8,400 GitHub repos share a naming convention that traces back to South Park joke

4 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by robbyrussell

4 Comments

robbyrussell

5 hours ago

I know this because I'm the guy in the middle. Let me explain.

2006: Trey Parker and Matt Stone write "Oh My Science!" into two Season 10 episodes... a joke about replacing religious expressions with scientific ones.

2008: A coworker and I think this is hilarious. We build a Twitter side project called Oh My Science. It fetched tweets from the API and awarded gold stars to anyone caught thanking science for something they might have otherwise credited to a deity.

2009: I have a messy folder of Zsh configuration files. I want to convince a few coworkers to install it on their laptops so I don't have to remember all the verbose git commands we kept typing while pairing on their machines. I need a name for the repo. I glance over at our oh-my-science private repo. I shrug. "oh-my-zsh" it is.

Today, there are 8,400+ public "oh-my-..." repositories on u/GitHub.

There's a decent chance you've used one. There's a chance you've built one.

If you have, I'd love to know... did you know where the name came from?

n1xis10t

4 hours ago

That’s really funny. I think I’ve seen one of these repos before, but I don’t think I’ve used one and I haven’t created one. Not too late to hop on the bandwagon I suppose!