This next Thursday is Whyday. Celebrate with some outragous coding.
What are you doing for Whyday?
This next Thursday is designated as Whyday, a
day set aside to commemorate all the many wacky contributions of Why
the Lucky Stiff to the Ruby community. How do you celebrate WhyDay?
The WhyDay web page suggests:
See how far you can push some weird corner of Ruby (or some other language).
Choose a tight constraint (for example, 4 kilobytes of source code) and see what you can do with it.
Try that wild idea you’ve been sitting on because it’s too crazy.
You can work to maintain some of the software Why left us (although Why is more about creating beautiful new things than polishing old things).
On the other hand, Why is passionate about teaching programming to children. So improvements to Hackety Hack would be welcome.
Or take direct action along those lines, and teach Ruby to a child.
As for me, I have several ideas:
Play with the HTML5 canvas, maybe writing a Ruby DSL for easily generating diagrams in Ruby.
Play with some Grit (a Ruby/Git library) and see if I can categorize git commits into a swimlane structure.
Combine the two ideas into program that generates a graphical swimlane representation (using an HTML5 canvas) of a git project history (similar to the hand drawn swimlanes in Vincent Driessen’s Article).
Those are just my ideas. And I reserve the right to change my mind at a moments notice.
