Gifts for developers
Gifts for developers are hard because the useful tools are already on the desk. Give a famous program, drawn as one colored bar per line, on a mug or a white tee.
They already own the gadget
A keyboard, a laptop from work, and a drawer of conference stickers. Another device has to beat the one they chose themselves. A program they already respect does not enter that contest. Programmer gift ideas that start from a catalog of electronics are competing with a person who reads reviews for sport.
Programmers, software engineers, and coders are the same person in this search. They will recognize a listing without a speech from you. If they write application code, stay on this page. If they keep machines running, the better door is Gifts for technical people. The object is the same catalog. The reason you picked the piece is not.
What is printed
The artwork is the source with the letters removed. Each line becomes one horizontal bar. Color marks the kind of token: comment, string, number, name, and the plain rest of the line. Indent stays, so the structure of the program is still a shape you can see. There is no plate behind the bars. On the mug the ceramic is the ground. On the shirt the white fabric is the ground.
The title, the credit, and any license notice stay on the piece page. You are buying the color of a listing. The story of who wrote it lives here, where a credit can be corrected. That split is the whole product. A slogan about coffee does not need a footnote. A real program does.
Mug or white tee
Buy the mug if the gift lives on a desk. Buy the white tee if they will wear the same picture. Both objects use one artwork. Redbubble prints it and ships to the EU and the US. This site does not take an address or a payment, and it does not ask for a shirt size. The sizes are on Redbubble.
A desk mug is the default developer gift, because that is where the work happens. Choose the tee when you know they wear white, or when a parcel of cloth is easier to hand across a remote team. Do not buy both unless you mean to. One picture, chosen well, is the gift.
Six pieces, if you are guessing
SQLite if they ship products and like a tool that disappears into phones, browsers, and build machines. D. Richard Hipp put the library in the public domain. The bars are the opening of sqlite3_exec, the call that runs a statement and walks the rows.
Zen of Python if they have a sense of humor about the craft. Tim Peters wrote it as PEP 20. CPython hides the text in this.py behind a ROT13 puzzle, so import this prints it. The PSF notice stays on the page.
Git if the week is commits. Linus Torvalds wrote it in 2005, after BitKeeper fell through. The bars are from that first version. The GPL notice stays on the page. Quake III inverse square root if they still mention the constant 0x5f3759df. Greg Walsh wrote the routine. It shipped in id Software's Quake III, and it is often handed to John Carmack. This catalog does not do that.
Apollo 11 ignition if they like the machines that flew. Don Eyles and Peter Adler wrote the lunar-module ignition routine BURN_BABY_BURN in 1969. Eyles traced the name to the disc jockey Magnificent Montague. The listing is public domain. CERN web server if they think of the web as a program someone had to leave switched on. On 30 April 1993 CERN placed the server, the line-mode browser, and libwww in the public domain. The bars are the opening of the routine that takes a connection.
One of those six is a sound gift when you know the person and not their favorite file. When you do know the reference they repeat, use Which piece to give and send only that piece.