Error pages is what we do

Does frantically hammering away at your keyboard for hours on end sound like a typical day to you? Well, that’s not the case with us developers here at XING as we’re a really creative and professional bunch who like to have fun at work.

And December 2011 is no exception. We want our customers to share the fun we have, even when presented with a 404 page after trying to find something. Let’s face it – it happens!

We recently breathed a little “techie” life into our 404, 500, and “it’s all dead” pages as these are all pages that our users see very little (fortunately ;-) so we decided there’d be no harm in jazzing them up a bit.

When deciding on a theme for our 404 page, Christmas was approaching like a juggernaut, so it probably comes as no surprise that we decided to give the page a Christmas feel to it. And who’s the best person to do that? Santa Claus of course!

We could have spent some hard cash on a professional photo, but we decided to come up with our own. But who really wants to pose as Santa Claus? Well, no one as it turned out, which is why we came up with a nifty way of finding a suitable “victim”: The first person to mess something up in our build/developer environment is appointed “employee of the month” and has to pose for the camera. Up to 40 engineers can be working on the same repository, so it’s quite normal for a build to become damaged from time to time.

So we announced this in a group email, and of course this gave rise to the question as to whether anyone would actually dare to commit anything. One little get-out clause was included – the first person to make a mistake could choose between writing a devblog text or becoming our Santa Claus. The second person, if the first wrote a devblog text, would then have to become Santa Claus no matter what.

So the following week we scoured our Jenkins build and we received several error notifications. Unfortunately they were all automatically generated errors, and in the end it actually took three days for someone to finally make a mistake. But then we’d got our man and there was no getting out of it. So he donned his Santa Claus outfit, held up a cardboard 404 sign, and posed for the cameras. Now he has a place in the XING hall of fame as the face of our 404 page in December 2011.

So if you’re looking for something on XING at the moment, you may come across our friendly “employee of the month” who’s actually somewhat of a hero around the office now.

And to round things off, here’s an unofficial look at how Santa came to appear on our 404 page.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 10:46 and is filed under Everything else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.