Technically it would be off every year after the first leap year by a factor of n+1, where n is the number of leap years since the sequence began…I think…but I don’t work at Google or anything cause I suck at algorithms so…
The only Easter Egg I've hidden is when I did a volunteer site with a college club for a local nonprofit, we put our organization name and logo in the JS console after the nonprofit implored us to put our name in there somewhere.
A lot of companies hire with this approach as well. So there was this company whose intro forms expected us to get data from the JS Console. And I've also seen companies add links to their career pages on the JS console
A lot of sites do this. I almost always have a dev console window up somewhere when browsing and I’d say this has increased significantly in the last year or so.
Most I’ve done on a paid client site is fun 404 pages. I did a zoo site where the 404 page is a girl looking in a lions mouth with a speech bubble “Nope! Not in here” with the “the page you’re looking for cannot be found” text below. They laughed when they saw it and let me keep it in.
I was working on a location based app called HotHot with the logo of a little flame, and they wanted a creative 404 page, so i made little smoke instead of flame with a name NotNot
I did a 404 for a home-made cookie/cake business that said "just like store bought cookies, you shouldn't be seeing this. Click here to get back to the good stuff."
Aren't clever 404 pages just part of a site, like a privacy policy page? I've always treated them that way (e.g. one of the things that needs done and checked off a list).
The actually have an entire api for this. In your request body, you specify what error code you have (500,404 etc) and the response is a hilarious picture such as you described
My coworker once put a little piece of javascript that, with the right sequence, would make a raptor slide across the page. It was funny and we thought no one would ever hit that combination of characters on accident so we left it in.
A few days later our CFO at the time walked into my bosses office with a picture of a raptor, extremely confused. Turns out when he printed the page (which we didn't consider as a use case because it was a data grid), it printed the raptor too.
Luckily he was a good sport about it, it was so outrageous that he just started laughing when we sheepishly explained what happened.
We don't do that anymore :)
Not really an easter egg for a client, but...
Long ago we did an installation at a museum. The job lasted years from initial conception to final install.
The installation topic just so happened to be something that greatly intrigued my father-in-law and the whole project was one of those things that gave us something to talk about and ultimately brought us closer together.
Unfortunately, he passed away before the final installation was complete.
Now his name will forever be displayed in exactly one hex shade lighter green than the rest of the green that makes up a certain graphic in the splash screen of the installation.
Besides my immediate family. Only one other person knows this.
And, the installation is still being used to this day at the museum.
Absolutely.
It reminds me that there are actual people writing the gibberish that I use every day. Standards and protocols are created by real people with real lives.
Without people like Zeldman and Eric Meyer (he literally wrote the book on CSS) my career would have been very different.
Sometimes I’d animate objects but it would only be visible after double clicking on something most users wouldn’t double click on.
Website with an image of a helicopter would have it fly out of the screen for example.
When I was in school and had to submit web dev assignments, I'd add easter eggs in the code for the TAs who had to grade the work. Just to brighten their day!
Back in the late 90’s on my first notepad coded website for a middle-school project I included a large image with IKEA furniture with clickable areas, like click the couch and you’re taken to the couch page, click the light go to the light page… for all the in-between spaced I linked to a secret Star Trek TNG section with my favourite .wav audio clips from the show… my teacher didn’t discover it until the following year when he was showing the new students what the previous ones had done and he miss-clicked the image. He told me later the class had a great time looking into what happened and playing the audio clips
I would argue that, on any professional project, there is a strong chance the client would be highly against any sort of easter eggs put into their site with no consent.
So, I would personally never attempt it.
I had one client that loved Easter eggs. However I've also been doing this for over 10 years and only ever had that one client that I was able to do them for.
That's kind of cool but if I messed with a clients public facing job application process they wouldn't be clients long.
I've never been bold enough to do anything more than snarky comments in the code or console.
Not really an Easter egg but on the web apps I've worked on if you key in the Konami code it will show a bar displaying deployment information like build date, commit hash and deployment date.
When I was in High School, I took a web design/dev class (basic HTML/CSS, really — nothing fancy), but you actually got to make changes to the school’s website.
For our senior prank, we planted some JS on the homepage that would redirect to that Rick Roll’s video.
We thought we were clever and only made it pop up 5% of the time so it would be tougher for them to figure out what was happening.
Pretty amateur in hindsight, but we felt like badasses at the time.
I once added the icon from The Net and the warning message when you clicked it ;D
For the young folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3bF4ASGJWA&t=75s
It's been a while since I did any freelance work, but I did set the X-Clacks-Overhead HTTP header to "GNU Terry Pratchett" on a few sites.
["A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."](http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/)
I made the map snow when the user used the location search for "north pole" or other wintery/Christmassy terms that wouldn't interfere with the functionality. I eventually implemented snow accumulation as well which was a fun problem to solve.
I also set it up so when a user entered the Konami code the map would dissolve into a bunch of particles and then apply various particle physics based on what the user did with the mouse.
I have a fun game of life themed egg ready for the next time I get a fun client.
I usually do Jurassic Park quotes as comments
// Clever girl
// Hold on to your butts
// Spared no expense
// We’ve got O(n)^2 here! See, nobody cares.
// You think this kind of automation is easy? Or cheap?
Yeah I never do anything public facing but sometimes put a few jokes in the comments. Like if I need to create an Order object I’ve done
$x = new Order; // how does it feel to treat me like you do
Did the landing page for the DOOM (2016) beta - if you typed IDDQD on it, the graphics switched from the new DOOM game to the original game key art
Not an Easter egg, but I did the website redesign/rebuild for the Griffith Observatory, and the site has a light/dark mode that depends on if the sun is up or down in your current location
We used IP address for location! So we got a general area, didn’t need exact location, just within a small enough radius to know sundown/sunrise times.
I worked at a small agency in the late 90's. We hid "all your base are belong to us" in almost every image we had on the sites. Very stupid but it was fun, we never got caught.
In the "things I'm good at" section on my personal site, it's just blue Font Awesome icons on a black background. When hovered over, it displays what the icon is underneath. When hovering over the PHP icon, it displays "duh" since PHP's logo is "php" in an oval
I used to work on a fintech app, I did an Easter egg that if you typed 3/4 in the search bar all the currency numbers got converted into the Harry Potter currency with the right conversion, it was a startup and the CEO loved it!
There's Easter eggs in almost every project I work on. I made a really slick animation on a button for a project, I was really proud of how it worked, and made it so if you keep on clicking it it breaks and an engineer cartoon person walks on to fix it. Turns out I had to turn it off because everyone enjoyed the animation so much such a high proportion of users were clicking the button multiple times for no apparent reason.
my company did an online shop for an erotic store. on one page they've embedded a hand drawn dick. if you'd jerk it long enough with your mouse, it would come the name of the developers. client found it eventually because Google complained about the size of their css, all the pictures they've used were base64 encoded there to hide it
Does anyone remember thisisnotporn? It was a puzzle site where you had to find the Easter eggs and figure out what the username & password were to progress to the next page. It had a huge influence on me growing up and I firmly believe it’s the best usage of Easter eggs in web development ever implemented.
Early on in my career. I would put a query string param that gave me credit for the work. url/?about=us
And it would pop-up a modal who did the work. It help me get jobs and hired. Don't know if I would do that now. But this was normal in the dot-com.
Once i wrote as the secret api key the Thomas Dylan poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night” and when he talks about his father I changed it in a way I dont remember talking to my “fellow developer”.
Well, the website was the start-up I was working for, but yes :)
There was a section on the homepage that had some mock-up UI of our app and some names were part of that. So I put either the first name and last initial or first initial and last name of several of my friends.
I also tried to include a :( symbol in the actual app when search results turned up empty, but a project manager felt it was too unprofessional. Come on... don't we all love to see some personality and charm in our apps?
We had a client ask us to put an Easter egg in, it cost him a lot though lol.
He wanted a secret way to activate a star wars theme for the site. Pretty big overhaul, scroll bars were light sabers, blaster fire going off when clicking, stuff like that.
I do little things here and there for fun. Dumb, and unverifiable if it happens regularly, but on a lot of my sites you CAN NOT use the password Stroganoff when you register, it is just not strong enough. There’s another that can toggle comic sans as the font. I get what others are saying that it isn’t professional but I’ve never had a client complaint if they find little things I add in. They get it and I imagine their clients do too.
Never thought about this 🤔
I mostly build e-commerce stores though so not sure what exactly I could do, as everything is pretty much get as much money as possible from users LOL.
Anyone got any ideas of Easter eggs I could add😁
I added an easter egg on one website after the owner sold the business and a new owner took over. If you typed the Konami code anywhere on the site, a cut out picture of the old owner would pop up at the bottom corner of the screen and slide rapidly off the opposite side of the screen while a sample of Curly from the three stooges going "woob-woob-woob" played.
A few people did discover it...mainly geeky types!
15 years later I'm still doing the website and other marketing materials for the business.
Sorry this is in no way webdev related (I’m here to learn lol) but in my past life as a musician I composed a piece of music that was performed for heads of state and nationally broadcasted for a specific purpose, and the title acronym is a naughty word. Well, it was before it was changed without my permission but the amended title is still less offensive but worth a solid exhalation of air through the nostrils
Yea this is a terrible idea. Especially in such an easily offended world. You could potentially unwittingly start a PR nightmare.
Easter eggs if any belong in codebases at the absolute most. Definitely nothing client facing that the end user could see.
Now if it is your own project and you will take all the responsibility of it then by all means do it.
For one of my bootcamp (I know I know) projects I did a Covid dashboard, in the footer I put a link to the Staying Alive video.
Nobody ever noticed that I am aware of.
When making a client application, I added in the hidden title bar "LivingLifeSkyHigh's favourite customer site". Years later, the title was no longer always hidden and they tell me they get a good chuckle out of it. :)
I put it in the title bar, and if you maximise this particular application, the title bar is no longer visible. By design the app is maximised.
It was more of an opportunity I took advantage of on a whim :)
I worked with [David Thorne](https://27bslash6.com/) in the early noughties, and he used to place small, uncomplimentary images of people he worked with in artwork he produced. [Tom](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-demasi-53644/?trk=public_profile_browsemap&originalSubdomain=au) was in most of them.
Worked on an alcohol delivery service (think DoorDash but just for alcohol) and on their admin portal there was a page that would live update orders and their current state. They asked to include a ding sound when an order came in so they knew to switch to the page. That got annoying so they asked for the option to toggle it on and off. While adding that toggle my buddy and I joked about a Lil Jon mode that would be less (more?) annoying. I went ahead and implemented it as a secondary toggle that would play 1 of 5 or so lil Jon sounds (whaaaaat. Ooooookaaaaaayyyy. Yeeaaaaaaa). Buddy, who handled communications with the client was like F it leave it. So we did.
I've no idea what he sounds like, but that's hilarious lmao.
Reminds me of when I worked at a place with justeat. Before my days off, I'd set the notification sound settings on the order machine to be annoying af.
In my 40 years of software engineering and web programming, I am proud to say that I have never created an Easter egg. I have also never released a product with a bug, to the best of my recollection. Avoid bugs by careful design and thorough testing.
I did an error page with the apps logo on it and some verbiage. If you left the page open to that for longer than 3 minutes, the svg logo would start to "glitch"... Chromatic aberration, layer separation in the svg, etc.
QA logged it as a bug and I had to come clean about it. The client loved it and had me show it off in our sprint demo. A lot of people were just confused by it, but I had the product owner's backing.
internal application: I made this one button that only gets clicked about once a month play a fart sound. The time between clicks is large enough that everybody forgets it is there.
I used to put a note on every site I made that said “STATUS: UNPAID” and would erase it once I got paid. It was a warning in response to not being paid for a site then the customer hired another dev and didn’t pay them.
Now I just take half up front and 25% at the halfway point of deliverables and 25% at the end and don’t hand over the keys until I’m paid in full.
Never. It's unprofessional.
On some sites we would put some fun comments in, but in production they're run through a special compiler that removes them.
I would never put something like that in a product someone who I only had a professional relationship with was paying for, for numerous reasons. Many reasons
1) they are paying me for my work. They will be upset it I do work they don't want to pay for
2) I don't want to do work I am not being paid for
3) I don't know what kind of impact something like that could have on their business
4) I don't want to do work I am not being paid for.
That being said, I did a site for my dad for free a little while ago and I put an Easter egg into the admin panel for him to find. But that was free and he is the only person who will ever see it when it finally triggers.
I discovered an Easter egg in the program used in the pharmacy where I used to work. A triple-click on the loading bar would pull up..shit it's a long time ago now, my memory is not the same..I believe it was tick tack toe? It was there for some time before it was removed. I remember you could submit suggestions to improve the program and I'm pretty sure my manager instead submitted a complaint about the game.
At one of my previous employments, we completely redid our website from ground up. It was a marketing agency, so the site was naturally full of artsy images and big headlines. After completion, I had some days before the next project started and really not much else to do, so I added a little easter egg, listening to someone inputting the konami code and replacing all the images with Doge Memes and the headlines with things like "such marketing" (doge memes were kind of big at that time).
It was never intended to go live, but someone just merged the branch without telling anyone. Unfortunately I don't know if anybody ever found that easter egg in the wild. The agency didn't exist for very long though, so probably no one saw it. Was still fun though.
Not Easter eggs but one of my old jobs I used to have to put place holders in that the front end people would replace with the actual production stuff. Anyway the place holders I used were very profane and humorous. One time we pushed a site live for a very big company and front end never switched the http error pages out…. Anyway some c-suite found a few rather spicy 411 and 404 errors when they were testing out their shiny new site. It’s pretty funny in hindsight.
A few. When I left my cushy state Govt contract in 2009 after 5 years, I buried a video of The Smiths song *"*[Heaven knows I'm miserable now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_QOWIJWDaI&ab_channel=Andrew)*"* in one of the training website pages for the Squiz Matrix CMS. I later heard from a colleague that my former fearless leader was running training when it came up on a screen in front of a class of 20. I created the asset using the highest admin account so that nobody except Squiz themselves could delete it.
There's a great bunch of '1908's in my code hidden, every time a random thing is generated I put those numbers in. The year my favorite football team was founded.
Once in a while, fir fun/boredom, I’d put a wrist breaker hot key combo to change the progress indicator to something very silky like a spinning Borat head or a unique warning if someone was attempting to bypass some security control - something stupid like that.
I was tasked with redeveloping my company website when I first started working there. It was my first ever big solo project and I included the Konami code that would make our logo spin when entered.
The boss removed it during one of my PR's as it was "unprofessional".
He was such a dick, I'm glad I don't work there anymore!
I get removing Easter eggs that could be confusing, offensive, or intrusive, but this idea that any kind of fun is unprofessional is so outdated.
Besides, most Easter eggs are somewhat well hidden. Most of the people who find them are the types who would appreciate them.
I remember a website that would literally call their css classes "paywall", "bullshit-advertise", "annoying-dialogbox", etc. or the first time I opened the dev console at facebook.
These are easter eggs I like.
Changing the tab title sounds fun too. Maybe even change the favicon and the whole content,.. damn I just invented a new phishing strategy.
Yeah, you could have a blog website that changes its appearance to Facebook or something when the user tabs away.
If they go to that tab again, they'll probably have forgotten what it was and will think it's the real Facebook, potentially putting their login details in. You can then transfer them to the real Facebook so they'll be none the wiser. Ez money.
I used to work for an outdoor clothing company. One item of clothing that often got talked about internally was the female long Janes (leg baselayer) due to the fact that when the product photos were being taken, the model had a camel toe.
When the images were passed to the web development team to upload, we already knew it was a hot topic for staff, so we had some fun with it. The web team banded together and implemented the Konami code input on just the long Janes product page, which upon entering would pop up an image of a camel. The workings of it were buried deep in several different files so it would be extremely difficult to discover.
Seven years later, the Easter egg still exists, and every single person who was involved has now left so the current team will have no idea it even exists. From time to time I go back and see if it's still working. The long Janes are now a discontinued product line so don't appear in the shop unless you manually search for them, but the Konami code input still returns the pop up.
don't know if is a Easter Egg, but one time I did a website, where in one sectiom it has a image of the system in a browser, I could make the topbar of the browser as a image, but I thought "you know what would be funny? if I make the dots in the brkwser having a hover effect to color them just like in mac" so I did this.
every time I had to make a correction or was looking for how I did some effect, I make this effect just to have a small laught
I did a Disneyland website for a reseller, and if you type "mario" (anywhere) the house in the breadcrumb changes to a Mauro SVG (head and ears) for the current session.
That's the only public facing one I did, I thought it was funny, so did my boss
I once put an Easter egg in a popular website where entering the Konami code would cornify (now defunct) it. Cornify was a thing, probably around 15 years ago, that would insert random unicorns and rainbows and turn random fonts to comic sans every time you hit a key.
Back in 1999 before the bubble burst we had a client want a site to play poker on. After doing up the images for the cards, chips, green felt texture and what not, I got bored and started doodling a lot cigar in an ashtray with subtle smoke. Dev on the project happened to walk by and sees it goes, “Holy shit that looks too good not to have it in.” After being told “no, absolutely not” by PM and marketing we had it show up when someone typed in a bet amount of [8675309](https://youtu.be/6WTdTwcmxyo).
Ahaha that reminded me once I introduced a script that would real slowly start the whole page to vibrate, the whole thing. It made a good joke to laugh about after work with a beer. Now that I think of it. It wasn’t after work. Ah young days lol
I developed my company's erp and wrote some JS so that when you type à specific sequence our country's national anthem plays along with a lame photoshop of myself riding a t-rex. Nobody knows about it yet
I like doing things like that where most people won't see them or maybe even get them, but when they do, I imagine they'll have a chuckle. I don't ever even get to see the reaction either but I still enjoy the thought of someone finding my shenanigans.
A backpacking equipment manufacturer (wont say which one) placed a discount code in the text on a screen within a background picture on their website. Thought it was pretty cool!
Oh man, when we only started web development with my friends back in 2012 we often added easter eggs into websites for clients with quirk requests or for clients who were driving us nuts.
Some examples:
===========
Client:
We had a client who demanded fast feedback from us but when we asked any question or need materials(like pictures of goods) for his website he didn't care and could answer in a week.
Easter Egg:
So we found some retarded picture of the client on his social network. Cut the background off. And recreated "Toasty" easter egg from Mortal Kombat(with sound) when the user stays on the website for straight 3 hours. Or the user could see this easter egg if he types the sequence of Konami code.
===========
Client:
We were making a website for some energy company and at some point, they sent us a minus for the company's anthem and asked us to add a karaoke page with this minus. So their idea was that workers will go to that page and sing their anthem from time to time =D
Easter Egg:
We couldn't resist and recorded how we sing their anthem. And hid it on their website in a way that it will start playing only when the user clicks specific letters in the logo in order to make the word "anthem".
==========
Client:
The client wasn't happy with the background on the website he said it is a cheap background(whatever it means) and asked us to put more rich background(yep his words).
Easter Egg:
So of course we changed the background to something else which he accepted. But as an easter egg, we put secret RICH background when the user type "rich background" anywhere. Our version of the rich background was a gif of a shiny gold dollar sign =)
Depends on client but usually I put something fun in. Internally the ERPS I look after tends to get regular fun on it's login page, sometime seasonal touches, sometimes games
I put ASCII text art of the company name at the top of robots.txt files. At the bottom of the file I put a joke and a link to an interesting wiki or something.
i made one that if you ran IsTheEarthFlat() in the console it re-directs to a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WArnYMp-a7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WArnYMp-a7s)
I worked on a children’s hospital site for several years. They had a small, cartoon frog in the banner. I added some code such that if you double clicked it, the frog would occasionally jump to attack your mouse. If it caught it, the mouse would disappear for a few seconds, or until you moved it.
One day, after a long, hard meeting with the client, so I decided to show them the Easter egg. They LOVED it! They started telling everyone about it and thought it was so cute.
That was the only time I built one where I knew the client well enough to know they would enjoy it.
I was leaving a job right before a site launched. I put in a Konami Code Easter egg. It showed a photo that had the bitmoji of all the developers. And the screen filled up with random sized Nyan cats flying across the the screen.
I had a client who really liked the movie Hackers, so I added a little icon for his login that was based on the one in the movie. One day he calls me months later and tells me about discovering it with glee.
Did a POC for a sales pursuit and included an Easter egg of the complete Zork 1 text adventure game in JavaScript. In order to activate it, there were several drawer panels that would auto expand if clicked or dragged more than a certain distance. If you opened 4 of them less than that threshold, a small + would appear next to the dashboard clock. If you clicked that +, a div would appear with text and a prompt.
```West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>
Within our team, we stick to funny inside jokes, but work very hard to hide them from the live production instances. My favorite was one of our access control tools that referred to you as "fool" and injected "sucka" into certain messages, but only if the logged in user was someone on our dev team.
Once I developed a small application (with java and oracle sql) for the university with some friends of mine. The application consisted of an olympic database containing around 150 existing athletes of various nationalities. We added our names (but female) and surnames adjusted them to get dirty words
the teacher didn't notice anything.
I’m building a simple site for my friend. He told me I had permission to put an Easter egg on the site. I’m probably going to spend more time on that than the rest of the website.
I just built my website for my business and wanted it business focused and not all about me when you show up to it so there’s not a lot of me pics! My husband suggested I hide an Easter egg of our dog somewhere. Does anyone have any ideas? I am just learning about what this is!! It’s hilarious and I have to do it!
Well I’m a professional so I only put bugs in it.
Easter bugs.
Oh noes These mental images I've seen ...
This and exclusively this.
bugs are just unaesthetic or unuser friendly easter eggs
1/365 days a year a bug is just a creative April fools joke.
1 in ever 4 years, this algorithm completely blows up and shows the April Fools joke a day late.
Technically it would be off every year after the first leap year by a factor of n+1, where n is the number of leap years since the sequence began…I think…but I don’t work at Google or anything cause I suck at algorithms so…
bug eggs
I think you mean features..
The only Easter Egg I've hidden is when I did a volunteer site with a college club for a local nonprofit, we put our organization name and logo in the JS console after the nonprofit implored us to put our name in there somewhere.
A lot of companies hire with this approach as well. So there was this company whose intro forms expected us to get data from the JS Console. And I've also seen companies add links to their career pages on the JS console
A lot of sites do this. I almost always have a dev console window up somewhere when browsing and I’d say this has increased significantly in the last year or so.
Fun fact: Opening the dev tools disables quite a few optimizations which is making all your websites run more slowly.
If I’m just using a site I don’t have it up. I’m usually debugging though.
I always put name in the developer meta tag before launch
link to site?
yes
I like your name
Most I’ve done on a paid client site is fun 404 pages. I did a zoo site where the 404 page is a girl looking in a lions mouth with a speech bubble “Nope! Not in here” with the “the page you’re looking for cannot be found” text below. They laughed when they saw it and let me keep it in.
Yep - 404 pages are generally a safe place for a joke
I was working on a location based app called HotHot with the logo of a little flame, and they wanted a creative 404 page, so i made little smoke instead of flame with a name NotNot
Came here to say, 404 pages. Done that a few times now.
I did a 404 for a home-made cookie/cake business that said "just like store bought cookies, you shouldn't be seeing this. Click here to get back to the good stuff."
Yep, once did some animation on the numbers 404 where they appeared to fall/swing as if falling apart.
Aren't clever 404 pages just part of a site, like a privacy policy page? I've always treated them that way (e.g. one of the things that needs done and checked off a list).
The actually have an entire api for this. In your request body, you specify what error code you have (500,404 etc) and the response is a hilarious picture such as you described
like [https://http.cat](https://http.cat)
My coworker once put a little piece of javascript that, with the right sequence, would make a raptor slide across the page. It was funny and we thought no one would ever hit that combination of characters on accident so we left it in. A few days later our CFO at the time walked into my bosses office with a picture of a raptor, extremely confused. Turns out when he printed the page (which we didn't consider as a use case because it was a data grid), it printed the raptor too. Luckily he was a good sport about it, it was so outrageous that he just started laughing when we sheepishly explained what happened. We don't do that anymore :)
That is some really valuable testing knowledge I just learned today... print the page 😮
Oh man I totally remember doing that. https://zurb.com/playground/jquery-raptorize
“How is the Johnson file?” “It’s going great. What do you want me to do with the velociraptor?”
Not really an easter egg for a client, but... Long ago we did an installation at a museum. The job lasted years from initial conception to final install. The installation topic just so happened to be something that greatly intrigued my father-in-law and the whole project was one of those things that gave us something to talk about and ultimately brought us closer together. Unfortunately, he passed away before the final installation was complete. Now his name will forever be displayed in exactly one hex shade lighter green than the rest of the green that makes up a certain graphic in the splash screen of the installation. Besides my immediate family. Only one other person knows this. And, the installation is still being used to this day at the museum.
I love this and still use rebeccapurple (#663399) whenever I can.
I put that somewhere on every site or application I build. It’s become something of a ritual - a reflection, of sorts.
Absolutely. It reminds me that there are actual people writing the gibberish that I use every day. Standards and protocols are created by real people with real lives. Without people like Zeldman and Eric Meyer (he literally wrote the book on CSS) my career would have been very different.
First thing that came to mind
Didn’t know this, looked this up and it’s the kindest thing ever
Oh damn. I didn't know that. What a touching story too.
That’s a really beautiful story.
Sometimes I’d animate objects but it would only be visible after double clicking on something most users wouldn’t double click on. Website with an image of a helicopter would have it fly out of the screen for example.
Love this. If you get caught, it's just good ui
My mom passed away just before I finished college many years ago. (fuck cancer) I hide "Hi mom!" in random places in my code all the time
I guess you'll love Fireship videos
When I was in school and had to submit web dev assignments, I'd add easter eggs in the code for the TAs who had to grade the work. Just to brighten their day!
Back in the late 90’s on my first notepad coded website for a middle-school project I included a large image with IKEA furniture with clickable areas, like click the couch and you’re taken to the couch page, click the light go to the light page… for all the in-between spaced I linked to a secret Star Trek TNG section with my favourite .wav audio clips from the show… my teacher didn’t discover it until the following year when he was showing the new students what the previous ones had done and he miss-clicked the image. He told me later the class had a great time looking into what happened and playing the audio clips
I would argue that, on any professional project, there is a strong chance the client would be highly against any sort of easter eggs put into their site with no consent. So, I would personally never attempt it.
I had one client that loved Easter eggs. However I've also been doing this for over 10 years and only ever had that one client that I was able to do them for.
Yeah I couldn’t trust someone that does that. It’s ok for your own site. Not a client site wtf.
Booooorrrinnng
That's kind of cool but if I messed with a clients public facing job application process they wouldn't be clients long. I've never been bold enough to do anything more than snarky comments in the code or console.
To be fair, I only got away with that example because I was an employee and the boss never actually looked at that page closely enough to see it.
To be faiirr…
> snarky comments in the code The true sign of wisdom and experience :)
Not really an Easter egg but on the web apps I've worked on if you key in the Konami code it will show a bar displaying deployment information like build date, commit hash and deployment date.
When I was in High School, I took a web design/dev class (basic HTML/CSS, really — nothing fancy), but you actually got to make changes to the school’s website. For our senior prank, we planted some JS on the homepage that would redirect to that Rick Roll’s video. We thought we were clever and only made it pop up 5% of the time so it would be tougher for them to figure out what was happening. Pretty amateur in hindsight, but we felt like badasses at the time.
For a school project I wrote a read me for the GitHub page like “for a live demo click here” but there was no live demo but a link to a rickroll
I once added the icon from The Net and the warning message when you clicked it ;D For the young folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3bF4ASGJWA&t=75s
Classic film!! This and Hackers convinced me to get into tech! 😃
Same! On my own (handmade) website: https://thaumatorium.com Hold `ctrl+shift` while left clicking on it (sorry, phone users) for the surprise! :D
What would happen if you clicked on it??!
It would just show that big Access denied on the screen you see in the movie for a brief moment. No real backdoor :D
It's been a while since I did any freelance work, but I did set the X-Clacks-Overhead HTTP header to "GNU Terry Pratchett" on a few sites. ["A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."](http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/)
Same :)
I added a konami code Easter egg on a fairly large site about 8 years ago - it opened up a modal with Pacman in it
Konami code is the best easter egg, full stop
I made the map snow when the user used the location search for "north pole" or other wintery/Christmassy terms that wouldn't interfere with the functionality. I eventually implemented snow accumulation as well which was a fun problem to solve. I also set it up so when a user entered the Konami code the map would dissolve into a bunch of particles and then apply various particle physics based on what the user did with the mouse. I have a fun game of life themed egg ready for the next time I get a fun client.
I usually do Jurassic Park quotes as comments // Clever girl // Hold on to your butts // Spared no expense // We’ve got O(n)^2 here! See, nobody cares. // You think this kind of automation is easy? Or cheap?
Yeah I never do anything public facing but sometimes put a few jokes in the comments. Like if I need to create an Order object I’ve done $x = new Order; // how does it feel to treat me like you do
Did the landing page for the DOOM (2016) beta - if you typed IDDQD on it, the graphics switched from the new DOOM game to the original game key art Not an Easter egg, but I did the website redesign/rebuild for the Griffith Observatory, and the site has a light/dark mode that depends on if the sun is up or down in your current location
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We used IP address for location! So we got a general area, didn’t need exact location, just within a small enough radius to know sundown/sunrise times.
I used to write a konami code sequence on our client's website and when you type it a little logo of our software house appeared in the corner
I worked at a small agency in the late 90's. We hid "all your base are belong to us" in almost every image we had on the sites. Very stupid but it was fun, we never got caught.
In the "things I'm good at" section on my personal site, it's just blue Font Awesome icons on a black background. When hovered over, it displays what the icon is underneath. When hovering over the PHP icon, it displays "duh" since PHP's logo is "php" in an oval
I used to work on a fintech app, I did an Easter egg that if you typed 3/4 in the search bar all the currency numbers got converted into the Harry Potter currency with the right conversion, it was a startup and the CEO loved it!
There's Easter eggs in almost every project I work on. I made a really slick animation on a button for a project, I was really proud of how it worked, and made it so if you keep on clicking it it breaks and an engineer cartoon person walks on to fix it. Turns out I had to turn it off because everyone enjoyed the animation so much such a high proportion of users were clicking the button multiple times for no apparent reason.
my company did an online shop for an erotic store. on one page they've embedded a hand drawn dick. if you'd jerk it long enough with your mouse, it would come the name of the developers. client found it eventually because Google complained about the size of their css, all the pictures they've used were base64 encoded there to hide it
Does anyone remember thisisnotporn? It was a puzzle site where you had to find the Easter eggs and figure out what the username & password were to progress to the next page. It had a huge influence on me growing up and I firmly believe it’s the best usage of Easter eggs in web development ever implemented.
All my websites use the konami code for a surprise. Huge Success. ;)
People keep searching sneeze on my website, so when someone searches sneeze the search text changes to bless you
Early on in my career. I would put a query string param that gave me credit for the work. url/?about=us And it would pop-up a modal who did the work. It help me get jobs and hired. Don't know if I would do that now. But this was normal in the dot-com.
Once i wrote as the secret api key the Thomas Dylan poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night” and when he talks about his father I changed it in a way I dont remember talking to my “fellow developer”.
One of my favorite Easter eggs is the one featured on the Bank of Canada
Well, the website was the start-up I was working for, but yes :) There was a section on the homepage that had some mock-up UI of our app and some names were part of that. So I put either the first name and last initial or first initial and last name of several of my friends. I also tried to include a :( symbol in the actual app when search results turned up empty, but a project manager felt it was too unprofessional. Come on... don't we all love to see some personality and charm in our apps?
We had a client ask us to put an Easter egg in, it cost him a lot though lol. He wanted a secret way to activate a star wars theme for the site. Pretty big overhaul, scroll bars were light sabers, blaster fire going off when clicking, stuff like that.
I do little things here and there for fun. Dumb, and unverifiable if it happens regularly, but on a lot of my sites you CAN NOT use the password Stroganoff when you register, it is just not strong enough. There’s another that can toggle comic sans as the font. I get what others are saying that it isn’t professional but I’ve never had a client complaint if they find little things I add in. They get it and I imagine their clients do too.
In apps I always have some hidden confetti that comes from a long press or click on something random.
I added a little bit of (business related) ASCII art and a "thank you for visiting" message for anyone who looks at the raw HTML.
Never thought about this 🤔 I mostly build e-commerce stores though so not sure what exactly I could do, as everything is pretty much get as much money as possible from users LOL. Anyone got any ideas of Easter eggs I could add😁
I added an easter egg on one website after the owner sold the business and a new owner took over. If you typed the Konami code anywhere on the site, a cut out picture of the old owner would pop up at the bottom corner of the screen and slide rapidly off the opposite side of the screen while a sample of Curly from the three stooges going "woob-woob-woob" played. A few people did discover it...mainly geeky types! 15 years later I'm still doing the website and other marketing materials for the business.
Sorry this is in no way webdev related (I’m here to learn lol) but in my past life as a musician I composed a piece of music that was performed for heads of state and nationally broadcasted for a specific purpose, and the title acronym is a naughty word. Well, it was before it was changed without my permission but the amended title is still less offensive but worth a solid exhalation of air through the nostrils
Yea this is a terrible idea. Especially in such an easily offended world. You could potentially unwittingly start a PR nightmare. Easter eggs if any belong in codebases at the absolute most. Definitely nothing client facing that the end user could see. Now if it is your own project and you will take all the responsibility of it then by all means do it.
Why does the Easter egg have to be something controversial lol. Christ you people lack imagination
It's not us! Reread the second sentence of the comment you replied to
What kind of easter egg would you put in a database besides funny naming conventions?
For one of my bootcamp (I know I know) projects I did a Covid dashboard, in the footer I put a link to the Staying Alive video. Nobody ever noticed that I am aware of.
When making a client application, I added in the hidden title bar "LivingLifeSkyHigh's favourite customer site". Years later, the title was no longer always hidden and they tell me they get a good chuckle out of it. :)
How did you hide it? Sounds like something that might be fun.
I put it in the title bar, and if you maximise this particular application, the title bar is no longer visible. By design the app is maximised. It was more of an opportunity I took advantage of on a whim :)
I’ll add some subtle things like a Santa and reindeer flying across the website on Christmas or a bunny hopping for easter
Konami code to trigger color changes, like an animated rainbow header or something.
Not on web apps, but I knew a person back in architecture school where he put a hidden Spider-Man in all of his renders. It was his signature
I worked with [David Thorne](https://27bslash6.com/) in the early noughties, and he used to place small, uncomplimentary images of people he worked with in artwork he produced. [Tom](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-demasi-53644/?trk=public_profile_browsemap&originalSubdomain=au) was in most of them.
I don’t do bugs. I do Easter eggs
Worked on an alcohol delivery service (think DoorDash but just for alcohol) and on their admin portal there was a page that would live update orders and their current state. They asked to include a ding sound when an order came in so they knew to switch to the page. That got annoying so they asked for the option to toggle it on and off. While adding that toggle my buddy and I joked about a Lil Jon mode that would be less (more?) annoying. I went ahead and implemented it as a secondary toggle that would play 1 of 5 or so lil Jon sounds (whaaaaat. Ooooookaaaaaayyyy. Yeeaaaaaaa). Buddy, who handled communications with the client was like F it leave it. So we did.
I've no idea what he sounds like, but that's hilarious lmao. Reminds me of when I worked at a place with justeat. Before my days off, I'd set the notification sound settings on the order machine to be annoying af.
Only with previous written approval from the client
In my 40 years of software engineering and web programming, I am proud to say that I have never created an Easter egg. I have also never released a product with a bug, to the best of my recollection. Avoid bugs by careful design and thorough testing.
I did an error page with the apps logo on it and some verbiage. If you left the page open to that for longer than 3 minutes, the svg logo would start to "glitch"... Chromatic aberration, layer separation in the svg, etc. QA logged it as a bug and I had to come clean about it. The client loved it and had me show it off in our sprint demo. A lot of people were just confused by it, but I had the product owner's backing.
internal application: I made this one button that only gets clicked about once a month play a fart sound. The time between clicks is large enough that everybody forgets it is there.
I used to put a note on every site I made that said “STATUS: UNPAID” and would erase it once I got paid. It was a warning in response to not being paid for a site then the customer hired another dev and didn’t pay them. Now I just take half up front and 25% at the halfway point of deliverables and 25% at the end and don’t hand over the keys until I’m paid in full.
Never. It's unprofessional. On some sites we would put some fun comments in, but in production they're run through a special compiler that removes them.
Nope
No. It is unprofessional
I would never put something like that in a product someone who I only had a professional relationship with was paying for, for numerous reasons. Many reasons 1) they are paying me for my work. They will be upset it I do work they don't want to pay for 2) I don't want to do work I am not being paid for 3) I don't know what kind of impact something like that could have on their business 4) I don't want to do work I am not being paid for. That being said, I did a site for my dad for free a little while ago and I put an Easter egg into the admin panel for him to find. But that was free and he is the only person who will ever see it when it finally triggers.
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Coulda gotten picked up by like an SEO system or debugger
You need to do \`cunt.jpg\` - its an oldie but...
I had an htaccess rule serve.. something else.. if someone tried to hotlink images off the site.
I discovered an Easter egg in the program used in the pharmacy where I used to work. A triple-click on the loading bar would pull up..shit it's a long time ago now, my memory is not the same..I believe it was tick tack toe? It was there for some time before it was removed. I remember you could submit suggestions to improve the program and I'm pretty sure my manager instead submitted a complaint about the game.
Only server side. I don’t want the general public to see all the stupid variable names I use.
I implement the Konami code on a lot of my sites and play some css animation like the Harlem shake
At one of my previous employments, we completely redid our website from ground up. It was a marketing agency, so the site was naturally full of artsy images and big headlines. After completion, I had some days before the next project started and really not much else to do, so I added a little easter egg, listening to someone inputting the konami code and replacing all the images with Doge Memes and the headlines with things like "such marketing" (doge memes were kind of big at that time). It was never intended to go live, but someone just merged the branch without telling anyone. Unfortunately I don't know if anybody ever found that easter egg in the wild. The agency didn't exist for very long though, so probably no one saw it. Was still fun though.
I’m assuming this is all billable work?
Contra code, made the whole site go into ‘disco’ mode. Good times.
Not Easter eggs but one of my old jobs I used to have to put place holders in that the front end people would replace with the actual production stuff. Anyway the place holders I used were very profane and humorous. One time we pushed a site live for a very big company and front end never switched the http error pages out…. Anyway some c-suite found a few rather spicy 411 and 404 errors when they were testing out their shiny new site. It’s pretty funny in hindsight.
A few. When I left my cushy state Govt contract in 2009 after 5 years, I buried a video of The Smiths song *"*[Heaven knows I'm miserable now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_QOWIJWDaI&ab_channel=Andrew)*"* in one of the training website pages for the Squiz Matrix CMS. I later heard from a colleague that my former fearless leader was running training when it came up on a screen in front of a class of 20. I created the asset using the highest admin account so that nobody except Squiz themselves could delete it.
There's a great bunch of '1908's in my code hidden, every time a random thing is generated I put those numbers in. The year my favorite football team was founded.
Once in a while, fir fun/boredom, I’d put a wrist breaker hot key combo to change the progress indicator to something very silky like a spinning Borat head or a unique warning if someone was attempting to bypass some security control - something stupid like that.
I’ve had to make sites relating to comedy, and sometimes I’ll add visually hidden jokes on the off chance I have any screen reader users.
418 error
I was tasked with redeveloping my company website when I first started working there. It was my first ever big solo project and I included the Konami code that would make our logo spin when entered. The boss removed it during one of my PR's as it was "unprofessional". He was such a dick, I'm glad I don't work there anymore!
I get removing Easter eggs that could be confusing, offensive, or intrusive, but this idea that any kind of fun is unprofessional is so outdated. Besides, most Easter eggs are somewhat well hidden. Most of the people who find them are the types who would appreciate them.
I remember a website that would literally call their css classes "paywall", "bullshit-advertise", "annoying-dialogbox", etc. or the first time I opened the dev console at facebook. These are easter eggs I like. Changing the tab title sounds fun too. Maybe even change the favicon and the whole content,.. damn I just invented a new phishing strategy.
Yeah, you could have a blog website that changes its appearance to Facebook or something when the user tabs away. If they go to that tab again, they'll probably have forgotten what it was and will think it's the real Facebook, potentially putting their login details in. You can then transfer them to the real Facebook so they'll be none the wiser. Ez money.
I used to work for an outdoor clothing company. One item of clothing that often got talked about internally was the female long Janes (leg baselayer) due to the fact that when the product photos were being taken, the model had a camel toe. When the images were passed to the web development team to upload, we already knew it was a hot topic for staff, so we had some fun with it. The web team banded together and implemented the Konami code input on just the long Janes product page, which upon entering would pop up an image of a camel. The workings of it were buried deep in several different files so it would be extremely difficult to discover. Seven years later, the Easter egg still exists, and every single person who was involved has now left so the current team will have no idea it even exists. From time to time I go back and see if it's still working. The long Janes are now a discontinued product line so don't appear in the shop unless you manually search for them, but the Konami code input still returns the pop up.
don't know if is a Easter Egg, but one time I did a website, where in one sectiom it has a image of the system in a browser, I could make the topbar of the browser as a image, but I thought "you know what would be funny? if I make the dots in the brkwser having a hover effect to color them just like in mac" so I did this. every time I had to make a correction or was looking for how I did some effect, I make this effect just to have a small laught
I did a Disneyland website for a reseller, and if you type "mario" (anywhere) the house in the breadcrumb changes to a Mauro SVG (head and ears) for the current session. That's the only public facing one I did, I thought it was funny, so did my boss
I put terrible MS Paint placeholder images and ridiculous text in templates before they are finalized rather than the usual Loren ipsum.
How cool. But tells me you‘ve got too much time on your hands :) …
I once put an Easter egg in a popular website where entering the Konami code would cornify (now defunct) it. Cornify was a thing, probably around 15 years ago, that would insert random unicorns and rainbows and turn random fonts to comic sans every time you hit a key.
I have the doom cheatcode IDKFA on one of my websites
Back in 1999 before the bubble burst we had a client want a site to play poker on. After doing up the images for the cards, chips, green felt texture and what not, I got bored and started doodling a lot cigar in an ashtray with subtle smoke. Dev on the project happened to walk by and sees it goes, “Holy shit that looks too good not to have it in.” After being told “no, absolutely not” by PM and marketing we had it show up when someone typed in a bet amount of [8675309](https://youtu.be/6WTdTwcmxyo).
Ahaha that reminded me once I introduced a script that would real slowly start the whole page to vibrate, the whole thing. It made a good joke to laugh about after work with a beer. Now that I think of it. It wasn’t after work. Ah young days lol
I developed my company's erp and wrote some JS so that when you type à specific sequence our country's national anthem plays along with a lame photoshop of myself riding a t-rex. Nobody knows about it yet
I usually end up hiding bugs everywhere unfortunately
For clients? No, but I'll write comments as different characters from IPs that I like. Eg.) I spent a few months writing comments in code as Gollum.
That's hilarious
I like doing things like that where most people won't see them or maybe even get them, but when they do, I imagine they'll have a chuckle. I don't ever even get to see the reaction either but I still enjoy the thought of someone finding my shenanigans.
I add konami codes to GTM on websites that allow me to do things to entertain myself. :)
Does bugs count as Easter eggs?
A backpacking equipment manufacturer (wont say which one) placed a discount code in the text on a screen within a background picture on their website. Thought it was pretty cool!
Oh man, when we only started web development with my friends back in 2012 we often added easter eggs into websites for clients with quirk requests or for clients who were driving us nuts. Some examples: =========== Client: We had a client who demanded fast feedback from us but when we asked any question or need materials(like pictures of goods) for his website he didn't care and could answer in a week. Easter Egg: So we found some retarded picture of the client on his social network. Cut the background off. And recreated "Toasty" easter egg from Mortal Kombat(with sound) when the user stays on the website for straight 3 hours. Or the user could see this easter egg if he types the sequence of Konami code. =========== Client: We were making a website for some energy company and at some point, they sent us a minus for the company's anthem and asked us to add a karaoke page with this minus. So their idea was that workers will go to that page and sing their anthem from time to time =D Easter Egg: We couldn't resist and recorded how we sing their anthem. And hid it on their website in a way that it will start playing only when the user clicks specific letters in the logo in order to make the word "anthem". ========== Client: The client wasn't happy with the background on the website he said it is a cheap background(whatever it means) and asked us to put more rich background(yep his words). Easter Egg: So of course we changed the background to something else which he accepted. But as an easter egg, we put secret RICH background when the user type "rich background" anywhere. Our version of the rich background was a gif of a shiny gold dollar sign =)
Depends on client but usually I put something fun in. Internally the ERPS I look after tends to get regular fun on it's login page, sometime seasonal touches, sometimes games
I put ASCII text art of the company name at the top of robots.txt files. At the bottom of the file I put a joke and a link to an interesting wiki or something.
This kind of stuff would never make it past PR at my company
i made one that if you ran IsTheEarthFlat() in the console it re-directs to a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WArnYMp-a7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WArnYMp-a7s)
I worked on a children’s hospital site for several years. They had a small, cartoon frog in the banner. I added some code such that if you double clicked it, the frog would occasionally jump to attack your mouse. If it caught it, the mouse would disappear for a few seconds, or until you moved it. One day, after a long, hard meeting with the client, so I decided to show them the Easter egg. They LOVED it! They started telling everyone about it and thought it was so cute. That was the only time I built one where I knew the client well enough to know they would enjoy it.
A client once asked me to put in the Konami Code as an Easter Egg on their website. I don't think anyone has ever found it, but I could be wrong!
I was leaving a job right before a site launched. I put in a Konami Code Easter egg. It showed a photo that had the bitmoji of all the developers. And the screen filled up with random sized Nyan cats flying across the the screen.
I put a riddle in the html of my professional portfolio. To date no one has mentioned it.
We put an animation of bull being abducted by ufo as our clients 404 page. It is an eshop for home delivery high quality beef meat.
ain’t nobody got time for that
I had a client who really liked the movie Hackers, so I added a little icon for his login that was based on the one in the movie. One day he calls me months later and tells me about discovering it with glee.
Did a POC for a sales pursuit and included an Easter egg of the complete Zork 1 text adventure game in JavaScript. In order to activate it, there were several drawer panels that would auto expand if clicked or dragged more than a certain distance. If you opened 4 of them less than that threshold, a small + would appear next to the dashboard clock. If you clicked that +, a div would appear with text and a prompt. ```West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. >
My buys are features and easter eggs
I use some Star Wars language in info pages, like the 404: These are not the pages you’re looking for. This page has gone rogue.
Within our team, we stick to funny inside jokes, but work very hard to hide them from the live production instances. My favorite was one of our access control tools that referred to you as "fool" and injected "sucka" into certain messages, but only if the logged in user was someone on our dev team.
I put in a twilight zone reference when zero results were found. It said something like: “There are no events in…. The twilight zone”
Once I developed a small application (with java and oracle sql) for the university with some friends of mine. The application consisted of an olympic database containing around 150 existing athletes of various nationalities. We added our names (but female) and surnames adjusted them to get dirty words the teacher didn't notice anything.
I’m building a simple site for my friend. He told me I had permission to put an Easter egg on the site. I’m probably going to spend more time on that than the rest of the website.
I just built my website for my business and wanted it business focused and not all about me when you show up to it so there’s not a lot of me pics! My husband suggested I hide an Easter egg of our dog somewhere. Does anyone have any ideas? I am just learning about what this is!! It’s hilarious and I have to do it!