Looking outwards 08

Dan Shiffman is a professor at the ITP (interactive telecommunications program) at the New York University’s Tisch school of art. He is known for his youtube channel Coding Train where his focus is trying to make coding and scripting more accecible to people. He is also known to have co-created an open source graphics library called Processing, which is based on the JAVA language but aims to teach non-programmers the fundamentals of the world of programming. To me what is most admirable of Shiffman is his approachability and down to earthness. Programmers and computer scientists are stereotypically seen as these whizzes that are unapproachable residing in the ivory towers of whatever institution they are part of. But with shiffman, his ideals and actions break that stereotype and brings code to the people. Not only are his youtube tutorials funny and engaging, he isn’t afraid of making mistakes on camera. This is evident in the intro video of his youtube channel where he has a supercut of him saying “whoops” during his live and regular tutorials.