Secret Santa for a developer
Secret Santa gifts for developers have to be obvious while the paper is still on the floor. A short famous program, drawn as bars on a mug or a white tee, is obvious.
Recognize it across the room
An office gift for a developer fails when it needs a lecture. You have thirty seconds and an audience that is only half listening. Pick a short piece. Hello, world is the program everyone was shown. Zen of Python is the list of principles Python hides in this.py. jQuery is John Resig's 2006 shortcut, the function you passed a function to. Quake III inverse square root is the fast inverse square root and the constant 0x5f3759df.
A tall listing, Linux or Apollo or a JPEG decoder, becomes a texture at arm's length. That texture is a beautiful object on a desk you chose carefully. It is a confusing Secret Santa. Save the long pieces for a goodbye or a retirement, when you know the person and you have a card.
You are not buying the book they were assigned, and you are not buying a sticker with a language logo. Those say you know the job title. A short listing says there is a canon, and that you know four entries in it, which is enough for a room. jQuery's MIT notice, the Zen's PSF notice, and the Quake GPL notice stay on the piece pages. You do not read them aloud. You do not have to pretend the mug is a license.
White elephant, stocking, same rule
A white elephant gift for programmers can be slightly rude, and this catalog can do that without being wrong. The Quake piece is the one. People will say Carmack. Greg Walsh wrote it, it shipped from id Software, and the GPL notice stays on the page. The correction is the joke. If the room will not enjoy being corrected, give the Zen instead. Tim Peters already wrote the punchlines.
A stocking stuffer for a programmer is the mug, not the tee, unless you know the size and you are willing to be wrong in public. Ceramic has one size. Redbubble prints it and ships to the EU and the US. The price is whatever the live listing says, plus the markup you choose. This page will not invent a number that expires.
When you know them better than Santa should
Secret Santa is a stranger with a budget. If you actually know the reference they will not shut up about, you are no longer shopping for the room. You are shopping for them. A birthday gift for a programmer is that errand, and Which piece to give is the map. Use those when the name you drew is a friend. Use Hello World when the name you drew is a colleague you like and do not know.
If the draw is a whole team and the budget is shared, still buy one object. A pile of small logo gifts reads as the party. One mug with a program on it reads as a person who thought about the room for ten minutes, which is all Secret Santa is asking.