

What Easter Eggs have you placed in code? - blackswan


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stcredzero
There was one tester we all hated, because, well she was just insane. Some
developers had email filters that moved her messages to the trash. She was so
gone, that she couldn't comprehend the difference between her just thinking
something to herself and actually communicating it to someone else.

One day, a coworker and I decided that she was so close to the edge, that we
could probably drive her over it.

We placed a little toy called "Gremlin" in the build, with some code that made
sure it was shut off, except in the case of our friend, the "Testy Tester."
What Gremlin did at random intervals was to have a weird little yellow/green
guy grab the bottom of a window (as if the 'window' was a window into his
room) and pull himself up to peep in and wave "hi" at you.

This was all fine and dandy in testing. Unfortunately, when the app made it
out to production, heavy network made the client take six times as long to
finish user authentication. Since we had the conditional shutoff code in the
user authentication, this gave a chance for the Gremlin to wave "hi" at some
of the users in the login dialog.

Whoops.

------
jwilliams
A system I worked on years ago was delivered in 4 languages. The app would
(initially) guess your language based upon your browser settings.

As the translations were often in a state of flux we had a development version
that was in swedish chef (bork bork, etc). This was never put into prod. It
mostly helped us work on functionality without getting caught up in the actual
text (lorem ipsum style).

However, down the line we got a batch of testers that were using our
development infrastructure. Go figure, one of them has swedish as their
browser preference... When they got "bork bork bork" they weren't impressed to
say the least. Took us ages to convince them that it wasn't deliberate.

~~~
0xdefec8
I believe you can still set your language preferences in Google to "bork bork
bork". An homage?

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delano
[http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2267/2458668241_707bd3f31a_o....](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2267/2458668241_707bd3f31a_o.jpg)

~~~
Shamiq
Are you claiming credit? Because that would be amazing.

~~~
delano
Haha, ya that was me. There were a couple others too.

That was in 2006. It was so well hidden in the code that no one found it until
I mentioned it to someone at the company this past spring (I had hidden in the
jar of a 3rd party library). Within a couple days I got a call asking how to
remove it. They obviously didn't see the humour which is unfortunate because
it's a marketing goldmine.

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cmos
In 1998 a friend and I were furiously writing a business plan for a 'business
plan contest' held at our college. After 2 weeks of continuously writing and
editing, at 3:00am, we couldn't come up with anything for the closing
paragraph so I type this out: "We are 2 strapping young men willing to do
whatever it takes for this company to succeed".

We forgot to replace it. And we won. $25k. It was probably the most honest
thing we wrote in the whole plan, and the only part of it that turned out
true. (except the "strapping" part)

------
tyn
I have made a desktop application for a DVD rental franchise. I have created
an account as a customer too and whenever I go to a store and the clerk enters
my customer code the title of his screen becomes a smiley.

~~~
staunch
Is the smiley there to distract the clerk from realizing you always get 90%
off everything? :P

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herval
cooked in a small animation (south park style) presenting me and the other
guys in the project inside the 65 series phone of a now-dead mobile
manufacturer from germany (S65, SL65, A65, etc - can't tell the name for NDA
reasons, but I guess it's easy to figure out, no?). You just had to open the
file explorer app on the phone, type *666#, and there you'd have it... ;-)

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mutoxen
I called R.A.I.S.E. the Intelligent Search Engine I made for the company's web
site:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040416123830/www.reteambiente.i...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040416123830/www.reteambiente.it/ra/index.htm)
("CERCA nel sito")

I was fired.

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spc476
Years and years ago when I worked at IBM, I added a panic button to all the
dialog boxes in an internal testing program. When hit, it would cycle through
several remarks (stuff like "Don't hit this button again" and "I thought I
told you not to hit this button").

Back in the mid-90s I had a hidden Easter Egg in a Java Applet (the next big
thing, you know) that expressed my frustration with the language even back
then ( <http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html> )

Shortly after that, I added another one in the HTML page for the rewrite to
that product (no longer a Java Applet) that, amazingly enough, people found
and tried to use (
<http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html> ).

And for the past fourteen years I've included an HTML comment on some of my
webpages and I've only had one person find (or at least, one person find and
comment about it).

------
huhtenberg
I .. err .. know of a product that has a clickable Pi symbol in the About box.
When clicked with Ctrl and Shift held down and _if_ your account nickname is
Sandra Bullock it tells you how many other people figured this out :-)

<http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/9836/egg1by2.png>

<http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7530/egg2zu2.png>

<http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/8361/egg3mv6.png>

This is an internal beta, this stuff will be taken out from the the production
release.

------
nslater
Easter Eggs, illegal in most countries. Now you know.

~~~
huhtenberg
Now we heard it on the Internets.

------
bosky101
all xmpp messages needed to be enveloped by a guid. we felt we did'nt need a
guid -something smaller was enough.

Although i left close to two years ago,and it really is'nt much of a deal - it
still brings me a hint of wicket satisfaction that 'each and every'
chat/whiteboard message spread across 107 countries, gets wrapped in between
my cellphone number : )

