I have distracted myself this week with the extraordinarily mundane task of designing a sample identifier scheme. I want to share some decisions I made in the hope that it saves somebody else some time.

The first choice was the alphabet. I wanted to use human friendly, familiar ASCII characters, but intentionally leave out potentially confusing characters. I'd previously read about "Crockford's base32" (https://t.co/xa3WREc1RQ) which tries to address this problem.

But my search led me instead to z-base32 (https://t.co/5PlTgAgyDU). The z-base32 alphabet is shuffled to try and make encoded identifiers easier to discern. I don't actually need the encoding, but I liked the idea that this shuffle makes sequential identifiers less sequential.

z-base32 takes the interesting choice of using the letters in lowercase to help identifiers form "coastlines" that aid with human recognition. The lab quickly fed back they didn't like this, so I force the alphabet back to uppercase.

With the alphabet decided, I wanted to pick a checking scheme. I learned that each algorithm catches different types of errors, so one needs some knowledge of how the identifiers will be used when making a decision.