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What’s behind the name

We went through hundreds of names to find one that’s short, a bit of fun and still available online. How hard could it be?

A wall of the names we tried before Nohead, dimmed, with Nohead and its logo bright in the middle

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

— Phil Karlton

One down. Ask us about the cache in a year.

How hard could it be?

We wanted something nice and short. A little fun, but not a joke. Technical enough for developers to take seriously, friendly enough to get it right away. The kind of word you type into a terminal without wincing and say in a meeting without explaining.

That’s half of it. A developer product’s name also has to be available in surprisingly many namespaces:

  • domain name

  • CLI command

  • npm package and scope

  • Ruby gem

  • Python package

  • Homebrew formula

  • GitHub organization

  • X handle

It also should not step on anyone’s toes: not already someone’s company, product, library or trademark.

We went through hundreds of candidates. Bless AI automation! Of course, the good ones were taken. Some almost did it, but in the end it turned out there is a popular OSS library with that name or a registered trademark.

Head·less

head·less /ˈhɛd.ləs/ adjective

  1. without a head.

  2. computing running without a screen or interface: a headless server, a headless browser.

  3. of a CMS storing content and serving it over an API, leaving the website to you.

Riffing on the word headless, we landed on Nohead. Loved it. Checked the list: available (almost) everywhere. Card out, domain secured!

The product does what a headless CMS does, and more: it’s a full-featured data layer, a superset of a CMS, if you like. You define collections of typed fields. People edit the content in the editor, while apps and agents work with it through the API, the SDKs, the CLI or the MCP server. Search, images, roles and the full history of every change are built in. That’s why neither “headless” nor “CMS” made it into the name.

The logo concept almost came bundled with the name: a figure lifting its head off. Simple, and a little fun. We’re not into mascots, but it could play one if asked.

The .io part

It was available, and it fits perfectly. In tech circles, .io reads as I/O: data in, data out. That’s what the product is about. Content goes in through the editor, the API, the CLI or an agent. Data comes out through the API to whatever shows it. And you can export all of it as plain files.

No-head. One word. Capital N.

Written by a human, with an AI agent drafting through Nohead’s own MCP server. It lets agents read your schema, write and publish records, and compare or revert revisions, within their API key’s permissions.