Celebrating Whyday

I lead a team of developers working on a larger scientific application. Having fun and reconnecting with the awesome feeling of "creating" things is important. That playful side of programming is often replaced with "software engineering" (*said of a heavy, deep, serious voice*) or adhering to "best practices."

Today - we put our "best practices away" as _why asked and have some kid-like fun.

Here's an excerpt of an email I sent out to the teams who are celebrating:

Hi all!

I just wanted to remind you that today is Whyday! [0] We're all celebrating by doing fun coding or learning. To me, it's all about reconnecting with the playful aspects of programming that originally hooked you in.

Not sure what to do to celebrate? See what everyone is doing to celebrate:

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23whyday

Still don't know? Learn about Hackety Hack! [1] Or learn about "light" frameworks that can enable web programming! [2]

Who is Why the Lucky Stiff? (aka _why) Well, this is a good place to learn about him [3] as a start. If nothing else, learn about the contributes that Why made to the community [4] and the inspiration that he was.

I'm coding on a little Android application [5] before I take off for the day

We're working some talks from "ART && CODE" in 2008 as a brown bag today at lunch [6, 7]. And a couple of satire shorts by _why [8]. [...]

Chunky bacon!!!

[0] http://whyday.org/

[1] http://hackety-hack.com/

[2] https://github.com/camping/camping

[3] http://www.shopify.com/technology/3822402-whyday-is-friday

[4] http://viewsourcecode.org/why/

[5] https://github.com/lenards/unalarming-android

[6] http://vimeo.com/5551981

[7] http://vimeo.com/5047563

[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXZ_htL1rOI&feature=related