PostHog Lore and inside jokes

A beginner's guide to some of our custom Slack emojis and various anecdotes you'll see and hear about.

• bad-internet Yakko always had bad internet when demoing. <em>Always.</em>

• James Greenhill wore a skin tight green all-body suit for months to improve his Zoom background game without us realizing.

• ben-peace Ben White has the same pose in 90% of PostHog photos. It's a reference to a meme.

• hype-X where X is a team member. Used in times of extremely impressive performance, unless used sarcastically.

• Mr Blobby. We once changed how we ingest session recording data, to use S3 blob storage. We called it Mr Blobby. Mr Blobby is a creepy '90s TV character from the UK. This project was nightmarishly hard, which is why this character was fitting.

• Paul D'Ambra will make you eat gelato at every offsite.

• Sometimes people screenshot each other's faces and Zoom screens and use them as their backgrounds. Usually when an all-hands is too dry.

• Charles Cook wore a suit to his performance review. He is the only person in history to wear a suit to anything PostHog-related. Unsure if he was making a point, we later abandoned the practice of performance reviews regardless.

• We took lots of buses at an offsite in Portugal. The roads were incredibly twisty, the driver was in a bad mood, drove too quickly, and people threw up. It was bad.

• sparksjoy / does_not_spark_joy A reference to <a href="https://konmari.com/marie-kondo-rules-of-tidying-sparks-joy/">Marie Kondo's book</a> on tidying your house, generally used to describe things that are particularly good or bad from a user's perspective

• eu-thumbsup / thumbs-down-eu We once made <a href="https://www.isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com">isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com</a> when there were privacy rulings about Google Analytics. We put it on Hacker News, got the top of the front page, and it was our biggest <em>ever</em> day of signups at the time. The website was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but the internet took it seriously. The person in the emoji is Ursula von der Leyen, who introduced the GDPR legislation.

• IPO promises. There is a list of these that is brought out at certain moments. You may see.

• Marius Andra will train you on Post-it notes if you go to an offsite with him. Success of a good Post-it note posting is in the lift away from the surface – the most important thing is to peel off the Post-it note, as opposed to pulling.

• Three finger rule - another Marius invention, if someone holds up three fingers while you're talking, it means you aren't being concise enough. We don't actually use this much as it's predictably awkward and distracting, so ruins any meeting it could have otherwise helped.

• When we hit 10,000 GitHub stars, Ian Vanagas read every username on a live stream that took over six hours.

• We like to nail things. It's not uncommon to see a GitHub issue titled "Nail [feature name]". Sometimes we'll even assign an absurd version number like "3000". (The codename for the next generation UI of the PostHog app is referred to as PostHog 3000, and other projects have also adopted this naming convention as well.)

• James Hawkins once decided to go off piste in a new starters intro of all hands and asked the question “Do you moisturize?”

• James Hawkins has also gone viral <a href="https://x.com/james406/status/1824083929860583858?s=20">multiple</a> <a href="https://x.com/james406/status/2005715590372020669">times</a> for his tweets about "hopping on a quick call" and that is entirely what he is known for now.

• Everyone says "thanks dylan" to Dylan Martin because he once had a really good all-hands demo. He also did a demo entirely with autotune.

• Anna-Marie Doudova did a presentation at our Barbados offsite about Gen Z slang which encouraged everyone to do Gen Z slangmaxxing like an unc that's cooked 💀.

• Hire movers. Whenever someone asks the team for moving or packing tips, the unanimous, handbook-sanctioned answer is: hire movers. (And, while you're at it, hire packers.) This was settled in a lengthy thread where someone moving to a second-floor apartment a four-minute drive away — with a flight of stairs and lots of heavy furniture — asked for _packing_ hacks and instead received an avalanche of "hire movers" from everyone.