Warp Zone 🌀

🎉 Congratulations! 🥳 You've found this page, meaning you've solved one of my Easter Egg riddles.

As you probably already noticed, I've hidden countless Easter Eggs throughout my site; each one leads here. This page serves as an explanation of how I designed this trail, why it exists, and what it all means. Think of it as a developer's commentary.

Since you've made it this far, I'd love to hear about your journey. Please shoot me an email about yourself at illya​ at​​ starikov​ dot​ co (WARNING: zero-width spaces injected here to prevent scraping bots.)

My passion for these sorts of puzzles began at Garmin, where there was an annual "code cracker” competition. Every week, a new puzzle would go live on the Confluence page, and competing teams would race to solve it first. It had everything: puzzles, encryption (they rejected my suggestion of using ROT32), code and no-code solutions, images, audio, videos. Ever since, I've made it a priority to weave puzzles into my career to keep things interesting.

When I left Garmin, my first full-time job, my farewell email included a hidden link in my signature, invisibly formatted to a song that deeply resonated with me at the time. I knew I'd be back to visit, making the song choice especially meaningful. But I didn't stop there—I personalized each hidden link for my team members when individually BCC'ing them. Here's the one for Hayden.

I continued this tradition at Google, awarding Moma badges to colleagues who discovered hidden links embedded in my presentations.

And now, I've brought it here.

The Zero-Width Space Place

This is where the entire idea of Easter Eggs really began to crystallize. Seeing the phrase "Nothing to see here" combined with the concept of altering software behavior using an invisible character resonated deeply with me—it felt exactly right.

Interestingly, I was surprised to discover that HTML actually renders in the subheading field; typically, this area is reserved exclusively for search engines.