Which piece to give
A programmer mug should be the right program. This page maps the person you are buying for to one of the sixteen pieces, each drawn as bars on a mug or a white tee.
Someone who has everything
A programming gift for someone who has everything fails when it is another device. They own the keyboard. A unique gift for a developer is a program they would defend, with the letters taken out and the structure left in. A code mug in this catalog is that object. The white tee uses the same file. The words, the credit, and any license notice stay on the page.
If you only know that they write software, start at Gifts for developers and pick from the six safe pieces. If you know the habit, use the groups below and buy one.
They ship software
Git is the week as a picture. Linus Torvalds, 2005, the first version, GPL notice on the page. Give it to someone whose sentences include the word rebase and who is not joking.
SQLite is the quiet tool. D. Richard Hipp, public domain, the opening of sqlite3_exec. Give it to someone who likes software that stays in-process and out of the meeting.
Linux start_kernel is the boot. Linus Torvalds and others, GPL-2.0 only, notice on the page. Give it to someone who has been paged because a machine did not come up. The bars are the opening of today's function, which has grown for decades.
They like the early web
CERN web server is the server CERN placed in the public domain on 30 April 1993, along with the line-mode browser and libwww. The bars are the start of handling a connection. The first web page is the other half of that story. The bars follow the structure of info.cern.ch. The words are not reprinted. A lawyer cleared the listing. Give the server to someone who cares about the program, and the page to someone who cares that a document had a link.
RSS 1.0 is December 2000, the RSS-DEV group, Aaron Swartz as one author at 14. The copyright notice stays on the page. jQuery is John Resig, 2006, MIT notice on the page, the function that became a reflex. Give RSS to a person who still wants the web to be a file you can subscribe to. Give jQuery to a person who remembers when that one function was the whole library you needed.
They like one famous trick
Quake III inverse square root is Greg Walsh's fast inverse square root, constant 0x5f3759df, shipped by id Software, often miscredited to Carmack. GPL notice on the page. This is the programmer mug for someone who likes a trick and cares that the credit is right.
Bitcoin halving is GetBlockSubsidy: 50 BTC, halved every 210,000 blocks, MIT notice on the page. SHA-256 is an original sketch of the compression step in NIST FIPS 180, not an OpenSSL file. A lawyer cleared that line. JPEG is the Independent JPEG Group and Thomas G. Lane, the opening of the fast integer inverse DCT, their notice on the page. Give the halving to the person who watches the epoch. Give the hash to the person who says the name SHA-256 out loud. Give JPEG to the person who knows that a photograph is a transform.
They like the history, or the paper
Apollo 11 ignition is Don Eyles and Peter Adler, 1969, BURN_BABY_BURN, named from Magnificent Montague's radio shout. Public domain. The programmer mug for someone who wants the machine that flew.
TeX is Donald Knuth. The bars are main_control. A lawyer cleared the listing, and the name stays Knuth's. Give it to someone who has argued about a line break.
Hello, world is Brian Kernighan's program, made famous by the 1978 book. The bars are the program, not the page. A lawyer cleared it. Give it when the right tone is a beginning. Attention is Vaswani and co-authors, 2017. The bars are an original sketch of scaled dot-product attention, not a figure from the paper. Give it to someone who dates the field from that paper. Zen of Python is Tim Peters, for someone whose affection for the work comes out as a rule.
Buy one. Redbubble prints the mug or the white tee and ships to the EU and the US. The page you came from, birthday or goodbye or graduation, still decides the tone. This page only decides the file.