Engineer in a terminal

This site answers on four protocols, out of one folder of files on one server. If you live in a terminal, you never have to open a browser to read it.

Everything below works today, against the live site. Nothing needs an account, a key or a client you have to build.

Every page is also Markdown

Each page is published twice: as HTML, and as clean Markdown beside it. Ask for either.

# The twin, by name
curl -sL https://engineer.company/about/index.md

# Or ask the server for it and let it choose
curl -sL -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://engineer.company/about/

Pipe it into whatever renders Markdown for you:

curl -sL https://engineer.company/portfolio/index.md | glow -
curl -sL https://engineer.company/what-it-costs/index.md | bat -l md

Both languages work the same way — /da/about/index.md, /uk/about/index.md.

A Gemini capsule

Gemini is a small protocol with the sensibilities of this site built in: text documents over TLS, no scripting, no cookies, nothing to track you with. Every page of this site exists as gemtext too.

gemini://engineer.company/

Any Gemini client reads it — Amfora, Lagrange or Bombadillo in a terminal, Castor or Kristall in a window. On a Mac or a Debian box:

brew install amfora && amfora gemini://engineer.company/

A Gopher hole

Gopher is a menu protocol from 1991 — plain TCP, no encryption, no scripting — and the site is a set of menus there, one per directory.

gopher://engineer.company/

Lynx speaks it out of the box, as do Bombadillo and gopher-cli. Or ask for a selector by hand, which is the entire protocol in one line:

printf '/contact\r\n' | nc engineer.company 70

An onion service

The same site over Tor, for a reader whose network should not know what they are reading:

http://engineer2ezpeji52ipphljcflzyhetvy5r6tnqubtq45nzlxxv6rsqd.onion/

It is plain http:// deliberately: an onion address is the service’s own public key, so the circuit is authenticated and encrypted before any HTTP is spoken, and a certificate would only re-prove a name the address has already proved. With Tor running locally, curl reaches it directly:

curl -sL --socks5-hostname 127.0.0.1:9050 \
  http://engineer2ezpeji52ipphljcflzyhetvy5r6tnqubtq45nzlxxv6rsqd.onion/index.md

Reading the work as data

The portfolio is syndicated in three formats, each carrying the full text of every item rather than a teaser:

curl -s https://engineer.company/feed.json | jq -r '.items[] | .title'
curl -s https://engineer.company/index.xml     # RSS
curl -s https://engineer.company/atom.xml      # Atom

And the site keeps a map of itself for anything that reads rather than crawls:

curl -s https://engineer.company/llms.txt
curl -s https://engineer.company/humans.txt
curl -s https://engineer.company/.well-known/security.txt

The source, over SSH

The site’s own source lives on our git server, and git speaks SSH:

ssh git.engineer.company

That lands you in a browsable list of the repositories we publish. The web view of the same thing is at git.engineer.company.

Why any of this exists

One deploy writes one folder, and four front doors read it — so none of them can drift from the others, and none of them is a port of the site maintained separately. A page that reads well as gemtext is a page whose structure is real rather than painted on, which is the same property that makes it read well in a screen reader and print correctly on paper. The credits page names the daemons behind each one.

We build things that read well without a browser because that is usually a sign they were built properly — ask us to build you one.