I read a handful of naming guides — the Stripe guide on choosing a company name and a long Reddit thread where founders shared what worked and what they regretted. The common advice was to keep it short, easy to spell, and not already taken on the major platforms.

I listed a few candidates, checked domain availability for each, and eliminated anything that felt generic or required a hyphen. The final choice was the one that survived the “say it out loud three times” test and had a clean .com and .in available. I also ran a quick trademark search on the Indian IP office portal to avoid future clashes.

With the name settled, I moved to the operational basics:

  • GitHub Education Pack – Applied using a university email. The pack gave private repositories, Actions minutes and a few marketplace credits, which covered the source control and CI needs for the prototype code.
  • Organisation profile – Created a GitHub organisation, added a profile README that explains the mission in two sentences and links to the public blog. The README also lists the main repositories so visitors can find the code without hunting.
  • Blog integration – Connected the existing Hexo blog to the organisation by adding the blog’s repository as a submodule in the organisation’s “website” repo and configuring the deploy key so the blog can still publish to GitHub Pages on every push.
  • Issue templates and labels – Added a bug‑report template, a feature‑request template and a small label set (bug, enhancement, documentation, good‑first‑issue). This keeps the issue tracker usable from day one.
  • Basic CI – A single GitHub Actions workflow that runs lint, unit tests and a build check on every pull request. It fails fast and keeps the main branch green.

The whole setup took an afternoon. The checklist‑in‑prose version for another student founder:

  1. Pick a name that passes the spelling, pronunciation and availability checks.
  2. Apply for the GitHub Education Pack (or the equivalent student tier on another platform).
  3. Create an organisation, write a two‑sentence mission README, and link the public blog.
  4. Add issue templates, a label scheme and a minimal CI workflow.
  5. Verify that a test pull request runs the workflow and merges cleanly.

Nothing fancy, just the minimum that lets a team collaborate without fighting the tools. Keeping the stack simple also makes onboarding new teammates faster.