A word about _why, #whyday , and Hackety Hack

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.

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...)

And so everyone is leaving him alone.