ktheory.com the personal weblog of Aaron Suggs

When sending documents to people, consider the utility of the filename in the recipient's context. We're hiring student employees for the summer, and if I had a nickel for every email attachment called "resume.pdf", I'd have at least $0.60.

Naming a file "resume.pdf" makes plenty of sense for a student, who likely only has one such file on their machine. But for potential employers, the name is almost meaningless. "kirby-mcsmartypants-resume.pdf", on the other hand, will make me think "Kirby's a smart guy (assuming Kirby's a guy, Kirby could  be a girl's name) for naming his résumé in a way that's useful for me." Also, Kirby McSmartypants is an awesome name.

Personally, I don't care if you put the acute accents on or not. I can swing UTF-8 or lower ASCII. Definitely don't put accents in file names though. That breaks stuff.

Tip o' the hat to Joel's résumé rant and Kathie.