In my workplace, I've adopted the tangerine as my symbol.1 For example, I react to Slack messages with :shrugging-tangerine:, :thinking-tangerine:, and :approving-tangerine: generated from Google's Emoji Kitchen. I've even presented to all hands with slides featuring tangerines!

Coworkers often wonder why tangerines. Well, I have a few reasons:

Accessible

Tangerines, like chocolates, represent the bounties of the global food trade. For a price nearly anyone can afford, I can enjoy the tangy and sweet juice of this orange treasure!

Tangerines have become so common that they have their own emoji: U+1F34A 🍊. That means I can proliferate tangerines on any text surface, including code review comments and internal wiki articles!

Versatile

Tangerines have flavors versatile enough for drinks, desserts, or simply eating whole! Biologically, citrus fruits like tangerines hybridize easily and quickly, facilitating complexity, fragrance, and robustness. I aspire to do the same.

Fun

Slipping into more base rationale, like with obscenities, I know fun when I see it. I want to bring fun with me, for myself and others. The fun comes from an appropriate, or an inappropriate, tangerine.

  1. A business person would call it part of my “personal brand”. ↩︎