John Doe - The mysterious lad

During your IT studies you might come across ‘John Doe’ as an example for a log-in page or some sort of a placeholder. Have you ever wondered why ‘John Doe’ and who the hell is he? Well, let me tell you, it’s not a pretty story.

Wiki says ‘"John Doe" (for men) and "Jane Doe" (for women) are multiple-use placeholder names that are used when the true name of a person is unknown or is being intentionally concealed’.

This didn’t start nowadays, for the use of placeholders on log-in pages, no. ‘John Doe’ originated during the medieval times in the UK and it got stuck in English law.

In these times, it was used for a lawsuit, where John Doe was fictitious plaintiff and Richard Roe was fictitious defendant. No one knows when these names were first used, are they really and if not, how were they picked. The assumption is that they were picked because they were the most common names.

Fun fact is that both surnames, Doe and Roe, reference deer, doe as a female deer and roe as Eurasian deer species.

In Ancient Rome, John Doe was Aulus Agerius and Richard Roe was Numerius Negidius. Now, what is not a fun fact is that in the USA ‘John Doe’ is often used for unknown or unconfirmed corpses and serial killers. To make it creepier, there is a whole family! John, Jane, James and baby Doe! As I said, not pretty. At all!

Another thing, ‘John Doe’ has 8 characters, it’s too short! Your QA may report an issue that says ‘longer name goes out of input field on iPhone6’ and you would go all Samuel L. Jackson on him, if you know what I mean ;)

So, to cheer things up and prevent issues, I suggest to use some other names, like ‘Ryan Reynolds’ (13 characters), Samuel L. Jackson (17 characters) or if you want a super long name where you can also test the font and utf-8, use ‘Mileva Marić Einstein’ (21 characters!).

That’s all folks!