Behind this site: the jokes and the easter eggs

On a large screen, a small terminal sits at the bottom right of this site. It has nothing to do with the page. It keeps typing commands and getting answers. curl wttr.in/belgium gives “rain. obviously.” and git push --force gives “on a friday? bold.”

Click it and you can type yourself. help gives a few suggestions, and if it does not know a command, it asks whether you have tried turning it off and on again. The commands stay in English in both languages, and only the replies change. You will not see it on smaller screens, and if your device is set to reduce motion, it does not type by itself.

⌘K

⌘K, or Ctrl+K if you have no Mac, opens a search window. It holds the pages, the projects, all the blog posts and the legal texts. You type a few letters, choose with the arrows and press enter. One line in that list does something different from the rest.

The g shortcuts

Press g and then a second letter within a second, and you jump to a page. g w goes to work, g s to services, g p to process, g a to about, g c to contact and g h to home. For the journal it is g j. ? shows the full list. They do nothing in a form field, so you can type there as usual.

The clock

The navigation shows the time in Belgium, with a short line next to it: whether I am at my desk, or when I am back. It works that out from the day and the hour, so it does not really know where I am.

Two languages with no /nl or /en

Dutch is the default, and English is the option. Every page has its own address per language, with no /nl or /en in front: /werk and /work, /aanpak and /process, /blog and /journal.

The easter eggs

You have to find those yourself, so here are only a few hints. Anyone who has ever typed a cheat code on a games console will feel at home here. Your browser’s developer tools are not empty on this site. The web of the nineties is also somewhere on this site, and it takes some persistence. Somewhere the studio refuses to make coffee, with an official text from 1998 as proof.

Why they are there

I enjoy building this. It is a one-person studio, and the site may as well show who that person is. People who poke around get something for it. They also show care: the terminal answers in your language, and it does not type if your device asks for less motion.