[infotainment]

I love them, because they give me an excuse to work on silly joke projects. Usually if you make something amusing enough you can win some award for "people's choice" or whatever.

At my old company, people would often go and work on projects that were somehow meaningful to the business. It's no wonder people like that didn't enjoy it. Go work on a VR first person shooter game based on your company's mascot; that's what's gonna get the votes!

[koliber]

One developer on my team added basic emoji support to our commenting system. It was a business app and adding emoji support was never on anyone's top feature list. He did it because that's what he felt like doing.

We feature-flagged this buggy implementation and turned it on for our internal accounts that we used for dogfooding. It was an instant hit. We fast-tracked emoji support, made the implementation stable enough to put in front of customers, and released it.

The good news is that it was well received and used extensively.

The bad news is that emoji support has surprising edge case issues (not talking UTF8 and display) and we've carried that burden ever since :).