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by JohnFen 1786 days ago
Plenty of commercial software contain easter eggs as well.
1 comments

I worked for a company where a developer put a dirty limerick in a UI control, activated by a keystone sequence.

They also turned on output tracing via another keystroke sequence.

During a presentation, one of the consultants needed to turn on tracing in front of a VERY large multinational client (heavens knows why, it was in front of C-suite execs…). They hit the wrong keystroke, and up popped the limerick - on a large projector, in front of the CEO.

Don’t put in Easter eggs.

I'm not saying putting easter eggs in is a good practice, only that it's not rare. I think with pretty much every company I've worked for, putting in easter eggs was specifically forbidden. And, in every company, they were put in anyway -- they just had to be sneaky enough to pass through code review undetected (which, I think, improved the quality of them!)
The lesson I take from that story is you should avoid dirty easter eggs, but innocent silly ones still seem fine to me.