Your little dose of octocat zen

Last year at Socrates Matthias gave a little introduction how GitHub makes GitHub. A little collection of 14 statements, called zen, capture the core values and principles. This zen is available through the public API.

Let’s have a look on such a zen statement. Try it out:

curl https://api.github.com/octocat

You get back a octocat telling you one zen statement.

               MMM.           .MMM
               MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
               MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM      _____________________
              MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM    |                     |
             MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM   | Speak like a human. |
            MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM   |_   _________________|
            MMMM::- -:::::::- -::MMMM    |/
             MM~:~ 00~:::::~ 00~:~MM
        .. MMMMM::.00:::+:::.00::MMMMM ..
              .MM::::: ._. :::::MM.
                 MMMM;:::::;MMMM
          -MM        MMMMMMM
          ^  M+     MMMMMMMMM
              MMMMMMM MM MM MM
                   MM MM MM MM
                   MM MM MM MM
                .~~MM~MM~MM~MM~~.
             ~~~~MM:~MM~~~MM~:MM~~~~
            ~~~~~~==~==~~~==~==~~~~~~
             ~~~~~~==~==~==~==~~~~~~
                 :~==~==~==~==~~

I really like this and created a little zsh plugin which displays a zen statement, every time you start a console. When I am lucky Robby Russel will accept my pull request.

If you are unwilling to wait, then you can just add the following code to your .zshrc. This might even work with bash but I did not test it.

function display_octozen() {
  local command="curl -s https://api.github.com/octocat"
  local zen=$(eval ${command})
  if [ "$zen" != "" ]; then
    printf '%s\n' ${zen}
  fi
}
 
display_octozen

Until then, happy coding.