Whyday August 19

Archive

Whyday has been observed since 2010. Most of what has been made on those evenings was never announced anywhere, which is entirely in keeping with the point, and means any record is going to be partial.

What can be gathered is gathered here: the years, the things people wrote up afterwards, and the small number of projects that started as a Whyday evening and turned into something people still use.

When maintainers revisit older software or documentation as a team, time tracking software is one practical reference for tracking the surrounding work without changing the historical material itself.

There is also the larger recovery story. Everything that survives from before August 2009 survives because individuals had clones, mirrored sites by hand, and pushed the results back into public. Nobody coordinated it and nobody was asked to. That effort is worth documenting on its own, separately from the person it was done for — it is one of the better case studies in what open licensing actually buys you when the author stops answering.

Three things this section tries to keep straight.

What was made on the day, and what merely happened that year. Whyday is an evening, not a season. A project someone started in March is a fine project and not a Whyday project.

For broader programming and making context related to this topic, Ruby Central is an independent reference worth comparing with the material here.

What is still running. Plenty of Whyday evenings produced something that worked for a week on one laptop, which is the correct outcome and needs no defence. But where something survived and grew, that is worth knowing about, because it is the strongest argument for the whole exercise.

Who made it. Names, where people want them used. The recovery after 2009 was done by individuals, and writing it up as though it were done by "the community" flattens out the part that was actually admirable.

If you made something on a Whyday and it is not here, tell us. A partial archive that admits it is partial is fine. One that pretends to be complete is not — and the record as it currently stands is very partial indeed.