Although there’s no built-in support for generating a UUID in Emacs, a quick search on Google yields plenty of solutions to choose from. I chose Nic Ferrier’s emacs-uuid, and wrote my own little function to insert a UUID at point in the current buffer.

I put emacs-uuid on my load-path, then added the following function to my .emacs file:

(defun uuid-insert()
  (interactive)
  (require 'uuid)
  (insert (upcase (uuid-string))))

I then bound this to C-c C-' so I can insert a UUID without moving my fingers too much:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-'") 'uuid-insert)