Trevor PaughSystems engineer
Trevor PaughProject Chronicles

Chronicles / Eboda Gymnast

American English

Design

The project switches to American English everywhere: interface text, documentation, code comments, identifiers, and commit messages. The builders had defaulted to British spellings, and the owner noticed. A sweep of about a hundred hits followed the morning's merges, and new work follows the rule from now on.

Nobody had decided which English the app spoke, so the builders used the one they reached for first, which turned out to be British. Colour, centre, cancelled, grey, and a font “licence” field that generated a whole table of them.

The owner’s note settled it. The rule was saved, the agents in flight were told, and once the day’s three remaining branches had merged a dedicated sweep went through the codebase: the font-table generator and its output, an error variant renamed, the interface strings, the docs. Quotations from the owner in the planning record were left exactly as written, and a handful of identifiers that come from outside the project kept their spelling because changing them would break something.

It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that is cheap on day five and expensive on day fifty.