There's a cute story of "debug stuff left in prod" in cartography of all things.
People designing geolocation systems started a tradition of populating map data with a 1 mile island at 0N 0E and naming it Null Island. No island is actually there.
This allows for an easy catch of a class of bugs in geolocation systems wherein for one reason or another the system mistakenly tries to resolve what's at 0N 0E instead of "actual" coordinates.
This has bubbled up to Null Island appearing on real maps a few times, much to the confusion of people using those maps.
People designing geolocation systems started a tradition of populating map data with a 1 mile island at 0N 0E and naming it Null Island. No island is actually there.
This allows for an easy catch of a class of bugs in geolocation systems wherein for one reason or another the system mistakenly tries to resolve what's at 0N 0E instead of "actual" coordinates.
This has bubbled up to Null Island appearing on real maps a few times, much to the confusion of people using those maps.
Also as a fun fact: Null Island, being placed inside of geolocation mapping data, has to have a shape. One would presume it'd just be a one square mile ... square... to highlight how fake it is, right? Nope.
Its shape is canonically the island from Myst.
Its shape is canonically the island from Myst.
