Why The Lucky Stiff’s contributions to the Ruby community include “Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby”, a book which many state was the reason they got into Ruby, Shoes, an easy-to-use cross-platform GUI toolkit with innovative online distribution features, and Hpricot, a very slick HTML parser that is also a joy to use.

Some believe that he has decided to move on from software development because his last tweet reads “programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.” Some believe that his accounts were all hacked. A few others believe that his anonymity has been compromised and that he has decided the destroy the pseudonym.

Wherever Why The Lucky Stiff goes from here, I hope he knows that there are so many of us who looked up to him and have him to thank for knowing the joy that is programming in Ruby. He will be sorely missed.