why the lucky stiff

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_why at RubyConf

_why's self-portrait from Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby

why the lucky stiff (often known simply as why or _why) is the persona of a writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer known for his work with the Ruby programming language. Along with Matz and DHH, he is sometimes seen as a key figure in the Ruby community.

1 Works
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Works

[edit] Tutorials

His best known work is Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, an "online Ruby book for beginning coders which reads like an illustrated novel". Paul Adams of Webmonkey describes its eclectic style as resembling a "collaboration between Stan Lem and Ed Lear".^[1]. Chapter three was published in The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky (Apress, 2005).

Try Ruby is an online interactive learning tool that provides a browser-based Ruby shell and an instructor that guides beginners through their first steps in Ruby.

His latest project, Hackety Hack, is a Ruby- and Mozilla- based environment used to teach programming to children.

[edit] Code

_why is the author of several libraries and applications, most of them written in Ruby.

Camping, a microframework inspired by Ruby on Rails and based on Markaby that is less than 4 kilobytes.
Hobix, a YAML-based weblog application written in Ruby.
Hpricot, an HTML parser.
Markaby, (markup as Ruby), a DSL to generate valid HTML using Ruby blocks and methods instead of tags.
MouseHole, a personal web proxy that can rewrite the web à la Greasemonkey.
the RedCloth library, which implements the Textile markup language.
the Sandbox, a library for managing several Ruby environments in a single process.
Syck, a YAML library for C, Ruby, and several other languages. Syck has been a part of standard Ruby libraries since Ruby version 1.8.0.
Shoes, a UI toolkit "for Making Web-like Desktop Apps"

A longer list of _why's open source Ruby projects can be found at http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/.

[edit] Music

Besides writing, drawing, and programming, _why tours with his band The Thirsty Cups, presenting programming-related multimedia shows at conferences like OSCON and RailsConf.

[edit] Web Sites

In addition to those already cited, _why runs several blogs and web sites:

RedHanded, a defunct blog dedicated to Ruby culture.
.c( whytheluckystiff )o., his personal blog.
(.~) what a quiet stiff (~.), a photo and image blog.
hackety.org, a blog about artful computer hacking and the successor to RedHanded.