I hid six easter eggs on this website. Nobody's finding them.

I've spent the better part of a year hiding jokes, a song and a couple of secret buttons inside my own portfolio.

Nobody's finding them.

Not because they're well hidden. Because nobody expects a portfolio to have easter eggs, so nobody goes looking. Recruiters read the headline, skim the projects, maybe click through to the CV. That's the whole job to be done. Why would you click a two-pixel red dot next to my name.

So, in the interest of anyone actually enjoying the scope creep this website quietly absorbed: here they all are. Consider this the walkthrough nobody asked for.

The message for anyone who actually checks the code

Right-click, Inspect, Console tab. There's a message waiting for you, styled and everything, ending in a large ASCII heart. Right-click, View Page Source works too — same message, hiding as an honest-to-god HTML comment in the body.

Both say roughly the same thing: well, well, so you want to know how I built this, that practically screams match, doesn't it, here's my email, write me.

If you found it this way, you were already doing the thing that gets you hired. Looking at the actual code instead of trusting the marketing copy. I respect that enough to leave you my email in a comment.

The dot. All of the dots.

Look for a small red dot. Not just the one next to my name in the nav — also the one in the hero badge, in About, on the CV timeline, in the footer, next to every tool in my toolbox. Anywhere something pulses gently and you assumed "decorative."

None of them are decorative. Click one. Any one. A card appears bottom-left announcing Anja Mode · ON, with a rotating fun fact about me. Click another dot later and it turns off again.

My reasoning at the time: if someone's going to hover over every element on a page anyway — and UX people do that, it's basically an occupational tic — they may as well find something when they do.

The song

Once Anja Mode is on, the label itself has a small red play icon next to it. Click it.

It opens a full song. ANJA MODE (Just One More Thing). Four minutes eleven seconds, written about this exact website, made with Suno, lyrics scrolling along as it plays. It is, to put it generously, a bit much. I regret nothing.

There's a second way in, quieter: a floating card shows up bottom-right a couple of seconds after you land on the homepage. Among its very reasonable XP chips — +10 XP UX, +15 XP AI — sits +5 XP Sleep deficit. That one also opens the song. The lyrics mention the sleep deficit specifically. That's the whole joke. I'm aware it's a small joke to have built an entire audio player around.

The side quest itself

That same bottom-right card is its own small easter egg, independent of the song. It's the one unpolished line on the entire site: building AI products while planning a wedding and coaching volleyball. No case-study language, no framing. Just what was actually happening.

It shows up once per browser session and then leaves you alone, because I have some restraint, occasionally.

The timeline nobody asked to unlock

The CV page has a button that says Unlock personal timeline. Click it and you get the plot twists that don't make it onto the tidy version: started in marketing thinking that was the whole plan, accidentally fell into UX, learned backend concepts out of sheer stubbornness, still fighting perfectionism while shipping anyway.

It's gated behind a click on purpose. The polished CV is for people skimming. This part is for people who wanted to know more and were willing to press a button to find out. Small filter, mildly effective.

The quiz that judges you back

There's a Match simulation quiz button in the nav. Six questions, multiple choice, each answer gets a one-line reaction instead of a score you have to interpret yourself. Answer "replace humans" to what AI should do and it tells you hard pass. Answer "build side projects during vacations" to how you spend downtime and it tells you classic digital product brain.

It's a recruiting tool disguised as a personality test, which is either very on-brand or the most on-brand thing on this entire website.

Why bother

None of this moves the needle on whether I get hired. Nobody's shortlisting candidates by console-log easter egg density.

I built it anyway because the alternative — a portfolio that only ever shows the tidy, finished version — is exactly the kind of thing I complain about in every other post on this blog. Confident, smooth, no gaps, no personality. The stuff I keep saying I don't trust in AI products, I nearly shipped in my own website by default, just by doing the normal, sensible thing.

So it has dots that do something, a song that's slightly too much, a quiz that talks back, and a timeline you have to ask for. It's not efficient. It's not what a portfolio audit would recommend.

It's just closer to what actually happened. Which, this many honest posts in, is starting to look like the whole point.