Project Numbers and Stardates

Throughout business, companies use abbreviations and numbers to refer to all sorts of content. In the AEC industry, our clients and fellow sub-consultants often use different numbering schemes to refer to the same project. While this can be confusing, we all understand that the underlying work is what is important. Even though you may never have to know our project numbers, it’s fun to let you in on how we format ours at Aethera Engineers.

Stardates
A brief science-fiction lesson is in order. Most readers should be at least tangentially familiar with the Star Trek universe, which created stardates as a fictional structure of time. Stardates can often be heard at the beginning of episodes and are commonly referred to in documentation, such as Captain’s Logs. There are a few variations that have been adopted over time. All of them are different ways of cataloging the century and season of each series, followed by incrementing a set of numbers. We ended up settling on a format which echoes stardates from The Next Generation era, such as 47457.1, which happens to be Captain Picard Day.

Exceedingly curious individuals can go in-depth on the Stardate Wikipedia page.

Project Numbers
Some basic data that Aethera Engineers wanted to make accessible when referencing a project number were:
⦿ The status of the project (S)
⦿ The year the project was pursued (YY)
⦿ An unique identifier (##)
⦿ Whether the project was a base contract or an Additional Service Request (A).

Given these constraints, we found that a stardate format suited our needs, categorically represented as SYY.##.A, or numerically as 220.01.0. This format gives æ the flexibility to organize our server folder structure, but also aids in standardization when we link documents and code, which helps to increase our efficiency.

Date Format
Lastly, while we are on the topic of (star)dates and formats, it’s noteworthy that Aethera Engineers has also standardized on ISO 8601 Data Elements and Interchange Formats – Information Interchange – Representation of Dates and Times. Thus, wherever practical, we use a date format of  YYYY-MM-DD, which means that the lexicographic order matches the chronological order. This is very convenient when organizing files alphabetically on a server, so that files appear in a predictable, sequential order.

At Aethera Engineers, we put thought into the small things, like project numbers and dates, so that our organization can be more responsive to you, our client. We also don’t shy away from who we are, Engineers that like to have fun in our work environment!