Education Ecosystem Blog

Who is dogweather? Is it true that he turned down a career in acting to teach underprivileged children how to breakdance? There’s really only one way to find out. Read our Q/A session and find out the truth!

Real name: Robb

Alter ego: dogweather

Location: Portland, United States

Powers/abilities: Python, Ruby

Username: https://www.livecoding.tv/dogweather/

Questions:

Q: When did you first hear about Livecoding.tv? What was your first reaction?

A: It was just within the last month, and it must have been on either the r/ruby or r/python subreddits. The idea immediately sounded great to me. I’m always looking for more feedback on my coding. I’ve also begun doing a lot of online teaching, and so this fits in great.

Q: If you were one of co-founders of Livecoding.tv, what would you do differently?

A: The site has all the right MVP features for its value proposition. And so I’d prioritize (1) UX improvements and bug fixes, and (2) Community-enhancing features. A little about that: The helpful and friendly community is a huge part of Livecoding.tv, setting it apart from other sites. So I’m imagining features such as notifications in chat when you’re mentioned. A web forum. A user-editable wiki. Potential integrations with online coding environments like Cloud 9.

Q: What’s the best thing about Livecoding.tv? What’s the worst/most annoying?

A: The best: streaming my coding pushes me to accomplish more, be more open to critique, and I learn more. The most annoying thing would be small glitches in the site and places where the visitor’s flow should be streamlined.

Q: Do you have any suggestions/messages for the team?

A: Yes, I’ve got two. 🙂 First, focus hard on User Experience. Really: UX, UX, UX. Now, I’m not talking about the site design; it looks great. But there are plenty of opportunities to smooth out the UX to make it a pleasure to use. See the article, “Dropdowns Should be the UI of Last Resort” for a taste of what I’m referring to. Other examples are links where visitors expect to find them, such as the ability to Log In from any page. UX fixes like these are essential to making the site a delight to use.

My second suggestion is to use 3rd-party apps and services when they’d better serve your users. (I see a small case of Not Invented Here-itis.) Apply the rule of thumb, “Are we in the business of making X?” So e.g., the Roadmap app itself has many issues. And Roadmap apps aren’t core to Livecoding’s mission. Use instead GitHub issues on a public repo, or UserVoice. Another example: users have a lot of info and updates we could contribute to the FAQ: so move it to a public repo as markdown and we can submit pull requests. Finally, the site really needs a forum, but do not write one yourselves! Use a hosted discourse.org with Single Sign On.

Q: Where do you see Livecoding.tv in 3 years?

I see it giving serious competition to YouTube and other online content services. I can see it competing with shared co-working spaces as well. It’ll be a virtual office where you can choose: work privately? Open your door and let others see what you’re up to? Or take a break and walk over to another desk and see what someone else is doing?

Q: What do you do when you get struck at a dead end while coding?

A: Yeah, this definitely happens. I imagine it like I’m recursively descending into a problem which yields another problem, which turns up something I need to research, and so on. It’s easy to lose track of why I’m even chasing down some weird piece of information. So what I do is I write a trail in tree-outline form of my tasks, sub-tasks, sub-sub-tasks, ad infinitum. I use OmniOutliner or Emacs Org mode for this.

Q: If you were not a coder, what would you rather be? Why?

A: A small business/intellectual property attorney, because it’s great working with entrepreneurs.

Q: What do you do when you are called for lunch/dinner while coding?

A: Heh, yeah, that’s hard sometimes. Like when I’m so in the groove of coding. I make an effort to mentally step back and remember that work/life balance is important. And as a practical matter, I then work a little more until I have a new failing test. This idea is from Kent Beck: when you come back to your code, the failing test acts as a bookmark.

Q: What role do you think programmers have played in last 50 years or so in the evolution of technology?

A: Programmers have had very little effect. The thing is, mainstream programming has just finally caught up to a 1950’s-era understanding of engineering and architecture. I’m thinking about important ideas like separating interface from implementation. Or how to just go about our jobs, developing software. Compare the initial automobiles to the cars of the 1950’s in which design-driven interfaces hid implementation differences.

Now for sure, in the past decade or two, lots of technology has become more reliable due to software’s influence. In part because mechanical complexity has been shifted to software complexity. Let’s hope we continue getting better at handling that!

Q: If Barack Obama/Queen Elizabeth/Angela Merkel were a programmer, which language do you think he/she would start in? Why?

A: Barack Obama has a pragmatic, technocratic attitude: “What solutions have worked elsewhere which we can use?” So I think he’d choose Python because it’s been used successfully in many projects, big and small. People walk away happy after they’ve used it, too. The community support and documentation is really outstanding.

Check out one of dogweather’s recent streams: 2 Refactoring Swift