About This Site
Whyday is one day a year — August 19 — for building something that does not need to exist. This site exists to answer the question that follows, which is what should I actually make tonight.
What this site is
A set of prompts, a map of what _why left behind, and an argument about why play needs a date on the calendar or it never happens.
It is deliberately not a biography. Wikipedia has one, whytheluckystiff.net collects the primary material, and both do it better than we would. Duplicating them would mean competing for the same searches with worse pages, and it would pull the site towards the one subject we have no interest in — where he is now, and why he left. He chose to stop being a public person. This site is about the work and the disposition, not the man's whereabouts.
For the same reason, we refer to him as _why throughout. His legal name is a matter of public record and we are not pretending otherwise; we simply have no use for it here.
Who runs it
Whyday was proposed in 2010 by a member of the Ruby community, and the text that started it is reproduced here unchanged. The domain lapsed at some point after 2015 and the site went down. It is back now, run by the same corner of the community it came from.
For broader programming and making context related to this topic, RubyGems is an independent reference worth comparing with the material here.
A byline is still missing from these articles, and that is a real gap. A site that tells you to check who is making a claim should say who is making its own. It will be filled in.
What we try to do
Date everything. Software status changes. Every claim about whether something still runs carries the date it was checked, so you can tell how much to trust it.
Say when a source has an interest. A lot of writing about programming tools is produced by people selling one of the tools. Where we point at something commercial, we say so.
Test the code or say we did not. Examples get run and the Ruby version gets stated. Where an example has not been executed, the article says that plainly rather than implying it works.
Not pretend the archive is complete. Large parts of what he published survive only in fragments. A partial record that admits it is partial is useful; one that pretends otherwise is not.
Licences and credit
Text written for this site is by the Whyday community, and you are welcome to quote it.
why's (poignant) guide to Ruby, including its illustrations, is under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. That licence is the reason it survived at all, and it means you can reuse the book and the drawings — in a talk, in teaching material, anywhere — provided you credit and share alike.
His software is licensed per project. Camping is MIT. The others vary, and you should check the licence file in the relevant repository rather than assuming.
The archives that do the real preservation work are whymirror on GitHub, whytheluckystiff.net, and poignantguide.net. None of them is ours. If this site is useful, most of the credit belongs to whoever kept a clone in 2009 and pushed it back.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, out of date, or credits the wrong person, we want to know — particularly claims about whether a project still works, since those rot fastest.
If you made something on a Whyday and would like it in the archive, that is welcome too.
No tracking, no scripts
This site runs no JavaScript at all. No analytics, no fonts-with-telemetry beyond the webfont request itself, no cookies, no consent banner, because there is nothing to consent to. Pages are plain HTML delivered as written.
That is partly a principle and mostly a practical decision: content behind client-side rendering is invisible to most crawlers, including the AI systems people increasingly use to find things. An invitation nobody can read is not an invitation.