One of the stranger parts of my job is working on features that haven’t been completely nailed down yet – someone will say “users should get e-mailed when a new comment is posted”, but won’t say what that “new comment” e-mail should look like.

Some people would treat this as a challenge. I treat this as an invitation to liberally sprinkle outlandish messages throughout the feature that’s being worked on. Here are some examples:

“WOAH DUDE YOU JUST GOT COMMENTED ON”

“YOUR PHOTOZ ARE DONE UPLOADIN”

“I CHOOSE YOU, NEWS STORY! <link>”

..As a general rule, if something is in all caps and sounds ridiculous, I wrote it as testing content. When someone goes through to make the things I build look pretty, they typically remove the testing content and replace it with things like “Hey, you just got a comment!”, or “photo upload complete – view below”. This works fine, really – it’s very easy to see when there’s a feature that someone hasn’t looked over yet, because it will respond in ALL CAPS(and occasionally lolcat).

So if you ever get an e-mail from something we’re building for you and it looks a little strange, don’t fret – but you may want to remind one of us to take a look at the feature in question.