Near fifteen years ago I worked for a web agency with basically no code review and very limited QA

I look back on my early web dev career where source control was something unheard of as were dev environments. In fact we regularly edited code live on prod server to debug/develop. Looking back I just shudder thinking about it.

I belly laugh every time I see that scene in Jurassic Park where the admin's animated face was playing on repeat with taunting audio, and Samuel L. Jackson snaps when he sees it and realizes what has transpired. Classic solid gold.

As someone who loves Easter eggs this is the best story I’ve read so far. Thanks for sharing it! I hid one in an internal “time sheet” tool we had at work that would be triggered after typing 666

You should have sold it as a feature, saying that it is a guard image that shows up when something isn't right :)

A nice note to not put anything you don't want other folks to see in software, even in testing. We wrote a system for a client once. And there was a particular functionality that I had to iterate over quite a bit, trying to nail down evasive, frustrating bugs. Needless to say, later, when the client was printing out some invoices and discovered one with several notes reading "F** F** F**!!!!", we got a phone call. We, clearly, didn't managed to scrub the DB properly when we installed it. We were graced by the fact the clients children were in during the weekend, and they felt maybe one of them had managed to add commentary to the data. "Yea! That's what it was allright! It's all fixed now!" Anyway, software never forgets. Version control is forever. Be gentle when adding commentary to code.

Similar fun story - I was working out how to embed jQuery into a Twiki site and how to do mouse-overs on content for some reason, no idea what any more. I needed some tests with different content. Our boss had just got a bulldog puppy that he was enamored with, so I found a gif of a bulldog puppy licking the camera, so it looked like it was licking the screen from inside it and used it as my test image. I ended up making the front page panel of the new team twiki page where we had the team structure laid out a small random chance of showing the bulldog licking the screen in a full screen mouse-over, then I completely forgot I'd done it and went on vacation. The boss was demoing the new site to the global team, with our MD there, and moused over it, triggering the screen licking gif, then moused off it and came back and it wouldn't retrigger and couldn't work out what had happened. It cau…

Back before flexible web layouts or modals were a thing, we went through a phase of opening a new browser window for some content, and locking the size. Sometimes we'd want to open multiple windows and reference them later on, so we had a naming convention like "_popup_a" and "_popup_b". We had an intern one summer who coded all of his new window calls as "_poopup_X". I have no idea how the client actually found it, but boy did we hear about it.