Origin

For many years, I was too discouraged and overburden to publish my JavaScript as packages. Having a full-time job and maintaining Athenaeum took most of my time. Like so many other developers, I was copying JavaScript from one project into another. I always knew that was very bad practice. But, it was too cumbersome trying to maintain so much code, spread throughout various repositories.

Nevertheless, in recent years, Lerna, TypeScript, and many other tools & frameworks made it somewhat easier to manage mono-repos. I cannot claim to have gained more time, but decided to give JavaScript packages another shoot.

Meaning of "Ion"

"[...] An atom or a group of atoms that has an electric charge [...] - positive or negative" ("Scientific definition" from dictionary.com)