Since Why The Lucky Stiff's supposed disappearance yesterday, I've been coming across a lot of interesting links with mirrors of his projects, discussions surrounding his disappearance, and lots of other juicy stuff. I think it's worth keeping track of this stuff so I'm kicking off a compilation post dedicated to Why related links.
If you have any useful resources you want to link to, leave a comment and I'll try and include them here so this post can act as a reference point.
Disappearance and DiscussionWhere is _why? A Reddit discussion - An epic discussion (443 comments at time of writing) on Reddit about Why's disappearance. The top moderated comment is a little mean: "Why couldn't DHH disappear instead?" Nevertheless, some interesting points come up, including a bit of detective work that resolves whytheluckystiff.net's IP address to the same as that for cewki.com which asks where Why is (Hampton Catlin has a roundup of this line of inquiry).
Who Is Why The Lucky Stiff? - A site that supposedly reveals Why's true identity as "Jonathan Gillette" due to headers in ruby-talk mailings.. but I'm not buying it. A lot of commentators have blamed this site for Why's disappearance though. It's not known who put this site up.
Hacker News: _why is no more - The Hacker News and discussion of Why's disappearance. Somewhat more mature and well meaning than the Reddit discussion.
Where and _why - A discussion about Why's disappearance on MetaFilter (of which Why was a reader). It eventually turns into a discussion about how C# is or isn't turning into Ruby. There's also a thread from July 2004 when Why's book was featured there.
"why the lucky stiff" Vanishes - Heise Online's coverage of Why's disappearance.
Why's Code and Contributions
A GitHub mirror of Why's projects - A user called "whymirror" has been formed on GitHub and features forks and mirrors of Why's projects, including Shoes, The Poignant Guide, Camping, and Hpricot.
Why's most favorited Twitter messages - favstar.fm collates the "most favorited" tweets for Twitter users, and this is a compilation of Why's top tweets. It includes some classics:
trying to reading dhh’s articles on himself, but his website is so drenched in axe body spray that it has more of a tear gas effect.
when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
if you program and want any longevity to your work, make a game. all else recycles, but people rewrite architectures to keep games alive.
An HTML mirror of The Poignant Guide - Courtesy of GitHub Pages, the Poignant Guide is back online in all its former glory.
A PDF mirror of The Poignant Guide - We've put up a mirror of a PDF version of Why's famous Poignant Guide.
ART && CODE Symposium: Hackety Hack - A recent(ish) presentation by Why at the ART && CODE Symposium. This is a great way to see him "in the flesh."
The soundtrack to why's (poignant) guide to ruby - archive.org has a mirror of the soundtrack to the Poignant Guide as performed by Why's band, The Thirsty Cups. 8 MP3s. I find archive.org to be frequently unreliable so if you like these you might want to mirror them yourself.
A screenshot of tryruby.hobix.com - tryruby.hobix.com was a Web version of irb, the interactive Ruby interpreter. While it's down, codepad.org might be useful, though it's not really the same thing.
The Shoebox - A repository of Shoes applications. This Web site was not owned by Why, hence it's still up.
Commemorations
Eulogy to _why - JavaScript supremo John Resig dedicates a few words to Why's memory.
So long and thanks for all the hoodwinks - Robby Russell of Planet Argon gives a salute to Why's memory.
Why the Lucky Stiff on Twins and Drawing - A video made to some spoken word by Why. A couple of quirky stories.
The Belljar, the Space, and My Daughter's Organ Instructor - A commemorative video by "Raymond" set to Why's music.
A Commemorative Milk Carton for Why
The "Missing why the lucky stiff" Facebook group - Already up to 9 members..
Twitter search for _why - Thousands of tweets commemorating or mentioning Why.
Why hasn't deleted all of his accounts. Others still exist:
His Advogato account - Features a rather intriguing poem as well as 54 blog posts.
The "why the lucky stiff" Wikipedia entry
Why's YouTube account - Features three videos in Why style.
Why's Vimeo account - With only one video - Hello World, the Song.
Photos of Why The Lucky Stiff on Flickr
Added: Supposedly Why was in a band (as his non-psuedonym self) called The Child Who Was A Keyhole and the album art certainly attests to that. So.. perhaps you might want to buy their CD from CDBaby?
Top photo credit: pdcrawley - Licensed as CC 2.0 A-N-SA
