The Story of Egg.js
Project
If you know me, read this site or Punching Kitty, or even just follow me on Twitter, it won’t surprise you that I like to put an easter egg in everything I make. (Example: Type the konami code right now.) APIs or command line programs aren’t always the best easter egg medium, but website are fertile ground and about two months ago I got tired of pasting the same basic easter egg code in all of my websites and thought about making a quick library to add easter eggs and tracking (you’ve got to know if people have figured them out!). Egg.js was born. I threw some simple javascript code together and pushed it up to GitHub…and then it needed a peer review (I practice what a preach) and sent it over to my friend Rob who is the best Javascript dev I know and he made some great suggestions / rewrote it. In the end, it works well and has a nice simple interface to get out the way and let you focus on the joke and not all of the setup.
A few days later, I was sitting at the Clojure/West conference, in between sessions, and said to Rob: “I wonder if I should submit this to Hacker News. It feels like one of those silly things that always take off and hit the homepage.”
I told you!
Yes, I was 100% right, but it was actually far more popular than I thought and, shockingly, the Hacker News comments were pretty nice. All of a sudden, Egg.js was one of the trending Javascript repos, sitting with the likes of React JS and React Native!
A few days later it raced past 1000 stars on GitHub and it’s still growing. Crazy. I guess people like silly web jokes.
You can check out the details at thatmikeflynn.com/egg.js.
Related Posts
Software Development is Dead, Long Live Developers!
“If you don’t learn to code, in ten years it will be like being illiterate!” That was what someone exclaimed on a panel discussion I was on in 2013. It was a talk about bringing technology and entertainment together held in Beverly Hills and hosted by a coding bootcamp company. Two of the people on the panel were from a different bootcamp company, and then there was me, an actual technologist working in entertainment.
Read moreApple Intelligence Summaries Are a Mess
Jason Snell over at Six Colors takes Apple to task over the current state of their Apple Intelligence notification summaries. He’s 100% right. They are bad, especially when summarizing news, and that’s unacceptable even with the “beta” tag. Take a look at his included example: A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough.
Read moreThoughts on Apple Bloggers and Vision Pro Coverage
I posted this on Mastodon, but I figured I would cross-post it here as well. I wonder if we’re headed for a weird place with the #Apple Blogosphere (AKA the Apple Blog Mafia). All of the main players are talking about Vision Pro all the time and saying things like “I lose track of time in here!
Read more