Nyan cat easter egg

Early in my career circa 2011/2012 I was working on a web page that displayed a list view of records. The backing database wasn’t very fast and load times could be up to 2-3 seconds.

At first I went to an online gif spinner creator. Maybe something like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100203081515/http://ajaxload.info/

That seemed so boring and corporate. This list view was an internal back-office application so I got the bright idea to show the nyan cat on 2% of page loads.

For weeks no one said anything. Until one employee kept reporting that “a cat was showing up” on the list view. Dear reader, they sat there and refreshed the view over and over to grab a screenshot.

To this day the most fun I’ve ever had building and releasing software. Fly on nyan cat.

nyan cat gif

Moral of the story

I always try and have fun at work. I think about this at least once a month.

Significant revisions

tags: 2024, technology, personal, javascript