kjd

Disambiguation

My name is Kyle Davis. This is an extremely common name1. I have many name doppelgängers including:

For the record: I’m none of these people.

Social profile doppelgängers

Since my name is so un-unique I’ve always tried to have a more unique username.

I used the handle “stockholmux” for a long time and still do on some platforms. It was reasonably unique but isn’t reflective of what I did nor where I live. And the story behind it is long and boring. There are probably some UX professionals in Sweden who feel some consternation about me using it and showing up in searches.

A few years ago, when I took a job working for OpenSearch (née Open Distro), I decided to change up my name when registering for the users forums. I couldn’t come up with a name so I picked a random filler “searchymcsearchface”: paying homage to a certain naming disaster. Little did I know that during the controversies surrounding the creation of OpenSearch, that forum would be come very important (and by extension my silly handle). To this day, I think there are VPs and C-suite folks who know me under this ridiculous handle.

So, when I moved to not working with a search engine and into working with a Linux distribution in 2022, I used the same pattern linuxmclinuxface. None of these profiles were very important until I started my Mastodon profile linux_mclinuxface, which grew pretty quickly.

Fast forward months later, I realized that this wasn’t a terribly unique name. Someone had adopted the same handle on Reddit years earlier and… they didn’t really post about great things. To be clear: the linuxmclinuxface on Reddit is not me.

I guess naming is hard ¯\(ツ)/¯

  1. This is especially true in the US. It’s far less common here in Canada, to the point that people on the phone often mishear it as “Kyle Bavis” (?) or “Kyle David”. ↩

  2. Someone gave me one of his CDs a decade ago. It’s okay. ↩

  3. He lives in the same province as me. Fun! ↩

  4. He even shares the same middle initial ↩