A business card in your terminal

Type this into any terminal with Node installed:

npx ouss

npm asks if it may install ouss, and once you say yes, your browser opens on this site. That’s the whole program. It’s my business card for the place developers already live; the command line.

The card

The package is a single file with one import and one call:

#!/usr/bin/env node
import open from "open";

open("https://ouss.es/");

The bin field in package.json turns it into a command named ouss, and npx runs a command straight from the registry without installing anything for good. The rest of package.json is the actual card:

{
  "name": "ouss",
  "description": "Hi, I'm EOussama.",
  "author": "eoussama",
  "funding": "https://github.com/sponsors/eoussama",
  "keywords": ["ouss", "ouss.es", "eoussama"],
  "bin": { "ouss": "./src/index.js" }
}

Run npm view ouss and npm prints it back: the greeting, who wrote it, where it lives and how to support it. The package’s page on npmjs.com shows the same thing to anyone who searches for it.

The trick

The clever part isn’t the code; it’s the name. Unscoped package names on npm form one flat, global namespace, handed out first come, first served. There is exactly one ouss in it, and it’s mine.

That makes the name work like a domain, except it’s free and needs no renewal. It also comes with a fingerprint of sorts:

• It’s dated. The registry recorded when ouss@0.0.0 was published, on 20 July 2025, and that timestamp stays with the package.
• It’s tied to an account. The package lists its maintainer, and only that account can publish under the name.
• It can’t be quietly rewritten. npm never lets a version number be published twice, so 0.0.0 will always be exactly what it was.

A short, memorable handle that every Node developer can reach with one command, backed by a public record of who holds it and since when. All for the price of a package.json.

One thing worth keeping in mind: npm frowns on names claimed only to sit on them. A card that does something, even something this small, is a real package with a real purpose.

Why only npm

GitHub’s registry only takes scoped names, so there the package could only ever be @eoussama/ouss. And installing from it, even a public package, takes a GitHub token and a line of registry setup first. Nobody is going to do that to read a business card. A card has to work for a stranger in one command, and only the bare, global ouss on npm does.

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The package’s source is on GitHub (opens in a new tab), and the package itself on npm (opens in a new tab).