---
title: "How a RuneScape bot helped me get into the tech industry"
date: 2026-10-07
description: "Why I think a simple RuneScape Twitter bot helped me get into tech, and what its Python and Go versions taught me about unpaid maintenance."
tags:
  - "side-projects"
  - "automation"
  - "scraping"
  - "go"
---

In September 2020, before I had my first job in tech, I made a Twitter bot for RuneScape. It was a Python script I slapped together quickly, and I still think it helped me get into the industry.

The bot was [HC Wildy](https://x.com/HcWildy). It watched the Old School RuneScape hiscores and tweeted when it detected a Hardcore Ironman account killing a dangerous Wilderness boss. It picked up an audience, got mentioned by RuneScape creators, and ended up on my CV.

RuneScape is my favourite game of all time. Making something that people in that community actually looked at and used was a huge source of pride. The technical achievement was fairly modest. The feeling of having made something real was much bigger.

## A few numbers changing on a page

The idea was simple: check the hiscores, keep a record of what they said, then compare the next check with the previous one. If a Hardcore Ironman's Wilderness boss kill count had increased, post a tweet about it.

If you haven't played Old School RuneScape, the relevant detail is that a [dangerous death costs a Hardcore Ironman their Hardcore status](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/hardcore-ironman-mode?oldschool=1). Killing dangerous bosses on one of those accounts carries stakes beyond another number going up.

The bot turned changes in a public leaderboard into something people could follow on Twitter. Its information came from checking the scores, so an alert described activity detected between checks rather than a player's live location.

A [later tweet from January 2024](https://x.com/HcWildy/status/1745416909095366949) gives a concrete example: Gulfed's Calvar'ion kill count had gone from 55 to 62, and the bot reported 12 minutes and 45 seconds since it had last checked that boss.

![HC Wildy Activity reports Gulfed's Calvar'ion kill count rising from 55 to 62, with 12m:45s since the last check.](media/wildy-alert-51b4d8dc1965-583.png)

*A later alert, dated 11 January 2024, shows a kill-count change detected between checks. Captured from the public account in October 2026.*

That was enough to make a useful little project. It didn't need to be technically impressive for the people following it to care about what it posted.

## Something real to put on my CV

It gained traction in the community. It was featured by a number of creators, and I got messages from others.

For someone who had spent so much time playing RuneScape, that was really cool. I was getting involved in a community I cared about through programming as well as playing the game.

Over the years, there have been a number of times when I've mentioned the bot to people I've met who played RuneScape, and they already knew it. “Oh, you made that? That's cool.”

I put it on my CV, and I strongly believe it was part of the reason I got my first job in the industry. I can't tell you how much weight it carried in the hiring decision. I can say that I had built something, put it out into the world, and found people who wanted to use it.

## Then I had to keep it running

HC Wildy also caused me a lot of annoyance.

Jagex would change a page slightly. Requests would get rate limited. An API would break. Something would change and the bot would stop working, and a project that had been fun to build would need another repair.

A couple of years later, I rebuilt it in Go and tried to engineer it better. Then that broke too.

I learned a lot from trying to keep it stable. A better implementation could improve my part of the system, but I still depended on the hiscores being available and usable, and on being able to post to Twitter. Rewriting the code didn't give me control over either service.

![HC Wildy Activity says the project had been abandoned, was back online, and had hoped-for fixes for rank 0 spam and performance.](media/wildy-recovery-e0e290677938-583.png)

*Bringing the bot back online in November 2023, after it had been abandoned for some time. Captured in October 2026.*

Eventually I stopped rebuilding it. People kept asking, and there were still a few active users, but I wasn't getting paid. Twitter's increasing API costs added another complication to a project I was already maintaining in my own time.

It was a cool project that had run its course. Keeping it going indefinitely was more work than I wanted to keep taking on.

Six years later, it's funny that something I made so quickly is probably still the project I've made that gained the most traction. In terms of getting users, it is probably the coolest thing I have made.