For over a decade, there's been a tiny ASCII duck hiding in plain sight. Open the page source for amazon.com, scroll all the way to the bottom, and there it is, surfing the web and quietly meowing at anyone who looks.
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A few years ago I stumbled onto this meowing duck, and it turns out the internet had too. MEOW has lived in that source code for years. If you've never seen it, go look now!
One day I thought, why not bring that same duck energy to AWS? So I made my own mascot. Same surfing spirit, except this one doesn't meow. It barks. Meet Waddles.
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Waddles made his first appearance on March 12, 2026 and landed on the timeline on X/Twitter.
You'll be seeing Waddles around more, but I figured I owe the internet an explanation of sorts.
Ok, I think all my ducks are in a row now 😂.
# Waddles takin a nap
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Want your own Waddles? I built a little tool called ducksay. Check out the repo here. Give it a message and it hands it right back to you, duck included:
$ ducksay "woof"
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If ducks aren't your thing, drop some of your favorite ASCII art in the comments. Waddles could use some friends.
Happy Coding 🤗!
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