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One surprisingly practical use I found for things like this; when internal tools throw up a 404 or a 503 with the usual default status page, people assume "oh it's not working, I'll try again later".

When they get an unexpected cat (or dog, in this case) they tend to go and ask their tech team, "what's with the cat?" It's not a substitute for good logging and alerting in any way, and is totally unsuitable for environments where internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, but as a way to get people to pay attention when something goes wrong then a cute animal can work a lot better than a "normal" notification.



Plus it’s gonna send a lot more data over the network. A typical 404 is just a few lines of text. But these are an entire image blob.


Cool > professional. "Professional" is boring. ;)


If internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, then there's a serious culture problem and I don't wanna work there.




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