After a long while, I’ve changed my usernames on the internet! I thought it fitting to take a moment to document the story.

For the longest time, I’ve used the name blattus or variations of it as my handle all over the internet (luckily I had the common sense to grab my actual name for things like gmail). The backstory here is fun: in the 6th grade, my tightly-knit group of friends all gave each other one-word nicknames. My nickname was roach since “roach-an” sounds similar to “rosh-an”. I leaned into it! My first-ever internet handle – my AIM screen name (remember those?!) – was rabidroach90.

Some time around then, the internet blossomed with new services all requiring usernames. I decided I wanted to pick one consistent handle that I could use for as many of them as possible. Naturally I gogogled “latin word for roach” and found Blattodea. That felt too long, so I shortened it to blattus which stuck. It also had the excellent property that it was an uncommon-enough word that I could register it most places wihtout issue. That’s the handle I used to sign up for Twitter 18 years ago (!) and for GitHub, Steam, and many others.

As time has gone on, I’ve found myself wanting to use my actual name in more places online. My new quest became trying to get roshan as my username everywhere, but it’s far-too-common for a 100% success rate. X tells me it’s a “rare handle”.

Earlier this year I decided I’d go for best effort – I changed my GitHub handle to roshansada, As of this week I’ve also changed my X handle, to roshan_s.

I’m sure I’ll find ways to keep using blattus here and there. In the meantime, it’s fun to think back on what it meant to have an identity on the internet back when signing up for Twitter in 2008.