rspec-kungfuhamster originated as a joke on a POS development team I worked on almost 10 years ago. In the battle of scope creep and requirements changes, we all got a bit loopy and a couple members of the team drew up an ASCII animated “kung fu hamster” as a terminal-based spinner while the credit card authorization (often by modem) was taking place.

Strangely, product ownership didn’t see the humor in so much time being spent on the animation.

I decided to revive kung fu hamster as an rspec formatter in honor of those days of solving technical problems on out-of-date SCO Unix boxes without access to anything but standard and home grown libraries, as well as the two team members that have passed away at far too young an age since.