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Comment by reidjs | Hacker News Reader

One of the first "coding guidelines" I introduced at my b2b crud app programming day job is along the lines of "Don't use humor or jokes in our business facing applications and codebase"

I assumed it was common knowledge not to do that crap. I was wrong.

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Don't use humor in staging either. You might forget to remove it, and suddenly a joke makes it into prod and people are pissed at you.

This (possibly) happened to Riot Games a couple years ago for their yearly predictions for the World Championship; they had some flavor text about the wildcard portion of the tournament being boring or something and people got pissed. They apologized and explained that it had been a joke from dev that made it into prod that shouldn't have ever been published, but...that shouldn't have ever been typed into the computer in the first place.

It's not about knowledge. It's about convention.

You set the convention where you were - great! I honestly prefer that too, but it's just a convention and not some kind of hard truth.

Before I was even realized as a possible future software engineer, I remember being fascinated by easter eggs.

https://www.stuff.tv/features/hatched-best-easter-eggs-tech-...

As a welp, I remember learning all about the jargon file and how important it was to sound 1337.

http://jargon-file.org

As disoriented, newly-hatched engineer in far-away Redmond, I remember learning about the Windows Registry and why loaded packages were called "hives" (dev was harassing a coworker with a fear of bees).

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...

These things are part of hacker culture. Welcome to HackerNews!

Tone deaf error messages that act like I'm supposed to chill and laugh at my shit breaking are not easter eggs.

I don’t mind it in the code, some of the best laughs are creative comments in code, just don’t put it in the interface where a user can see it.

In my previous job any humor or "humor" in the code was forbidden as it was audited by our customers. At first I thought it was stupid but after a while I was thankful not to have to read the same tired jokes all the time.

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