Here’s a tool to help avoid that awkward moment you realize your name is trademarked

It’s not been a great week over at JavaScript repository NPM after a trademark battle erupted between a longtime contributor and messaging app Kik, resulting in the former pulling his code and crashing thousands of websites.

But, as always in the tech community, a solution is never too far away.

GitHub user Andrea Parodi has created a simple tool to check if your NPM project name is trademarked.

You can run it across the entire site, or check out specific users.

It’s super simple and might avoid upset in the long run, although a small row has already erupted about the dev’s choice of name for his project.

Parodi was trying to make an amusing reference to the Kik incident – turns out he’s unintentionally used a racial slur.

Perhaps everyone should just take a week off from naming things?