Whyday August 19

The Project Map: What Survived

On August 19, 2009, _why took his work off the internet in an afternoon. Repositories, blogs, project sites — all of it. What exists today exists because other people had copies and put them back.

This is a map of what came back, where it lives, and what condition it is in. Every status below was checked on August 9, 2026. Open source moves, so if you are reading this much later, check before you trust it.

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

Where the archives are

Three places do most of the preserving, and none of them is here. This page is a map, not a mirror. How any of it survived at all is a story worth knowing before you use it.

whymirror on GitHub holds restored copies of the code repositories, pushed back by people who had clones. This is the starting point for anything involving source.

whytheluckystiff.net is a curated collection of links to everything he published, with some of the writing mirrored locally and the rest linked out. It is the most complete index that exists.

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

poignantguide.net hosts the book at its original address.

The writing

why's (poignant) guide to Ruby is the best-known thing he made and the reason most people know the name at all: a Ruby tutorial interrupted by cartoon foxes, a talking sandwich, and long digressions with no technical content whatsoever. It is under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5, which means you can legally copy it, translate it, and reuse the drawings, provided you credit and share alike. That licence is why it survived so easily.

Reading it in 2026 takes a little navigation, since parts of the Ruby it teaches have aged.

The blog and shorter writing are scattered. Some is mirrored at whytheluckystiff.net, some exists only in the Internet Archive. Quality of preservation varies a lot from piece to piece.

The code, by condition

The interesting thing about this list is how uneven it is. These were all abandoned on the same afternoon by the same person, and seventeen years later they are in wildly different states — which turns out to have nothing to do with the code and everything to do with who picked it up.

Still maintained

Camping — the four-kilobyte web framework, and the clearest success story here. Version 3.2.6 shipped in August 2024, commits continued into 2025, the licence is MIT, and it has an actual maintainer: Karl Oscar Weber, who has been modernising it and moved discussion to the Ruby Users Forum. A framework whose author vanished in 2009 has had more releases in the 2020s than in the 2010s.

A detail for the archive: Camping 2.1 was released on August 19, 2010 — the first Whyday.

Superseded, and that is fine

Hpricot was his HTML parser, and it was fast and pleasant and widely used. It is not what you should use now — Nokogiri took that role and kept it. This is the healthiest possible outcome for an abandoned library: the ideas moved into something maintained, and the original can be left alone.

Syck was the YAML parser that shipped with Ruby for years, before Psych replaced it. Most people who depended on it never knew they were depending on it.

RedCloth, the Textile parser, is the one project here that was handed over deliberately, before 2009 — and it is still shipping releases.

Stalled

Shoes is the sad one. A GUI toolkit built so that beginners could make windowed applications in a few lines of Ruby, and genuinely lovely to use. The rewrite, Shoes 4, reached 4.0.0.rc1 in November 2017 and the commit activity trails off around 2018. The shoes gem sitting at 3.0.1 in RubyGems is a placeholder that does not install a working toolkit, which catches people out regularly.

There are forks. Whether any of them is the one to use is a question that needs its own article and its own testing, not a sentence here.

Hackety Hack — the programming starter kit for kids, and the project he cared about most — is stalled for a specific and slightly heartbreaking reason: it is built on Shoes, and its development was waiting on Shoes 4. Shoes 4 did not arrive. The dependency chain that made Hackety Hack possible is the same one that stopped it.

If you want to act on his interest in teaching children, Hackety Hack is not the tool to reach for in 2026. What to use instead is a separate article.

Present but needing a look

Markaby (HTML written as Ruby method calls), Bloopsaphone (a chiptune sound library), Potion (a small language), Hobix (a blog engine), Mousehole, Sandbox, Unholy and a dozen more are all in whymirror in various conditions. Some install, some do not, some need a Ruby old enough that getting one is the hard part.

We are working through these one at a time rather than summarising them in a batch, because a one-line status on a library nobody has tested is worse than no status at all.

Try Ruby — the in-browser Ruby console — has had several homes and several implementations since 2009, some related to the original and some not. The idea, though, won outright: Ruby now ships an official WebAssembly build.

What this map is for

Two things.

If you are looking for something to work on today, the stalled column is where the work is. Not necessarily reviving it — his own view, in the note he left as he went, was fairly bleak about software being replaced within a few years anyway. But there are people who would use a working Shoes, and there are children who would use a working Hackety Hack — though that is not where to start teaching in 2026. Why some of this survived and some did not is a question worth its own page.

And if you are looking for something to read, start with the guide and ignore the code entirely. The code was never the most durable part.

The short version