namegen

Generates random names based on US population data. In addition to picking names with real-world probabilities, less realistic names can be generated with a Markov chain.

Data

The first names are aggregated from yearly data back to the 1880s: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html

The last names are from the 2000 US census data: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2000_surnames.html

Build

Extract the first name and last name data to the data-raw subdirectory, then generate the dataset:

$ sbt console
scala> namegen.historical.Dataset.buildToFile("data/firstnames.csv", "data/lastnames.csv")
scala> namegen.markov.Dataset.buildToFile("data/markov.csv")

Then you can start the server with sbt run and the client dev server with yarn start, which will run at http://localhost:8080/.