The Mug
Every institution has a founding document. Ours was dishwasher-safe.
Somebody in an office was holding a mug. Printed on the mug was a web address. The address belonged to nobody — it had been let go, quietly, the way these things are.
So it was bought. And because something had to go on it, and because the person holding the mug was called Mike, the entire site was made to say, in one enormous heading, and nothing else at all:
Hello Mike!
That was the whole website. One file. Twenty-seven bytes. It stayed that way, and then the name changed, and then it changed again, and a tradition was established without anyone deciding to establish one. The name on the front page is the only thing this site has ever really done.
Everything else here — the fruit stall, the market board, the man from Compliance — is scaffolding built around that one heading, which is still there, still the largest thing on the page, still the point.
The Roll of Honour
4 names, newest first. Currently: Mike
-
Tom Riddle
Current
Not a customer. Has never bought a lime. Badge still active.
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Chris
Greeted himself. The Board, being also him, declined to comment.
-
Artem
First succession. Proved the greeting was a rota, not a fact.
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Mike
The original. Holder of the mug. Cause of all this.
Succession
The name used to be a commit. It is now a value in a key-value store at the edge, which means changing it takes a request rather than a deploy:
curl -X PUT https://ftintranet.com/api/greeting \
-H "authorization: Bearer $INTRANET_TOKEN" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"name":"Mike","note":"Returned. Brought the mug."}'Names are limited to 48 characters and stripped of control characters, because the value goes straight into the largest heading on the internet. Try one without committing to it at /hello/Beryl.