Easter egg hunt

Easter is coming and for all those, who don't know what to do with their spare time and fancy entering a little competition, we've prepared a small challenge.

Easter Egg?

In software development, an Easter egg is funny (but harmless) and undocumented feature hidden from users in unusual places. Excel 97 has its Flight Simulator, FireFox about:robots address and Debian's apt-get has a moo command. The ChEMBL web services has now joined this list and we invite you to find its hidden feature and share with others.

But why?

We would like to encourage you to look at the source code of our web services. Reading code is essential developer skill, as it helps in understanding how the code works. This can lead to the development of new software and/or improve an existing codebase. After skimming through the code, hopefully you will agree that it is well written and easy to extend. Let us know if you disagree, either by emailing us or creating a GitHub issue. We promise, there are no dragons there, only an Easter egg, which should be easy to find after reading the code.

How?

The first person to comment on this post with a URL revealing the Easter egg (web service URL, hmm hint maybe?), will be honoured with a mention in a future blog post. As a 'guarantee', that the Easter egg exists now, we provide the following password protected URL - we will reveal the password, the winner and more details in the follow up blog post. Do you think you can do it? Check it out!

Is this an April fool joke?

No. The joke is in having an Easter egg, not in finding it.

Comments

Matt said…

Is it maybe the chemcha image format?

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/api/data/image/CHEMBL12?format=chemcha

1 April 2015 at 15:09

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