Would You Add Easter Eggs To Software Produced At Work?

Mr. Leinad writes "Do you add Easter Eggs to the software that is produced at the office? I mean, if you have complete control over the final product, do you spice it up with that little personal touch, which, as unlikely as it is that anyone will see, carries with it an 'I was here' signature? I've just finished the development of a large software product, and I have a couple of days left to try to add my own personal Easter Egg code, but given that the software is quite professional, I don't know if I should. What do you think? Should we developers sign our creations?"

Comments

Add something useful instead

[Clueless Moron]

Anywhere I've worked, we've always tended to add potentially useful but undocumented experimental features to our programs.

Quite often they end up being useful and get cleaned up and documented in subsequent releases.

Re:I would

[jawtheshark]

I already did... Long time ago, in an e-Banking application. If you pressed ctrl-alt and clicked on the bank logo, you got a picture of the development team. It was innocent stuff, but I know as a fact that they have removed it by now. It was simple code, a bit of JavaScript and a picture named as if it was an advertisement banner.

Ah, the good old days when I was young and foolish.

Professionally Signed

[no1home]

My personal take on this is to go ahead. First, the world NEEDS to step back from the super-serious attitude, but still be polite. Second, coding is as much art as science and I think your paintings, songs, code, engineering, etc should all have your personal mark, something to make it identifiably yours. Third (kinda goes with the first) doing so can be a moral booster for you AND those who discover it.

However, there are issues to keep in mind. You must keep it professional, so no vulgarity, rudeness, or jokes about loss of data. Certainly, you should avoid all the '-isms' like the plague. And, just as important, it should be clear that the Easter Eggs do not break security in any way.

In short, make it secure, polite, fun and it should be cool.

Re:Well..

[Clueless Moron]

Easter Eggs? No, funny comments/error messages, and bizarre variable names, absolutely.

At one place I worked, the guy who wrote up the coding standard explicitly prohibited jokes in comments and humorous variable names. I'm not kidding.

Presumably he will be reincarnated as a worker ant in his next life.

Well, yes

[girlintraining]

Yes, you should. Just do so in good taste. I once put The Story of Mordac(tm) into a script that I made and distributed around the office, which described in a humorous and epic way the reason for its invention: All it did was send F5 to a window with a specified name.

We were running HP Service Desk and the admins, in their infinite idiocy, disabled the auto-refresh of the views. This was because they seriously under-spec'd the server and were looking for any way possible to cut the load down. It crashed every few hours; Which is what you get for using Citrix for over five thousand workstations in six different countries for "security" purposes. And then using RAID10 on the database... oh god, the write times, they buuuurnses us. *snickers* In either event, after distributing it to our techs and letting it bounce around the working grunts in our various offices for awhile, I let it slip to a few friends about the story of Mordac, Preventer of Information Services (thank you Dilbert), who I credited with the debacle.

Two weeks later, the auto-refresh got turned back on. Many queries were made and security operations attempted to track down who had made the "unauthorized script". To this day, whenever a feature gets turned off on a server that the users liked, or some dumb "security" policy goes into place... People chalk it up to Mordac. Many of them aren't familiar enough with the strip to know of the little-known Dilbert character. ;)

Easter egg away my friend, but remember thy audience!

You tell me.

[Ihlosi]

I write firmware for medical devices. You want some easter eggs in your ECG?

The best one ever

[nhtshot]

I used to be the lead programmer for a Big Company (tm). We'd just completed a several year project to build and roll out an in-house ERP system. It was mid-October.

I decided we needed a little fun break. I whipped up a quick piece of code that recolored all the application screens in orange and black. Through it on the update server.

When everyone logged in on Halloween, they were greeted with orange and black screens. Everybody laughed. Even the PHB thought it was pretty funny.

If your work is so serious that you can't have a little fun, it's probably time to find a new job.

here's what I did...

[marhar]

It's only an easter egg for true geeks, but I used this value as an encryption seed:

long encrypt_seed[]={1263681869,1381122376,1313821513};

Hexdumping the executable shows:

00000130 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00000140 00 00 00 00 4d 41 52 4b 48 41 52 52 49 53 4f 4e ....MARKHARRISON
00000150 01 00 00 00 0f 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 78 00 ..............x.

Since it's the file encryption seed, nobody can ever change it without destroying the program's ability to decrypt old files!

Re:My Easter Eggs are comments and error messages.

[Coriolis]

At my current place of employment, all the code we write belongs to the client (which is pretty much SOP in the field). Our clients sometimes do not share our sense of humour. As the technical lead, if I find it, you can be damn sure you're taking it out again. And I am looking :)

I'd discourage actual functionality easter eggs too, in most programs. The industry average is estimated to be 10-20 defects per 1000 lines of code. Every non-essential line of code you write risks introducing a bug.

Re:I would

[eosp]

I've seen that before. I believe that it was on The Daily WTF. Someone was demoing a piece of software, and the guy who wrote a similar product was in the audience. He realized then that the software was very similar to his, although the splash screen had been removed. Eventually, he just accused the author of stealing it, in front of the whole group. Needless to say, he tried to deny it, only to be told to press a certain keyboard shortcut. He did, and sure enough, the accuser's face appeared on screen.

Absolutely - It saved my company's ass once!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hid a secret dialog box in an application I did for a call-center project my employer was working on back in 1999. The software was to manage a call center of untrained temps calling various suppliers of a Very Large Company surveying their Y2K compliance. We were a small company run by an ex-employee (laid off and rehired as a consultant) of the Very Large Company. I hid the egg just as a joke, not really thinking about it. To hide it from the other programmer on the project, I obfuscated the code that created the egg and hid it across several modules. Anyway, about two weeks before we were to ship (and get paid), our salesguy decided to give the customer a preview of the software, which was feature complete and in final testing. He decided that rather than ask me for a demo version, it would be faster to simply send the customer a copy of the folder on my desktop. (This is when I learned to be paranoid about locking my screen when unattended!) All of a sudden the Very Large Company called us and told us they no longer needed us or our software, as they had "repurposed a software used for a previous project". The salesguy threw a fit, talking about how he had "gone above and beyond" to make the sale and "even done a demo". When asked about the demo, he admitted what he had done.

So a week later, my boss and I paid the Very Large Company a visit to meet with the manager who was our contact. He and his boss very proudly showed us his call floor with about 60 people working at workstations running a very familiar-looking piece of software, talking about how they had this "just lying around" and "forgot they had it" and were "really very sorry".

So I asked if I could see the "software that beat us". Before he could say anything, his boss said "Sure, go ahead!", and he didn't argue. So I sat down at a workstation, opened the about box on the software, and noted that the text strings had changed but not the layout. So I clicked where my hidden button should be, and sure enough, there was the hidden dialog box with my name, the date, the company's name, and a large picture of Sailor Moon and Chibi-Usa.

My boss was livid. The manager turned white as a sheet. All of a sudden he didn't want to talk to us anymore! He called security to show us to the door, but the damage was done. Both he and his boss had seen what I did. His boss was not pleased. Apparently he had claimed "finding" the software as an expense. After some discussion between them and our lawyer, it was decided that in exchange for us not suing them and not telling anyone about it they would pay us four times our original contract value. The manager responsible was fired by the Very Large Company, and we fired the salesguy for exposing the company to such liability.

So yes, absolutely, I hide some sort of identifying mark in everything I do. You never know when you might need to prove you worked on something.

Re:Professional easter eggs

[ChameleonDave]

Yes, and it seems very unprofessional of them.

I find it a little annoying that OpenOffice has an entire Space Invaders game in it (put =GAME("StarWars") in any Calc cell) when the suite is so slow and bloated. It makes the statement that they they don't care about streamlining.

Re:I would

[iduno]

Thats kinda scary really if it got through an inspection process.
Just think it could be a bit of JavaScript sending bank and user details to someone. I would think that banks would be pretty strict on the code being written since their customers rely on it.
Especially when things like a major bank like Commonwealth Bank of Australia takes out a withdrawal twice, and keep the second withdrawal themselves. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,,24703544-2,00.html

Re:Easter Eggs are unprofessional

[Facegarden]

Your examples are horrible: Do i want a doctor leaving anything abnormal behind in my body? Fuck no. Do i care if a piece of software i use has an easter egg that shows the dev team when i hold Shift+F8 and click on some logo? No, i don't care at all, they are completely different things!

Now i know you say you worked on mission-critical software for the police, etc, and if there was a place i might omit an egg, it would be there, but that doesn't mean that easter eggs are universally horrible, and you don't seem to get that.

And i get paid on salary, which means i get paid to get my work done. I already work over 8hrs every day, and if i have already gotten my work done and I decide to stay an extra half hour and screw around, that's MY decision, on MY time. That's not "screwing the pooch and exploiting [my] employer" as you put it (which i would say borders on stupidity, given the possible situation i just described). Of course i know someone else is paying for the software and i know that my screwing around would never be okay if it was detrimental to the final work, but i don't consider easter eggs detrimental, if they are simple and harmless.

Simple and harmless may seem like an innocent and uniformed concept, but honestly, unlike what another commenter said, i just don't agree that software is infinitely complex. It's SOFTWARE for christ's sake, it's made to run on a machine that only understands two states, 0 or 1. Software is absolute, and it is one of the simplest things you can encounter, when correctly designed. If i write code that checks for keypresses by running some function in every portion of my program just to have an egg, that could very well lead problem, but if there is a reasonable place to deal with keypresses and i am already using that input for legitimate things, adding one more case is is in most situations going to be completely harmless. I would never encourage a novice to add an egg, but i can't say it's horrible if you know it won't cause damage.

And ultimately, yes, it is unprofessional, in the sense that the ideal professional never has fun, and only does their job, but don't you think you should lighten up just a bit? I do.
-Taylor