Education Ecosystem Blog

Who’s Wild? Aside from being a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, we know that he’s a Livecoding.tv streamer. Here are a few things you might now know:

Real name: Dan

Alter ego: Wild

Location: Skövde, Sweden

Powers/abilities: C/C++, JavaScript, PHP

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

Questions:

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

A: I found LC from a reddit post on r/programming (if i remember correctly).

I first thought that the idea was neat but I didn’t know if the site would attract many viewers because I thought that not a lot of people would like to watch someone code. But now that I have streamed for a while I realize that a lot of people like to watch other people code! Which still seems a bit strange to me.

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

A: The best thing must be the community. It’s really friendly and helpful. They sometimes catches bugs while I write code, that means that my code often kinda works on the first try. One really nice thing is that the viewers ask questions in chat, which not only helps them understand what I’m doing, but it also helps me because then I can check that I have planned everything right.

I still have not had a bad experience on LC. The only annoying thing that has happened a few times was that OBS lost the connection to the LC server, but a quick restart fixed that.

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

A: I have no idea. I would guess that more companies will start to stream when they develop their games. Other than that I have zero clue what will happen.

Q: Share an interesting moment/experience you had as a streamer/viewer on Livecoding.tv.

A: What I find cool is when @drmjg joins my chat and shares a new feature which they have published. I find this cool because that shows that the creators behind the site are part of the community. Also, it’s always fun to try new features.

Q: What role, if any, do you think Livecoding.tv is playing in promotion/learning of programming/coding?

A: I think that LC shows programming as a social activity. It’s not just sitting in your dark dungeon and coding away by yourself. It also shows that even the smallest project could influence a big crowd. Furthermore, it shows that you can get help as both a streamer and as a viewer. We want everyone that is interested in programming to have access to it, in one way or another, even if they can’t code themselves.

Q: When did you first learn to code? How did it go initially?

A: I think I started about 10 years ago when I was 8-9 years old.

I found a cool program called Dev-C++, which I found somehow. It was basically an IDE with a compiler bundled with it. It also had a couple of example project, this was the first contact with code that I got. I started to change some strings in the example project. For example, I changed where it said “Text Editor” to “Dans Text Editor.” Most of the time this worked and I was really impressed and thought that this was really cool (when the program worked)!

After that I got into vb6 via some YouTube videos, most of this was just copy-pasted code, but still, I made something. After a while I moved to .NET languages and later moved back to programming languages that generate native code. I also did some Lego robot programming and Web development in between everything. Java was also one language that helped me a lot. I used it to make Minecraft Server Plugins.

Q: Programmers don’t have a social life. Negate/contradict that assumption.

A: Well this is a hard question to answer. Yes, we are social, but maybe in different ways. We are mostly social via the web. Because that’s the place where we can get in contact with people that think like similarly. We can be social in real life as well, different from person to person.

Q: What’s the best thing about coding?

A: The freedom. Your mind is the limit. You can do what you want, when you want it.

And when the code works, that feeling is the best feeling ever. Or, when you release something and get feedback from it. That is also great.

Q: Does coding help anyway in imparting social skills? Explain.

A: Well it could help you start and maintain discussions, but mostly this just works when you talk to another programmer. Other than that I have no idea, but that could be because I’m still young.

Q: Do you think ‘Aliens’ also code? Why?

A: It all depends on what you define as the word code. If you interpret the word in its broad sense everyone is coding everyday. Because when you communicate you transfer a sort of code to another thing, which will interpret that code and follow your instructions. So by my definition, everyone on earth is coding everyday, even if it’s not computer code. Based on this I would say that yes, Aliens do code.

Check out one of Wild’s recent streams: Operating system development