I know my own name. I've been using it for quite a while.

So when an email arrived at my personal public address recently, addressed to:

Hi Ewanc Team,

I had to read that twice, because apparently I am now an entire software development team.

The email was from a person called Richard and was about my GitHub repository, ewanc26/website. That repository is the source code for my personal website. It is not a company website, a startup, or a team project. It is mine.

The email was sent to contact@ewancroft.uk, the public address attached to my personal website. My GitHub profile says Ewan Croft. My username is ewanc26, which is not particularly cryptic. It is Ewan C plus some numbers. My Git identity is literally Ewan Croft <contact@ewancroft.uk>.

Even my domain has my name slap-bang on it.

So I am not quite sure how we arrived at “Ewanc Team”.

My name is literally Ewan

There are quite a few clues available if you spend even a small amount of time looking. My profile picture is an illustration of me, and my profile README starts with “hi, i'm ewan”. It goes on to describe me as an Anglo-Scottish pagan, poet, and programmer from the UK, and talks about the various things I build. Everything that cites GitHub for the account identifies it as ewanc26 (Ewan Croft).

None of this is hidden information. I am not particularly difficult to find.

ewanc26/website is also one repository among quite a lot of them. The canonical thing it points towards is ewancroft.uk, which is also quite clearly a personal website.

So when someone looks at all of that and concludes that they are contacting the “Ewanc Team”, something has gone rather wrong somewhere.

This isn't a pronunciation problem

I can forgive people getting my name wrong. My name is Gaelic-derived English, and I use Ewan in English. I don't expect people to know anything more complicated than that. I've been called E-wan, I've been called Evan (somehow?), and I've had various creative attempts at it. Whatever.

This wasn't that.

This was an email. You don't have to pronounce Ewan to write an email to Ewan. You just have to read it.

The particularly strange part is that the mistake isn't even a misspelling of my name. It is an assumption that the username ewanc26 represents some organisation called “Ewanc”. That makes the rest of the email rather difficult to take as seriously personalised outreach.

What was the email actually offering?

The message claimed to have looked at ewanc26/website, noticed the recent commits, and identified a genuine problem with its visibility. It offered to help rewrite the README and positioning, and suggested finding several channels to build a more sustained presence around the project.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. The problem is that the repository is for my personal website.

I don't particularly care about making the repository itself highly visible. The thing I actually want people to find is ewancroft.uk. That is the entire point of having a personal website.

I replied politely and explained that I was a solo independent developer, not a team, and that I was happy with how the project was working. I wasn't particularly angry when I wrote the reply, but I did feel slapped in the face by the original email.

Not because someone got my name wrong, but because the email was supposedly based on looking at my work and somehow managed to miss the person who made it.

I think this is why corporate language bothers me so much

I've always been pretty adverse to corporate masks of kindness or compassion. Not because I think everyone working for a company is secretly heartless. Usually they aren't. There are real people underneath the language, and that's almost the point.

A company can have genuinely kind people working in it while the machinery around them still turns people into abstractions. An employee becomes a headcount, a customer becomes a lead, a person becomes a role, and eventually someone can become a line on a spreadsheet. The language can sound incredibly human while the underlying process remains remarkably good at forgetting that there is a human attached to the record.

There is actually a name for part of this in organisational research: organisational dehumanisation, meaning the perception that an organisation is treating people less as individuals and more as instruments or objects. A 2021 study by Nguyen et al., for example, found that employees in the UK and Vietnam who perceived greater organisational dehumanisation also reported lower job satisfaction and stronger intentions to leave.

You don't need to be fired to experience the underlying idea. You can see smaller versions of it everywhere. Someone becomes a job title, then a department, then a number on a spreadsheet, and when circumstances change they can simply become redundant. An organisation can talk endlessly about people being its greatest asset while the person themselves can still disappear from the system with astonishing efficiency.

I'm not saying an unsolicited sales email is equivalent to redundancy. Obviously it isn't. But the mechanism that bothers me is familiar: the person gets replaced by an abstraction.

In this case, Ewan Croft disappeared and “Ewanc Team” took his place.

It also feels strangely personal after six years

I started programming in summer 2020 because I was bored. I did a one-hour Python course from CodeWithMosh and then kept going.

Six years later, I've built an almost absurd amount of software. I've got repositories for AT Protocol tooling, compilers, games, clients, infrastructure, experiments and various things that probably made sense at three in the morning. I've spent years learning how to design systems, write code, debug things that have no business working, maintain projects, deal with users, write documentation, fix CI and generally figure out how to turn ideas into software.

A repository with my name on it is not an anonymous asset that happened to fall out of GitHub. It is the visible end of years of work.

That's something I've written about before. In “I Still Built It”, I wrote about the distinction between delegating implementation to coding agents and actually delegating ownership of an idea. An agent can write code, but it didn't decide that I wanted the project to exist. I did.

The same principle applies here. You can look at ewanc26/website as a repository, or you can look at it as something made by Ewan Croft. The second interpretation requires about thirty seconds of basic research.

This is what genuine outreach looks like

I've had a useful contrast recently. Matt Reeves from AltStore emailed me after seeing something I'd posted about Inkwell.

He started with “Howdy Ewan!” He knew what Inkwell was, knew I was the person making it, and had a specific reason for contacting me: AltStore PAL could distribute the app, and he thought it might be useful to me. He gave me relevant developer resources and left the decision with me.

That email actually made me want to engage with it. Not because it was particularly sophisticated, but because it was clearly written to a person.

This isn't an argument about whether someone used AI to write an email. I don't particularly care. An AI-assisted email can be perfectly good if someone actually checks what it says, and a human can write an email just as lazily as a machine can.

The issue is whether anyone involved actually cared enough to look.

That's why I'm writing about this

Normally I wouldn't bother writing an entire blog post because somebody used the wrong salutation. Nobody died, nothing broke, my website is still there, and I replied and moved on.

I can already imagine how this might read to someone else. Maybe it sounds like an inflated ego. Maybe it sounds like I'm demanding that strangers treat my GitHub account as some grand personal monument.

That's not what I mean.

I don't need everyone to know who I am. I don't expect strangers to care about my work as much as I do, and I certainly don't expect some random person sending me a sales email to have studied six years of my life before pressing Send.

I just want the fairly modest courtesy of being recognised as the person they are actually talking to.

There is a difference between wanting recognition and demanding admiration. I'm asking for the former, not the latter. I want the work I've spent years doing to be understood as work done by a person, and I want that person to be treated with the same basic respect I'd extend to someone else.

That's why the mistake bothered me more than it probably should have.

The email claimed to have found my project, inspected it, noticed my recent work, identified a problem and developed a strategy around it. Then the very first line told me that the person behind all of that research had somehow vanished.

That's what got me. It made the rest of the personalisation feel hollow.

I think that's the broader problem with a lot of modern outreach. There is an enormous amount of effort put into making communication look personal. Your name gets inserted, your project gets mentioned, something from your latest commit gets referenced, and a few flattering sentences are assembled around it. Yet sometimes the most basic human fact is missed: there is a person here.

In my case, that person is Ewan. Not “Ewanc Team”, not “the developers behind the project”, and not a mysterious software company. Just one idiot who started learning Python because he was bored in 2020 and somehow ended up spending the next six years building things.

For the record, it is still one idiot. The other 68 repositories haven't formed a committee yet. I checked.