I go by bigOmega
Platforms I’m in as bigOmega and the story behind the name
- Profile/Contact
Website, Skype, LinkedIn, Polywork - Dev & Design
Behance, Github, DeviantArt, Codepen, Dribble - Social Media
Flickr, Youtube, Instagram, Imgur, SoundCloud, Pinterest, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Steam - Other
StackOverflow, Bitbucket, Medium, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Quora, Chess.com, NPM, Dev.to, Devpost, Hashnode, Dev.to, Twitch
Checkout my webpage for an animated version of this.
The story behind it
This was back during the end of 2012 (yes, after “The End”). When I realized the platforms I use will become a big deal, I wanted to put myself out there before I make the next big thing. As I started I found that choosing a handle had a lot of limitations.
- It has to be very unique, common ones are always already taken.
- You have to choose it early. ie., early in your days before you start setting a name for yourself. You want your handle to BE there when you achieve something, not create one after that.
- It has to be catchy and easy
- Different platforms expect different types of handles. Some expect to be funny and some, not really. Twitter/Github — CrazyBrat/SrikanthLogic
- It must mean something.
- Preferably it has your name in it.
Case Study
rajbala47, abishekk92 — Good, but why the numbers
manojlds — Perfect, except for the pronunciation of “lds”
nihahs — Perfect (reverse of his name, Shahin)
codingnirvana — Perfect
manthosh — Perfect. Not everybody gets such a unique name
dEim05 — Bad, though unique, hard to remember the numbers
cegprakash — Good, except “ceg” which was his college name
enthudrives — Perfect
iamdhivya — Okay’ish, though cool in Twitter and such
tamizhgeek — Perfect
poisonaavi — Perfect++, but includes a non-English word (aavi — smoke)
^ I’m awed by the multiple puns in the last one
Having my name in the id would be very helpful. But Bharath Raja was not unique at all. I tried shortening, BhaRa(dota), RaBha, 😑 Nope, not going any further, well it couldn’t be shortened at all. Grr… I tried all combinations of it. I definitely didn’t want any numbers added to my name. So, when I looked at the perfect handles, I realized it’s okay to not have your name, as long as it means something to you and it’s short and catchy.
I started off with the kind of stuff I was doing, mostly coding, looked into coding concepts, here, there, everywhere. I derived posimpable on the way. I can’t recall my other choices but after a couple of days, I fixed on bigOmega. Since O looks similar to the symbol Ω (omega) which the word is trying to represent, I was able to replace it wherever required.
In computation, big-Ω is an Asymptotic notation that denotes the running time of an algorithm. Thus it’s used to measure the complexity of the program. I took it and made a title that says,
bigΩmega
Measuring the complexity of Life
Wherever I couldn’t get bigOmega, I went with big0mega (big-zero-mega) or big_omega or bigomega3 based on desperation. Though not perfect, it fits in all places I care about, art, design, programming, social, formal, gaming, journalism, etc., and I’m planning to keep this until I can think of and get-everywhere a better one.
