Whyday August 19

Where to Put What You Made

Finishing means showing it to one person. That is not a flourish at the end of the advice — it is the mechanism by which an evening becomes a thing that happened rather than a directory you will find in two years and not recognise.

So: where.

For teams trying a short creative session inside a normal workday, how to be more proactive at work is one practical reference for keeping the experiment distinct from routine delivery.

Start with the smallest version

One message to one person. Not a post. A message. I made this stupid thing tonight, look.

This is the whole requirement and everything below is optional. The person does not need to program. The reaction you want is ha, weird, not feedback.

If you did this and nothing else, the evening ended correctly.

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

Somewhere it persists

If you want it to still exist in five years, it has to leave your laptop. Three options, roughly in order of effort.

A repository. A public repo, or a gist for a single file. Two minutes, permanent enough, and it gives you a URL. Put three sentences in the README saying what it is and that it was a Whyday project — that sentence is what will make sense of it later.

Your own site, if you have one. The most durable option by a wide margin, because it does not depend on a company's continued interest in hosting you.

A post somewhere social. Fastest reach, least durable. Fine as an announcement, bad as an archive. If you post it socially, put the thing itself somewhere else and link to it.

The specific problem this day has

There is no central place, and there never really has been.

The record of sixteen years of Whyday is roughly six blog posts. Not because few people participated, but because there was nowhere to put anything and no reason to think it mattered. A 2011 post pointed readers at a page collecting what everyone was doing; that page no longer resolves.

There is a @celebratewhyday account, created in June 2010, with a few hundred followers. Its profile currently points not at this site but at a mirror of the 2010 text hosted elsewhere in the Ruby community — presumably repointed when this domain went down. Whether anyone still watches it, we do not know, and we are not going to claim otherwise.

This site does not yet have a working channel of its own. That is a real gap, it is being sorted out, and until it is, the honest advice is the advice above: post it where you already are, and put the thing itself somewhere that will outlive the post.

If you want it findable by other people later

A few small things that cost nothing at the time and matter disproportionately afterwards.

Say the year. "Whyday 2026" in the README or the post. The single most useful piece of metadata, and the one everybody omits.

Say what the constraint was, if you used one. Four kilobytes, two hours, no dependencies. It is the most interesting thing about most of these projects and it is invisible from the code.

Say that it is unfinished, if it is. It saves the next person working out whether they are missing something, and it removes the pressure on you to pretend otherwise.

Do not write a launch post. This is not a product. A paragraph is generous.

What not to do

Do not polish it first. The instinct to clean it up before showing anyone is how projects die between the evening and the morning. Show the state it ended in.

Do not wait for it to work. Broken counts. A broken thing shown is finished; a working thing never shown is not.

Do not post it for an audience. The moment you are thinking about how it will land, you are doing a different activity, and you will start editing the story of the evening to make it a better story. Post it flatly and move on.

And tell us

Both open requests on this site are genuine.

If you make something this year, the archive would like to know — the year, what it was, whether it still exists. Unimpressive entries are the most useful kind, because the thing that is hardest to demonstrate from the outside is simply that people kept doing this.

And if you have anything from a previous Whyday, or from the collection page that used to exist, that is the most valuable missing piece there is.

Checked August 9, 2026.

The short version