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Thanks for sharing. I'm in the National Guard too. I've done some VBA to automate tactical operations center (TOC) reporting while deployed. I wrote an iPhone app / website for ammunition net explosive weight calculations ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dodic-calc/id660062276?mt=8 ). Working on a bunch more. I'm in the logistics field and would love to collaborate.
I wish I was still in! Do you work in supplies or the motor pool?
In 2009-2010, I was an infantry officer working in Kandahar (Afghanistan) Airfield's brigade HQ; a canadian HQ then. My job was to receive all the reports from the ground and fan that info out thorough the HQ and our higher ups/sides. The HQ was processing things like medical evacuations, support fire missions, contact reports. The way it was done was very inefficient, frustratingly so. For instance, a medical missio…
"Being the canadian army, they don't give medals" - could you clarify that?
On other pages of this website people are being lectured how they should adapt to the website etiquette. I would like to learn how you guys expect Europeans to behave in this context. Should we say what we think? Do you want us to cheer you on? Do you expect us to shut up? How do you want to see this? Just be honest, use whatever language you feel necessary, I'm not easily offended. Here we all thought you would stop…
This sounds a bit like my experience in a standard civilian transport company, except that I don't get medals (rightly so) and I don't deal with life and death (thankfully). Our operational database is still accessed via an emulated version of IBM 3270 terminal [1], where we have Windows emulator for the client that connects to the DB2 database. It's freaking ancient, to the point where the emulated version uses the…
Apparently they had "modified" a clipper database and added new records, but it was one record per file, with each field delimited by new line and field/values in ini format (key=value). They were opening each file in notepad, then copying each value into a spreadsheet. They had over 20,000 thousand files^H^H^H^H^H records, needless to say this took a long time to compile the excel file which they used for reporting. Like 9 weeks long.
I was mucking around with Perl at the time, and I casually mentioned this is what Perl is good for, I got this skeptical look, so I said I'd prove it. They gave me 100 sample files, and then I spent some time using file globbing and some regexes to split out the data. Whilst I was about it, I fiddled with hashes and worked out how to use refs, mainly because I was a bit bored and learning some Perl concepts.
I then returned the next day with a working program, installed a Windows version of Perl, then copied the 10,000 records locally, ran my script, tweaked it, then emailed the guy the CSV file I created. The script took about 45 seconds to run (it was a bit inefficient).
I then walked over to the guy, asked him to open his email and watched his eyes bulge a little. I then walked to my desk and took some more calls about printers.
A few weeks later, I was surprised to discover I had been made employee of the quarter by Epson Australia.
In 2009-2010, I was an infantry officer working in Kandahar (Afghanistan) Airfield's brigade HQ; a canadian HQ then. My job was to receive all the reports from the ground and fan that info out thorough the HQ and our higher ups/sides. The HQ was processing things like medical evacuations, support fire missions, contact reports. The way it was done was very inefficient, frustratingly so. For instance, a medical missio…
His job was fairly simple: controlling access to information. Other departments would send him requests for information about certain individuals, and his job was to send them the data that they required, but only that data, to prevent other departments from intentionally or inadvertently accessing the wrong data (and violating privacy laws).
So his day consisted of getting an e-mail with a request for data X about person Y, and then sending them that data. A fairly straightforward task, but when he was hired there was a three-month backlog.
After a week or two, he wrote an application in VB that would access the database directly; he could type in a name, choose a result, select fields, generate a PDF, and e-mail it to a given e-mail address. What used to be a 5-10 minute job became a 30 second job. His three-month backlog turned into a three-month headway. People were getting their results within minutes of sending the request, rather than hours, days, or weeks, and productivity everywhere increased.
At this point, his job consisted of sitting at his desk watching anime on his netbook until a request came in, typing for a few seconds, clicking a button, then watching anime again.
He was bored constantly; he asked his boss for more work, something else to do, automation or paperwork or anything, but his boss refused. Union job, defined role, can't give you more work.
Haven't talked to him in ages. For all I know he's linked his app into Outlook to pre-fill fields by now and he's running a startup out of his office in his eight hours a day of extra spare time.
On other pages of this website people are being lectured how they should adapt to the website etiquette. I would like to learn how you guys expect Europeans to behave in this context. Should we say what we think? Do you want us to cheer you on? Do you expect us to shut up? How do you want to see this? Just be honest, use whatever language you feel necessary, I'm not easily offended. Here we all thought you would stop…
I too enjoy Markov-chain text generation.
Not bad for a motorpool guy. The place that I remember really needing some programmers was on the MI (military intelligence) side. They spend all of their time looking for patterns in data, and in 2009 it was still mostly done by hand. Plus that is where most of the smart Soldiers end up.
Why doesn't the Military hire more computer science graduates then?
Government pay scales are inflexible. A college graduate in CS would typically enter government service as an O-1 or GS-7, step 1. Both are less than $40k/year. Pay maxes out at around $150k/year after 18 years of unremarkable service. If you somehow manage to become a 4-star general of the cyberbrigades, in essence the CEO of Army Programming, Inc., you could possibly earn $180k per year, with no equity, but a nice pension plan.
But you won't get even half that far. The mental processes involved in creating military procedures are fundamentally incompatible with those involved in software development. It is worth noting that everything Original Poster did to improve anything was completely against the rules, and was only permitted because it actually worked out in the field, and did not negatively impact anyone's duties.
Government hiring is ridiculous. I once overheard a conversation about the possibility of converting contractors to employees. As it turns out, thanks to the preference ranking systems, the person most perfectly qualified to do the job, because that is exactly what he was currently already paid to do, with over 10 years of experience doing just that, would typically turn up no earlier than the third page of applicants. Every one of them would have to be individually considered and rejected before reaching the person already doing the job. Also, he would have to take a 50% cut in pay.
Essentially, the government cannot compete in the open job market for any skill that makes a person worth hiring. They are therefore forced to train existing military personnel in software wherever necessary. And as expected, they train for that in a similar manner to the way they train everything else. The person is ordered to transfer to Fort Wherever for six weeks, to become a programmer. You end up with a person that thinks Waterfall is a good process, better programs have more lines of code, and that unit tests are written from an Excel template.
You cannot solve a problem from the same state of mind that created it. The military is covered with leechlike contractor companies because they have been forbidden by law, by regulation, and by standing order from solving their own problems in an effective way. As always, the worst problem is bad management.
In 2009-2010, I was an infantry officer working in Kandahar (Afghanistan) Airfield's brigade HQ; a canadian HQ then. My job was to receive all the reports from the ground and fan that info out thorough the HQ and our higher ups/sides. The HQ was processing things like medical evacuations, support fire missions, contact reports. The way it was done was very inefficient, frustratingly so. For instance, a medical missio…
Heck, my brother is commander of the 10th medical wing in the USAF -- I should ask him what tools he thinks they are lacking.
In 2009-2010, I was an infantry officer working in Kandahar (Afghanistan) Airfield's brigade HQ; a canadian HQ then. My job was to receive all the reports from the ground and fan that info out thorough the HQ and our higher ups/sides. The HQ was processing things like medical evacuations, support fire missions, contact reports. The way it was done was very inefficient, frustratingly so. For instance, a medical missio…
Battle Captain, right? I know exactly how you must have felt. I did this job as a 1LT in a bunker in Korea with shitty outdated MS Office and I never even thought to write a VBA app. This sounds like an interesting startup idea: TOC software. It would be easy to write. I wonder how difficult it would be to sell to the Army. I see from your Github that you, too, write Go. We should talk sometime. http://github.com/chr…