The Story of Egg.js

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.