English name too and my wife's Chinese surname name so can do the same

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Ben Sinclair

I look forward to family photos with Placeholder Greeneryfold.

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Massimo Artizzu

I've never understood this practice of "taking the name" of your spouse.

In the most common tradition, the wife's last name just changes - it always seemed to me like she becomes "property" of the husband. Relic of a patriarchal society.

Your approach is far more advanced and respectful, but facing all those doubts and questions is a little silly IMO 😅

So my suggestion would be: just keep your original last names. It's your love that will show that you're married 😊
Many countries do that and they don't feel incapacitated just because they don't get to say "the Roys" or "the Greenfelds" when referring to a family.

Of course that would be too late for you folks. But I honestly don't know what to suggest.

By the way, in Spain the children get two last names by default 😉 It's still a little man-centric (the father's first surname comes first and that's the one that's inherited), but shows that there's plenty of traditions to get inspiration from.

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Samuel

Greenfeldroy sounds a lot closer to a surname, moves you up the ABC list, and was not even mentioned in your article. As a side note, I really like the name; it sounds Welsh or Irish.

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Chris B

$a

 
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Berislav Lopac

I have a strong feeling that in John's particular case it was not only the hyphen that was the issue... :D

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Audrey Roy Greenfeld

Great points here, The Furious Ape. I totally agree on systems badly needing an update. It's complex enough of a problem that we need a common spec telling developers how to implement such an update.

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Berislav Lopac