|
|
|
|
|
|
by FearNotDaniel
2521 days ago
|
|
|
I actually got my first dev job by doing exactly that. While I was searching for a new career and vaguely interested in something to do with IT, I was doing short-term temp work as an office admin. One was in a startup - not tech-related - where I spent most of my day searching for customers' names and addresses in a spreadsheet, then copy-pasting them into a bunch of Word templates and printing them out. I already knew about mail merge, but in this job the particular set of docs to be generated would be different according to the specific circumstances of each individual case, along with one or two customer-specific paragraphs that came in an email and had to be pasted into the document. Having been a hobby programmer as a teenager, I had a hunch this could be made more efficient. Once I discovered VBA (what? Excel has its very own programming language BUILT IN?!) I quickly threw together some macros and an Excel form that generated the whole personalised document set in a few clicks (what? you can write code in Excel to control Word? This is AWESOME!) At the time I was sharing a house with a couple of CS students and one of them let me borrow a very academic textbook about this wacky thing called SQL. I fell in love with the idea of tables and joins and stored procs, skipped over all the difficult maths parts, and discovered back at work that the funny icon next to Word and Excel called "Access" was actually a SQL database. Feeling like I had all the power of the universe at my fingertips, I hacked together a custom CRM system which pretty soon the whole office was using, and pretty soon it started grinding to a halt. Round about then the company hired its first IT Manager, he liked what I had done and said: maybe you should check out this new thing called SQL Server 2000, do you want to be our Database Developer? So I shifted the back end over to SQL then discovered .NET 1.1 and started writing better front ends and hired a small team to take it over. So yeah, I kind of fell into business app development by accident just by automating my very repetitive office admin job. That was 15 years ago, and I'm still getting paid to automate other people's 9 to 5 jobs. |
|
|