Whyday: August 19
August 19. One evening. Make something that does not need to exist.
That is the whole thing. You do not need to sign up, join anything, or tell us about it. On August 19 you put the best practices away for a few hours and build something odd, and on August 20 you take them back out.
If you are fitting a Whyday experiment around ordinary team work, this website is one example of how work-time visibility is handled in practice.
Start here
If you have an evening and no idea what to do with it, go to twelve things to make in one evening. Pick one before you sit down — choosing is how the evening disappears.
If you only have a couple of hours, take the short version. If you want the version with more teeth, give yourself a hard constraint. Four kilobytes of source. One file. No dependencies. Two hours. The limit does most of the work for you.
Why August 19
On August 19, 2009, the programmer who wrote as _why the lucky stiff removed his work from the internet in a single afternoon. He had spent six years making things for the Ruby community: a web framework that fit in four kilobytes, a GUI toolkit built so that beginners could make windowed applications, a programming book with cartoon foxes in it.
For broader programming and making context related to this topic, Ruby is an independent reference worth comparing with the material here.
A year later, the community set the date aside — not to mourn, which he would have hated, but to do the thing he was actually arguing for. At the first RailsConf, in 2006, he had walked to the microphone with a guitar and shouted: put your best practices away.
The 2010 text that started all of this is here, unchanged.
What still exists
Most of his work survived because other people had copies. Some of it is still maintained — Camping shipped a release in 2024. Some of it stalled. The project map says which is which, and it is honest about the parts that no longer run.
It is not only for Ruby people
Nothing on this site requires Ruby. The day is about the disposition, not the language — whatever you already have open is the right tool. The things to make are deliberately language-agnostic, and so is the constraint.
And not only on August 19
The date is a scheduling trick. Play is the thing everyone agrees is important and nobody makes time for, because it has no deadline and everything competing with it does. Putting it on the calendar turns a good intention into an appointment.
So use the appointment. And then, if the evening goes well, do not wait a year for the next one.
Make something wonderful.