Ask HN: What Easter Eggs Have You Written for Your $Dayjob | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Easter Eggs Have You Written for Your $Dayjob

13 pointsnazri115 comments

You know sometimes you just can't resist it and and thought to yourself "Hey this is the perfect time to put this in...". So go ahead and share with us.

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When implementing a radar display, the central pixel has no radar data mapped to it, so usually people just pick something. It was almost no effort to have the pixel flash, reading its next value from a bit string every time it went round. It's so slow, seriously, no one will ever notice.

It spells out a message in morse. No, I'm not going to tell you what it it.

I wrote an internal (and tiny) troubleshooting tool where if you pressed the "Support" button you'd just get a js alert saying "You're welcome!" :-)

The landing page had a large hand-drawn graphic of a country landscape with nothing much happening unless you hover over a certain loch for more than 2 seconds whereupon a little graphic of a sea monster pops out from the loch.

In another workplace, the retrieval of log files from customer sites had become a paperwork nightmare until a little feature was added that meant shift-clicking the Help > About... button opened an 'admin console'. By the time I'd left there the 'admin console' had seven tabs worth of features.

Konami code that, when entered, prints "A winner is you!" in the console.

We replaced an old grails service with Django - for some reason the home button in the grails app would take you to the grails.org website, so naturally it went into the Django app.

Worked on a video on demand app with millions of registered users. One of the test videos was a certain Rick Astley video.

I have written many. From writing a long comment in a particularly ugly code with the starting letters spelling F* to substituting North Korea for 'The Glorious and Awesome Democratic People's Republic of Korea' for a particular operation. I thought it was catchy.

one of my favorite easter eggs was if you accessed our web app using app.com/pirate/login (instead of en or another locale) -- things got mighty interesting, arggg matey!

Man, who has time for something like that?

lol who works 8 hours a day???? not me..

Every now and then a team gets the urge to stay in the office and work on something up late. That something tends to include an Easter egg.

As someone who works on B2B web apps, I can honestly say I've never been tempted to add Easter eggs. Is it that common outside gaming?

It was. Microsoft used to have some... uhm... overengineered easter eggs.

It's probably not common anymore due to trust and legal reasons.

There's a wiki page for them[1]. With one of the most famous probably being The Hall of Tortured Souls[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Easter_eggs_in_Microso...

[2] http://eeggs.com/items/719.html

We have a few "undocumented features" in our product because us developers like conveniences that our sales team doesn't seem to value.

For example, part of our application is controlling PTZ (pan tilt zoom) cameras, but we only have rudimentary manual control. I got tired of using our clunky buttons, so I built in gamepad support a few years ago, and it has become one of our sales team's favorite features. One of our developers didn't like the layout we had, so he built in a shortcut to change it, and a bit later a customer requested that and we were able to use it. We also have a map interface set to up being north, and one of our developers thought it would be cool to change that orientation, so they hacked it in. Shortly after, one of the sales members saw his different orientation and asked how to do it, and now some customers use that feature as well.

Basically, when we get tired of working on boring business use cases, we try to add in some quality-of-life improvements, and those tend to be favorites of our sales team (after the fact; they seem to always ignore our suggestions).

I've been meaning to add in some less useful Easter eggs, but I honestly don't care enough to build something that could get me into trouble (my boss hates video games, so putting Pac-Man or something into it would be crossing a line).

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