I didn’t want to tie my identity to my work.
That line comes from someone who built a career around eileencodes, then deliberately rejected
“Codes” as a legal surname. It landed with me because I went through a smaller but related
transition, from Paul to Pau. One dropped letter looks trivial from the outside. It isn’t. A name is
both a public interface and a private claim: repeated by everyone else, but lived by you.
Tech treats identity as an immutable primary key—a handle, a GitHub history, a title ladder—but people are not rows. A chosen name does not have to erase the person who carried the old one. Pau didn’t erase Paul. It made the name fit the person using it.