The wacky version of esoteric community celebrity worship around here is not useful. It does not produce any knowledge I can apply or find enlightening. It is not relevant to my day, is it relevant to yours? I do not understand why people find this sort of thing appealing.
I know! It's really bizarre. It's almost like some people have different preferences from you or something. Let's spend more time talking about how people with different preferences are weird and stupid.
It's not just celebrity worship I don't think; it's a pretty good reminder to not forget play (and simultaneously a memoriam to someone who lived that out).
For those who appreciated _why's cultural contributions to the Ruby community, this is a relevant link.
If you're looking for a way in which this applies to you as someone who was never familiar with _why until his disappearance was originally broken on this website four years ago today, I'd invite you to either read the post this links to, or else bear the following in mind:
* build something awesome, or fun to build
* help a young person do the same
If you don't think this will improve your abilities (I'd assert that it will) then at least it might help you remember why you got into this game in the first place.
Love the call to teach children programming. For those interested in getting into this world, one of the longest running related projects is MIT Media Lab's Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/
On top of this, I think it's a wonderful idea to teach not only kids, but also high school students to code (or at least try to initiate motivation to learn computer science).
