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Easter egg follow-up

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Tom says there's no excuse for adding easter eggs. I think this post of mine has generated more activity than anything I've written about WinFS or Longhorn ;)

I'm not going to advocate that every developer ought be able to spend as much time as they want checking in hidden features willy nilly. But I think there is something to be said for allowing developers to add some personal expression and creativity to a product that they spend years building.

The original Mac had the signatures of all the designers on the interior shielding of the case. To me, that shows pride, and passion, for the product they worked on. At their best, easter eggs serve the same purpose (although admittedly adding code to software is higher risk than carving your name into a piece of shielding).

I also strongly disagree with the notion that developers ought to be spending every minute of their time at work writing code. While that's clearly their #1 job, if you hired only developers who sit at their desk all day writing code (and don't take time out to experiment, or be creative, or de-stress at the foosbal table, or whatever), I think your product would be worse off.

[update: fixed spelling of easter in the first sentence ;]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
    How many developers think that writing code for Ferris's company would be a good job?
  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
    Well, you can do what you want here, im flexable, but if any rogue code ends up in the product that puts food in our mouthes, you jeoperdise ALL of us. SO yeah yer out but outside the project you can do pretty much anything you want you can create your own apps or things but they dont go in the live code. There is this issue about trustworthy computin you are mouthing on about and harping on blah blah yack yack.. So you want to have this "Do as we say but not as we do" label?
  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
    Hey don't repres us word 97 pinball gamers!!
  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
    From the easter egg database, 90% of this so called "creativity" you rant on about and "expression" is mostly displaying of CREDITS, OMG IM CRYING A RIVERIN THE POOL OF CREATIVITY!

    The other ones seem to be offensive.