Warmdrobe! "It will be our company's name..."

Trần Tấn — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:04:26 +0000

This is a blog post that will probably lean more toward storytelling and personal reflections rather than technical content.

Hey everyone, I'm sure that back when we were young college students studying IT, everyone wanted to find companions to go through university with. For me, that mattered a lot, along with all those daydreams about starting up a startup with a really cool name!
At 18, I failed to get into a "real" university and ended up at a private school that people jokingly call one of the "Big Four remedial schools" That period was pretty rough for me... pressure from family as well as from peers, since most of my high school friends got into top schools.
I did a lot of things to pick myself back up, clinging to the belief that "university means you have to teach yourself", so before starting college I studied ahead quite a bit, even if it wasn't much.
Freshman and sophomore year are the times that, looking back now, I feel were pretty wasted. My rented room back then was about 20km from school, a 30-minute ride if traffic wasn't bad. I'd just go to class and come home with an empty head - even knowing, even knowing that foundational knowledge mattered, that "just enough for now" mindset made me miss out on a lot, especially free time that I could've spent learning English or improving my professional skills, but instead I chose to do pointless stuff that I later ended up telling my juniors not to do. Funny, isn't it!
The turning point only came in my third year of college, when I got closer with Tuấn Kha and Viên, along with Khang (an old friend from the same class in high school). We'd been classmates before, but it seemed like those two had also fallen into the same state I was in during freshman and sophomore year.
Besides An Khang, whom I already knew well since we'd studied together before, these two new friends made me pretty curious at first. What impressed me right away was that they were excellent students, totally different from the rest of the class, and since we also sat near each other, we interacted pretty often. Over time, I realized these two guys were hilarious to talk to, so we clicked. We'd go eat, hang out, even go drinking together.
We also started doing group projects together. Kha was really talented, so I learned a ton from him. My self-study ability improved to a whole different level too. Being with teammates who had the same mindset helped everyone in the team grow a bit more, both in professional skills and soft skills.
Honestly, Warmdrobe wasn't the name we came up with first - it was Zein. If you're wondering where that came from, just go on YouTube and search "Kamen Rider Zein." Yep! We were rider nerds. We named projects "Zein" - things like Zein IDE (an IDE built on Theia), Zein Team Planner (a team work-management app), and Zein Commter (a chat app). These were basically just student projects, nothing production-level, but through starting each new project we knew we'd learn a lot from each other.
A bit embarrassing to admit, but it wasn't until the end of my third year that I even found out Git had "organizations." Oh! So we tried it right away and immediately got stuck at the hardest step: naming it. Anyway, we eventually decided on the name Warmdrobe - a name Tuấn Kha had already used for one of his previous organizations. It's a combination of "Warm" and "drobe" (wardrobe); put together it's kind of meaningless, but it rolls off the tongue nicely, so we went with it. A GitHub organization is like managing a bunch of different repositories, which made us think of it as sort of our own company. Pretty funny thing to think, honestly. But afterward, whenever I worked on a personal project or something like that, I'd still tag the name "Warmdrobe" somewhere so people would see it and get to know it. Truth be told, I really, really love this name.
This is the first blog post I've ever written, so it turned out pretty long. I'm really glad to have met you all - it's thanks to that that I've grown so much as a person. Warmdrobe will be something I hold onto to mark this stretch of my college years as, at the very least, not wasted the way I once thought it was.

Fact: we're still in touch and have chicken rice together every weekend, hehe.

DEV Community: Trần Tấn

Warmdrobe! "It will be our company's name..."