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Goodbye fgandiya, Hello faraixyz

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I’ve had fgandiya for most of my online life. It make sense—first name initial and last name1. Since I’m Farai Gandiya, you get fgandiya. It can clash with my mom’s who has the same first name initial but besides that, I’ve never failed to get a handle. Using it for my domain makes sense too. Ever since I got the GitHub Education Pack in college, I’ve used fgandiya.me2 which included a .me Namecheap domain (affiliate link). It’s been useful and since farai.com was taken, it was easy to get.

So if it’s so great, why am I switching away from it? Well, the other day I was with my friend who came back to Zimbabwe for Christmas. Here’s how it went-ish.

[F]riend: Dude, I’ve got a side hustle with a website hosted at company.com.

[M]e: I got a website too at fgandiya.me

F: Lololololololol

M: What the hell is so funny?

F: Dude can you not hear it?

M: I can. What of it?

F: Seriously, just sounds wrong.

M: Bro, it’s just my first name initial and last name. fgandiya.me

F: fgandiya— eff Gandiya.

M: Oh, mxm. Dumbass. 🙄

Rather immature, but he did have a point. It could have some unfortunate connotations. After meeting him, I went looking for another domain for the hell of it. I looked under farai to see what was there and saw that farai.xyz was available for $1. At that price I couldn’t pass it up3, so I bought it.

With it, I then wondered if I could switch everything over to faraixyz and it turns out I could. I wanted farai.xyz but not all sites support full stops (dots, periods) in handles. So now I have my Twitter, GitHub, Instagram and Patreon on faraixyz.

So that’s the whole story behind the change. Terrible reason, but 🤷🏾‍♂️, I like it. Besides, it’s easier to spell than fgandiya. As for fgandiya.me, I might give it to my mom. She’s asked me to make her a website for the past 3 years and it’s about time I did.

  1. I had a female friend tell me that it might help reduce bias since you can’t easily infer the first name which might contain gendered hints. Kinda doubt it could since it’s rarely in isolation. We probably need more than a handle to solve bias. ↩︎

  2. Except the one year I forgot to renew it, at which point I used fgandiya.com which I got from one of the Major League Hacking hackathons. When it lapsed, some dude snatched it up and tried to sell it back to me for $100. ↩︎

  3. I could but hey, it’s a good deal and I’m only out a buck if it doesn’t work out. ↩︎