How to Choose the Perfect Parameter Name

“They told me naming is hard. They didn’t tell me it’s an entire boss battle.”

I’m a frontend dev, part-time API wrangler, full-time naming warrior.

If you’ve ever stared at an endpoint thinking,

“Wait, is it product_id, prodId, or just... id?”

You’re not alone. I’ve been there. Too many times. Sometimes I feel like 30% of my job is coding, and 70% is renaming stuff until no one complains in PR review.

Today, I’ll walk you through a very real, very chaotic day in Devland — a day where inconsistent parameter names almost cost us a deadline — until I discovered a secret weapon: EchoAPI.

Let’s gear up.

The Naming Trap

Time: 9:00 AM
Mission: Build a product search endpoint
Input needed: Product ID, category, price range

I start strong, confident. I name things like a good citizen of Devtopia:

{
  "productId": "12345",
  "categoryName": "electronics",
  "priceRange": "$100 - $500"
}

Looks clean. Structured. Human-readable.
10/10 — I’m ready for Hacker News.

Then I peek at yesterday’s commit. And it’s chaos:

{
  "prodId": "12345",
  "cat": "electronics",
  "price": "500"
}

Oh no.

• cat → Could be a product category. Or a literal cat. Or a typo from cut.
• price → $500? Min? Max? Total? Wishful thinking?

And now my frontend breaks because the key name changed. Again.

This isn’t an API. It’s a word puzzle.

If your API feels like a guessing game, it’s not ready for prod.

Calling in the Naming Gurus (aka Google)

After a few minutes of shaking my fist at the void, I do what every dev does: Google it.

API Naming Best Practices? I’ve seen blog posts, style guides, Reddit rants. But today, I go straight to the pros: the Google API Style Guide.

Turns out, they’ve been through this naming war and lived to write it down. Some golden rules:

Naming is UX for developers.
If I need to look at the docs every time I hit an endpoint, we have a problem.

The Great Team Name-Off

Time: 2:00 PM
Scene: Zoom call with backend, QA, and designer

We're integrating a payment flow. Simple, right? Until we start naming stuff.

• I say: customerEmail
• Backend says: user_mail
• QA test data uses: "email123"
• Designer Figma file says: email address

The result? A Babel tower of parameter naming.

Every team uses different words for the same thing.
And of course, no one thinks they’re wrong.

That’s when I remember something a coworker shared: EchoAPI.

It’s like ChatGPT, but it speaks Swagger and OpenAPI.
So I try it out.

I just type: “A user submits an order ID, picks a payment method, and enters an amount.”

EchoAPI returns:"order_id", "payment_method", "amount".

EchoAPI doesn’t just spit out parameter names — with AI Generates Fake Data, it fills them with smart, realistic fake data that fits your business logic perfectly

It generates these parameters:

{
  "order_id": "ORD12345",
  "payment_method": "Credit Card",
  "amount": 25.99
}

You’re not getting generic placeholders like "123" or "test".

This means your API examples, tests, and docs instantly feel professional and meaningful — saving time and avoiding confusion.

Now when someone asks, “What should we call the user’s payment thingy again?”

We don’t argue.
We just say: paymentMethod — and EchoAPI already set the precedent.

EchoAPI is not just a tool. It’s a team argument diffuser.

EchoAPI Utility Belt

Parameter Naming Cheat Sheet

Here’s the cheat sheet I keep taped to my monitor now:

Final : The Naming Saga Continues

Let’s face it — naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science. (Yes, that and cache invalidation.)

But good names are a gift to future devs. Including yourself in 6 months when you’ve totally forgotten what xyzValue even meant.

Thanks to tools like EchoAPI, we don’t have to whiteboard naming conventions anymore or die on hills like "isValid vs validStatus."

Instead, we get to focus on what actually matters: building good products with clear, usable, human-friendly APIs.

And hey, if we can avoid another userDataFinalFinal_v2.json, that’s already a win.