Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM

But they’d rather you not really see through the product abstraction layer anymore. The Product People want to control the full image of the product and it’s just safest to de-humanize it in case that list is too big or people on that list become undesirables or whatnot.

I’m thinking about what this might look like today. Maybe a neat Easter egg in my iPhone that every time I activate it, it shows me a few people at random who played a role in development. I’d love it, but I imagine this would offend the high tastes of the Product People.

I think it's what I pick up on when I feel annoyed at the emulated soul they try to instil with their design/branding/commercials.

I think another example, sibling to easter eggs, would be April Fools. Mind you I hate April Fools, but the soul was sterilized as they Risk Managed their way to jokes/pranks that were guaranteed to be safe.

I don’t know if the message was edited, but GP addressed this with “Maybe… it shows me a few people at random who played a role in development.” Anyway, you could also show thousands of names/faces rapidly but still meaningfully, or let the user explore them slowly. Feels like the other responses are more accurate than it simply being about the quantity of people.

Oh, and you would get a red mark on your "HR P&D record" for the 'Secure Software Policy' violation.

(Shit.. I hated myself writing the above, but it's true)

In 2001 though, we would all laugh if we would have 'caught' the devs doing something cool like this!

I hope we do shrink software companies down to the mythical "1-person unicorns" so we can be done with this madness.

I prefer the taste of small auteurs to the consensus of product orgs and their politicking. (Add to that whatever design refreshes we are faced with when the designers declare a new design language.)

In a past life I did technical writing and slipped all sorts of fun things into my documentation: Multiple 4/20 references, my birthday, in-jokes from the team that I was working with, even the occasional proper meme. When I needed a link? Something funny from the official corporate channel on YouTube that I could get away with. Needed a company name? I checked every trademark we had on file to find Something.

Never be afraid to hide something wonderful in your code. The header for UFS2 contains the author's birthday [0] and OpenVMS has several interesting exit code states [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Kirk_McKusick [1] https://www.parsec.com/os/openvms/undocumented.php?page=13

Let HR run your engineering, go broke.

In your own code or in your employer's code?

Because having some engineer years down the line spend hours figuring out some mystery WTF code, jut to realize it was some undocumented easter egg of another engineer who left years ago, would piss everyone off.

Easter eggs had their place when engineering teams would basically stay the same and work on the same product for years, so it would be like an inside joke the whole team was in on, but when teams are constantly changing with people job-hopping all the time, easter eggs are liabilities.

What a time to be alive.

Be careful what you wish for, lest a special hotkey on a new Mac brings up a fullscreen portrait of Craig Federighi in his full mighty hairy-chested glory with “infinite” zoom into the chest (available as a 5GB download).

They will, often enough, find ways to go on being successful without you, but at least you can cart your cardboard box away with a clear conscience.

Those same techniques can also be used for mischief, if you prefer.

sounds like a great way to burn out. if you do not take care of yourself properly, how are you expected to take care of anything else?

edit: oops late reply, but oh well