The Story Behind Hopper's Name

Most of our hatchlings get cute nicknames before anything official sticks, and for a long time that was genuinely as far as naming went. Numbers on a chart, a nickname that felt right in the moment, nothing particularly planned. Last year that changed, and it happened because of a clutch that almost didn't happen at all.

That was the year Bajsa ate most of her eggs while laying, so we ended up with only eight hatched babies (the whole story is here). For that clutch, for the first time, I decided to actually give the babies a proper theme instead of just improvising names as we went.

I landed on scientists and inventors, specifically people whose ideas ended up shaping the world in a big way. That clutch became Einstein, Newton, Hawking, Maxwell, Darwin, Edison, Sally (after Sally Ride, the first American woman in space), and Hopper, named after Grace Hopper.

Out of that whole clutch, Hopper is the one who stayed with us. Not because of the name, the decision came long before it meant anything. Hopper had a rough start, months of refusing to eat, then a respiratory infection and a stuck shed that took the better part of two months to fully recover from. Somewhere in the middle of the worst of it, we made her a quiet promise that if she pulled through, she wasn't going anywhere. She pulled through. She stayed.

Grace Hopper was a computer scientist, and among a long list of contributions, she helped build one of the earliest programming debuggers. Which is where this gets a little too fitting. My actual day job is programming. So the snake we ended up keeping, out of that whole named clutch, happened to be the one carrying the name of someone who helped build the very thing I use every day. It's one of those coincidences that's almost too perfect to have planned, especially since we didn't plan any of it.

Hopper's enclosure lives on my office desk, right where I work and write code every day. And every so often, when she's curious and stretches up to look over at whatever I'm doing on the screen, I can't help but say it out loud: "Hopper is helping!" It's become a running joke at this point, but there's something genuinely nice about it too. The snake named after a debugger, watching over the desk where the actual debugging happens.

Sometimes a name is just a name. This one somehow turned out to mean a little more than that.