Introduction

This app initially was an exploration on how to deploy web apps. I had already explored creating a static website with the site you are on now: timroberts.site. Now I wanted something interactive that I could program. An app name generator seemed like the most simple way to create something and get it live straight away.

Explored Technologies

I wanted to deploy something using Flask because I was familiar with Python and had played with some Flask apps in the past however I have never deployed anything before. To prepare myself for deploying an app I wanted to first try developing in a local container to see what the experience is like, additionally this would be advantageous to make sure I was able to develop with consistent environments. So I downloaded Docker Desktop so that I was able to create a container for my new Flask Web App.

When it came to deploying the app I went with Fly.io which has excellent source control integration. When I initially deployed I was worried by a prompt saying that some files had to be added to complete the deployment but when I returned to my source control it had created a pull request to ensure that my source control would contain these files in any future deployments.

Adding it as a subdomain was really easy as it just required some configruration on both my site and on fly.io.

Initial version, how it works and further work

The initial version I created was very simple, I didn't want it to use Artificial Intelligence and wanted to use simple Natural Language exploitation so I could easily understand how it works and improve it.

The first version would just take the first keyword and then add the suffix 'er'. For example adding the prompt: 'an app that tracks your mood' would return 'trackser'. This led to some funny demonstrations to friends as it is wildly simpler than what is possible and you can just ask ChatGPT nowadays for some decent App Names.

I did improve the algorithm eventually to add different suffixes at random. In the future I would like to add other methods of generating app names to vary it, for example using more than one word from the prompt or maybe even prefixes.

try the app here: App Name Generator