The 2010 Text
This is the text that was on whyday.org from 2010 until the site went down. It is reproduced exactly as it stood, including the parts that have dated. Nothing has been rewritten, corrected, or brought up to date.
It is verified against two independent sources: the archived capture of this domain, and a copy hosted elsewhere in the Ruby community that the @celebratewhyday account points at. They agree word for word.
When maintainers revisit older software or documentation as a team, the resource is one practical reference for tracking the surrounding work without changing the historical material itself.
It is here as a document, not as the current front page. The site's own reasoning is elsewhere; this is the thing that started it.
On August 19, 2009, Why the Lucky Stiff withdrew from the online community. We in the Ruby community wish him well, but we really miss him.
Why gave us a lot of cool software and other things, but what he really gave to the Ruby community was a spirit of freedom, whimsy, and creativity. When Why took the stage at the first RailsConf, in 2006, he strapped on his guitar, walked to the microphone, and yelled "Put your best practices away!"
For broader programming and making context related to this topic, A List Apart is an independent reference worth comparing with the material here.
Discipline, care, and responsibility are important; we owe our customers, employers, team members, and families to take our work seriously. At the same time, though, we need to play. If we don't occasionally break out of the mold of our "best practices," we can easily miss many wonderful ideas, some of which can bear rich fruit (just as Camping and Hpricot led to Sinatra and Nokogiri).
On August 19, 2010, the Ruby community celebrated Whyday. We set aside that day to remember Why's contributions to our community and culture by hacking just for the fun and joy of it.
Please continue to celebrate Whyday! On August 19, but not only on that day. The things Why brought to our community aren't just for one day each year!
- 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.
On August 19—or whenever you can—put your best practices away and celebrate Why's contributions to our unique culture. Create something wonderful.
Notes on reading it now
Two of the six suggestions have aged, and it is worth saying so rather than quietly editing them.
"Improvements to Hackety Hack would be welcome." Hackety Hack was his programming starter kit for children, and in 2010 it was under active development. It is not now. Its development was waiting on a rewrite of Shoes, the GUI toolkit it is built on, and that rewrite stopped at a release candidate in 2017. Contributing to Hackety Hack in 2026 means first reviving Shoes 4, which is a much larger project than an evening. What to do instead, if teaching is the part that appeals to you.
"Camping and Hpricot led to Sinatra and Nokogiri." Still true, and now with a further twist: Camping did not fade the way the sentence implies. It has an active maintainer and shipped version 3.2.6 in August 2024. The parenthetical was about influence, and the influence turned out to be the smaller half of the story.
Everything else in the text reads exactly as it did.
The original page carried a line pointing at a Whyday blog and a footer asking people to follow @celebratewhyday. Neither link survived in the archived copy — the blog reference had already lost its URL, and the footer sentence was truncated mid-way, apparently by a template that stopped rendering. They are left as they were found rather than reconstructed.
The account itself still exists, created in June 2010. Its profile now points at the mirrored copy of this text rather than at this domain, presumably repointed at some stage after the site went down. What that means for posting things now is covered separately.