
A word about _why, #whyday , and Hackety Hack - icey
http://blog.steveklabnik.com/a-word-about-why-whyday-and-hackety-hack
======
steveklabnik
Hey, thanks for posting this.

I didn't put a link to the new release yet because I'm actually still throwing
together the _massive_ update to the website and builds. Fela (the Ruby Summer
of Code intern) was burning the midnight oil last night, we didn't finish the
builds until this morning.

Expect more news later! As always, you can follow @hacketyhack on twitter to
get the latest.

Happy Whyday everybody!

~~~
steveklabnik
I've amended the blog post, the release is out. Get it from <http://hackety-
hack.com>

------
sz
Can someone give a quick backstory to this?

~~~
steveklabnik
After _why disappeared, everyone decided to pick up his projects. I watched as
people stood up left and right, saying "I'll take over hpricot," "I'll work on
Shoes," "I've got Camping," and I thought, man, this would be a great time to
step up and really give back. My only real open source contributions were my
own projects, that nobody really uses. I could never seem to find anything
useful to contribute elsewhere.

My favorite project of _why's was Hackety Hack. I _was_ that kid who learned
to program with GW-BASIC when I was seven, and the world is totally different
now. So I checked out who had stood up to work on Hackety... and nobody did.

As the day progressed, I expected someone to. It was _why's masterpiece, after
all. Lots of the other libraries he wrote are part of Hackety. I didn't want
the responsibility of taking charge of such a well-known project, since I'm
just a nobody. I figured that someone better than me would step up, and then I
could just help them.

But nobody did.

Finally, after lots of thinking about it, I gave a small little "I will." Bam.
I'm in charge. Sweet! ...

Oh God, this is scary! This is a huge responsibility. What if I do poorly?
Everybody on the internet will see. Can I really do this? I haven't even been
coding in Ruby all that long!

Then, to complicate things, I had some personal stuff come up, and I couldn't
really find the time in my schedule to actually write some code. There were
also upstream issues; Hackety needed Shoes 3, which was in development still,
and really unstable and an absolute motherfucker to compile. So I got
frustrated when I even did try to work on it.

By Christmas last year, I had made some small modifications, and released it
as 0.9, hoping to get some people interested to give me some support. But that
didn't really happen. So, I trucked along, doing little bits here and there.

Finally, I had a serious breakthrough with my Shoes development. I got it to
work with Snow Leopard. That's a whole other story. But the momentum and high
off of doing that got me to put a bunch more work into Hackety, and I made
some decent progress. Also, around this time, I got an email from Fela, who
wanted to work on Ruby Summer of Code. And he wanted to do it with Hackety.
Between he, myself, the Shoes team, and some of my friends, we've made really
great strides with the project over the summer, and I couldn't be happier.
1.0-final should be out within a month, once we polish up some more things,
and sort out a few issues. I still occasionally grapple with "not being _why",
if that makes any sense. It's hard to be respectful of a legacy and yet make
something your own at the same time.

That wasn't really quick, but there you go.

~~~
goatforce5
Thanks for picking it up and running with it, even when you hit some
unexpected hurdles along the way. Sounds like you're doing a perfectly fine
job of keeping the project alive.

And, BTW: "80% of success is showing up." - Woody Allen

~~~
steveklabnik
Thank you. Someone just linked me to this video, I think the first few minutes
describe perfectly how I feel right about now:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE>

------
gnufied
Many thanks, steve.

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks. :)

------
hardik
It's not clear to me yet if this is a "programming-pusher-for-non-programmers"
or "helps-you-learn-ruby" app? Should I try it if I am interested in Ruby but
am OK writing simple code?

Some background info: I am into finance and am comfortable with basic PHP,
write lots of VBA macros and also code for a propriety software used by my
employer (its very basic, something like C).

~~~
steveklabnik
Hackety Hack may or may not be for you. It depends.

One of the core problems that the app solves is a toolchain problem. Instead
of choosing between 1.8 or 1.9 or JRuby or Rubinius, and Textmate or vim or
BBEdit or Eclipse, and then figuring out how to use them together, Hackety
Hack lets you just install it and start coding. When you're teaching somebody
from the ground up, they don't know _anything_, so it's best to give them
something that's all wrapped up in one package.

However, all of the tutorials are just simply Ruby code, so it _will_ teach
you Ruby... but you also might find that it moves more slowly than you'd like.

Really, I'd say give it a try, what's the worst that can happen? (I'm a bit
biased, though...)

------
nisnotequaltonp
Anyone heard from _why since?

~~~
nkassis
I don't think so. As day pass, I'm losing hope we will ever see him again as
_why. I think if he's still hacking, he's hacking under a new pseudonym.

~~~
mkramlich
I bet it's something like _because or _whynot

