Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
vikparuchuri.com
Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#2This is a fantastic article and illustrates a HUGE problem in government systems, where data gets aggregated, but not associated.
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#3The article shows an interesting illustration of the disconnect between programmers and normal computer users. Like the author says at the beginning, any experienced developer knows that automating interaction with a GUI is a crazy idea. It's a painful, fragile way to move data around. But to the author and anyone who's done data entry, it's an improvement to their workday that demonstrates the power of programming.
So much programming instruction seems designed to teach people who already understand programming how to solve problems that nonprogrammers wouldn't even understand. A tutorial that started with automating tasks like this might be more effective than all the ones that start by demonstrating how to do basic arithmetic in $LANGUAGE and go on to a detailed explanation of $LANGUAGE's object system.
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#4> I decided to write a program that clicked on things.
I cringed a little. I'm glad he's learned enough to know now that this is not the right approach.
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#5The article shows an interesting illustration of the disconnect between programmers and normal computer users. Like the author says at the beginning, any experienced developer knows that automating interaction with a GUI is a crazy idea. It's a painful, fragile way to move data around. But to the author and anyone who's done data entry, it's an improvement to their workday that demonstrates the power of programming.…
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Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#6> I decided to write a program that clicked on things. I cringed a little. I'm glad he's learned enough to know now that this is not the right approach.
I thought this way before, and looked down on what I had made, but I'm slowly coming around to the idea that its more about how well the approach works and what it teaches you than about the technical details. I definitely wouldn't code it the same way today, but it worked well and taught me a lot. I wouldn't stop anyone who's in a similar position from doing the same.
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#7> I decided to write a program that clicked on things. I cringed a little. I'm glad he's learned enough to know now that this is not the right approach.
I cringed too, but then I realized this is probably the best way to start out. It's only a 'problem' because it's a bit more glue code (but less 'figuring things out' time).
The only truly cringey part is not knowing about CSV!
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#8Brings up old memories reading this. I remember my first job about 20 years ago at NEC as a data entry operator. It was 8 hours each day of taking a bunch of mal-formatted CSV files from some reports the previous day and importing it into excel and drawing graphs. I was just getting into learning C at the time and ended up writing an importer (parsing and formatting in C and ODBC to write back to excel along with excel macros to draw graphs). Very hacky and ugly but got the job done. It got the 8 hour job done in about 30 minutes - most of which was detecting patterns in the input and adding rules for those, which was fun in itself.
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#9> I decided to write a program that clicked on things. I cringed a little. I'm glad he's learned enough to know now that this is not the right approach.
I thought this way before, and looked down on what I had made, but I'm slowly coming around to the idea that its more about how well the approach works and what it teaches you than about the technical details. I definitely wouldn't code it the same way today, but it worked well and taught me a lot. I wouldn't stop anyone who's in a similar position from doing the same.
The worst that could have happened was that you talked yourself out of automating it because there wasn't an 'easy way'
Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat
#10The article shows an interesting illustration of the disconnect between programmers and normal computer users. Like the author says at the beginning, any experienced developer knows that automating interaction with a GUI is a crazy idea. It's a painful, fragile way to move data around. But to the author and anyone who's done data entry, it's an improvement to their workday that demonstrates the power of programming.…
This is why I like http://www.sikuli.org/ and Mechanize-style DSLs so much. They translate programming, web requests and parsing/processing into plain english "click [here]" concepts.