What Easter Eggs have you placed in code?

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.

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.

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)

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.

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... ;-)

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... ("CERCA nel sito")

I was fired.

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).

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.

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

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 : )