Been reading the book RESTful Web APIs by Leonard Richardson & Mike Amundsen. One section that is worth blogging about it the discussion on First Name vs Given name.

Traditionally, lots of forms we filled in our lives contained “First Name”, “Middle Name” and “Last Name”. As a database designer, I’d have 3 fields for it too. But what is “First Name” and “Last Name”?

Richardson and Amundsen in their book titled “RESTful Web APIs” state that:

“For instance, “first name” is not an accurate term. It’s an artifact of Western culture, in which we put the a person’s given name first. In some other cutltures, the family name comes first. The current oresident of China is named Xi Jinping. His “first name” is Jinping. That’s why givenname is a better semantic descriptor than firstname.”

I always write my name as Nayar Joolfoo (Nayar being given name and Joolfoo my surname).

If ever i were to write my surname first, i’d write it like this: JOOLFOO Nayar which makes it pretty clear what is my given name and surname.