Rainbow Unicorns & Reversible Erasers: Developers Share Their Most Unconventional Code

Developers often have a trove of peculiar, whimsical, or downright strange programs they've built over the years, born from curiosity, humor, or the simple joy of making. A recent Hacker News discussion invited users to share their "weirdest" creations, and the responses painted a vivid picture of ingenuity, nostalgia, and the often-playful nature of coding.

For the Sheer Fun of It

Many of the shared projects were crafted purely for amusement or to inject a bit of levity into the digital world. The original poster mentioned a CLI utility that shows a rainbow unicorn flying across the screen upon successful test runs, and an IRC client built using only named file pipes. This playful spirit was echoed by others:

vunderba recalled creating a Win9x system tray app that allowed users to grab a window by its title bar, shake it, and "hurl it off the screen" to kill it. They noted, "Assigning a touch of anthropomorphism to a stubborn program provided a satisfying outlet for user irritation."
ChrisGermano shared "Screaming," a Brainfuck interpreter written in Python that only used various forms of the letter 'A' for its syntax.
gdhkgdhkvff built a mock "machine learning movie recommendation" website that, regardless of user input, would always recommend "Weekend at Bernie’s," followed by "Weekend at Bernie’s 2."
gcheong's first iOS app was a simple button that played a flushing sound, inspired by Japanese restroom etiquette devices, though Apple rejected it for being too simple.
yen223 built a Lorem Ipsum-style placeholder text generator using quotes from the /r/nocontext subreddit, an idea that another user found "legitimately interesting and fun to use."

Nostalgia and Early Coding Adventures

For many, these "weird" projects were stepping stones in their programming journey, often representing their first encounters with new platforms or APIs:

vunderba's window-hurling app was their first program after reading Charles Petzold's Win32 API guide.
bhu1st fondly remembered building a polyphonic ringtone maker for Nokia 1600 phones using QBasic.
90s_dev reminisced about a beautifully crafted bubble emulation app for iOS, inspired by Windows 95 screensavers. This spark of nostalgia even led to a live rebuild during the discussion (more on that below).

Clever Hacks and Unconventional Solutions

Beyond pure whimsy, some projects showcased ingenious solutions to peculiar problems or unconventional approaches to tasks:

willmeyers created a random number generator API that used a shared caps lock key as a source of entropy. While bots eventually made it deterministic, it was a weirdly fascinating concept.
mikewarot was tasked with writing a program to erase hard disk boot sectors in the MS-DOS era. Concerned about its potential for harm, they cleverly designed it to merely flip the bits, making the process reversible by running the program again. Their motivation: "to be able to recover from stupid decisions on anyone's part. That and 'Don't be Evil'."
hiAndrewQuinn developed a Go program to SSH into Debian machines and generate a JSON status report, aiming for a simpler alternative to existing, overly complex tools.
sralbert built a website for a judge with a button that showed a green circle 95% of the time and a red circle 5% of the time, the purpose of which remained a mystery.

The Spark of Inspiration: A Live Rebuild

A particularly engaging narrative unfolded within the comments. User 90s_dev, after reminiscing about their old iOS bubble app, declared, "I'll just make it with JS. Can't be that hard." A few hours later, they returned with a link to the newly rebuilt bubbles.90s.dev. This quickly evolved into making it an embeddable screensaver, which they then posted on Show HN, demonstrating the spontaneous creativity and rapid prototyping that such discussions can inspire.

Reflections and Shared Culture

The thread also touched upon broader themes, from the frustration of bots foiling creative projects ("Bots ruin everything," lamented 90s_dev) to the ethical considerations in software development, as highlighted by mikewarot's responsible approach and babyent's candid remark about the moral unease of working on "dating app gamification" despite the job experience. The repeated references to XKCD comics (like 221 - Random Number and 3054 - Esoteric Monorepos) also underscored the shared cultural touchstones within the developer community.

Ultimately, these "weirdest programs" are more than just coding exercises; they are expressions of creativity, humor, learning, and sometimes, a quiet form of problem-solving or social commentary. They remind us that programming can be a deeply personal and wonderfully strange endeavor.