Photo by Jon Pratt. Click to see the source.
“Why the Lucky Stiff”, the enigmatic programmer who created all sorts of interesting, useful and oddball goodies and code-baubles in Ruby as well as many of its code phrases (“Chunky bacon!”), dissolved his online presence on August 19, 2009. In his honour, Glenn Vandenburg declared the first Whyday on August 19, 2010, and I reminded everyone to celebrate the second one on the Shopify Technology Blog.
We’re closing in on the third anniversary of Whyday, and I thought I’d give you some advance notice. The best way to celebrate it is to start a project or make something. Suggestions from the Whyday site include:
- See how far you can push some weird corner of Ruby (or some other language).
- Choose a tight constraint (for example, 4 kilobytes of source code) and see what you can do with it.
- Try that wild idea you’ve been sitting on because it’s too crazy.
- You can work to maintain some of the software Why left us (although Why is more about creating beautiful new things than polishing old things).
- On the other hand, Why is passionate about teaching programming to children. So improvements to Hackety Hack would be welcome.
- Or take direct action along those lines, and teach Ruby to a child.
Get excited and make things, as they say, and don’t forget to share!