Jun 14 2010

Introducing Singleton Brewing

I’ve been trying to come up with a name for myself as a brewer, or basically what my brewery would be called. Obviously, I’m not a brewery, or even a brewer in that sense – I just end up messing around and trying to make some delicious beer every now and then. But in the event that I wanted to enter a contents or anything like that, I figure I would need a name for myself. Since I’m a Flash Developer by trade, I wanted the name to have something in common with that. I went though some pretty nerdy names, but finally I settled on Singleton Brewing.

Named after the Singleton pattern in Object Oriented Programming, it was just the right amount of geek yet still sounds “normal” enough to non-developers. Here’s the explanation of the Singleton pattern in a nutshell from Wikipedia:

In software engineering, the singleton pattern is a design pattern used to implement the mathematical concept of a singleton, by restricting the instantiation of a class to one object. This is useful when exactly one object is needed to coordinate actions across the system. The concept is sometimes generalized to systems that operate more efficiently when only one object exists, or that restrict the instantiation to a certain number of objects (say, five). Some consider it an anti-pattern, judging that it is overused, introduces unnecessary limitations in situations where a sole instance of a class is not actually required, and introduces global state into an application.

I have really two thoughts on why I thought Singleton was an appropriate name. (Note: I’m going to talk programming for a bit to explain, so I’ll try not to lose the non-developers here). First, since a Singleton restricts to only one instantiation of an object, it can (loosely) be thought of a “one and only” type of thing – I guess kind of arrogant but still fitting. Secondly, some people think that using a Singleton is hacky and is a bad practice, and at the same time, I might try and do some pretty bizarre experiments (such as the catnip beer, and my current Special Project Series #1 which is currently underway and legally needs be be kept secret under NDA). So, it might not be the strongest connection, but the name seemed to fit without being too nerdy (like “Method Overload Brewery”) and in the end, the name just grew on me.

A current placeholder page is set up at singletonbrewing.com, but don’t expect any real content there for some time.