I´m a big fan of Will Wight, not the same world-builder qualities, but some of his books have a similar innovative way magic works and such. Travellers Gate is cool, and I liked the Cradle series as well, which is kind of an ever escalation of martial arts powers in a fantasy-ish setting :)

I always choose names from Gibsons novels, wintermute, continuity, case, molly, count zero, ashpool! It's fun to have naming schemes. At one of my jobs few years back we had a Futurama theme, clamps, scruffy, zoidberg, bender etc.

We binged it last weekend, it was really great, all the way.