1. System favourite colour
Some time I think just before the release of 1.0, I picked up a ticket to add a bunch of extra stuff to the System Information screen: what version of Java you were running, how much heap was allocated, that kind of thing. In the middle of a block of "System [blah]" lines, I added "System favourite colour: Puce".
In theory, as one of the last steps before releasing a new major version, someone was supposed to update the system favourite colour (usually by searching for obscure colour names on Wikipedia), but it was often forgotten, or done on a random point release, and quite a few times we repeated ourselves. This led to a weird kind of Kremlinology where people tried to reverse-engineer the meaning of something that was not, in the first place, engineered.
I may have encouraged this a little.
As far as I can tell they stopped assigning new ones around 2023, which tracks as that was about when the company stopped being any fun.
2. The donotsuck flag
As an homage to my previous job as an IBM consultant, where starting Websphere would print "Wesbphere is now open for e-business" to the logs, I hid a line deep in Confluence's labyrinthine startup code that checked if you set an undocumented system property (I think: -Dconfluence.donotsuck=true), and if found, would log:
Do not suck flag enabled. Starting in negative suckage mode."
The flag did nothing else. Occasionally someone would suggest hooking actual behaviour up to it, and I would laugh at them.
3. The cheese macro
While developing a quick feature for Confluence that allowed plugin developers to declare macros (bits of wiki markup that executed code) purely through configuration without having to write any Java, I created a simple test macro that, when included in a page, printed the string "I like cheese!"
As a joke, I committed the test code, figuring that if someone noticed I could just pretend I forgot to delete it. The cheese macro went on to become a beloved, if obscure, product mascot (although sadly, not one that survived the most recent Cloud editor rewrite).
Originally posted to LinkedIn, when I was out of work and trying to get attention there.