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Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

vikparuchuri.com

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Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#41

Post by thebenedict »

Love it. I started my career in International Development and one of my team's first projects was figuring out how many miles our organization's 1000+ staff flew in a year (why is a separate story). The travel agent could only provide records in PDF. 1000's of them.

The intern I shared an office with was assigned to go through each record, type the origin and destination airport codes into an online flight distance calculator, and enter the results in a spreadsheet. After two days of watching this I volunteered to take over and spent a few nights learning enough Java to read/write CSV and make the HTTP request. Saved days of pain for the intern and was a satisfying accomplishment as a novice.

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#42

Post by yason »

This is golden. I've wondered more often than once myself what would it be like to have a "normal" office job.

For instance, take some city department or some big firm where things generally flow at a slow pace and require a lot of time spent on work items, doing possibly repeated tasks each week. What would a programmer do? Exactly as described in the article:

- learn what kind of tasks the job consists of

- identify repeated actions and patterns in work

- think of a way to automate the easiest parts, still requiring human to finalise the task

- gradually learning more and automating the harder and harder parts and building tools bottom-up based on earlier blocks

- finally ending up with a software mechanisation puppet that I can instruct and program to do my work

- gradually spend first some of my time doing the automation and as it would slowly take over I could devote more and more of my time automating the rest, and when all is done, I would feel the job is "completed" and get bored.

This is something that feels so natural to a programmer: I have dozens of little tools to aid in doing my programming job at work. The goal of a programmer is to program anything that can be automated and only work himself on the hard tasks that can't.

It's intriguing to imagine how you could apply those skills outside programming jobs.

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#43

Post by yason »

elwin wrote: post #3

The 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.…

I know several places where software components or systems software is tested against real-world applications, games, and whatnot, and... guess how it's often done? Yup, with a combination of injecting artificial keyboard/mouse inputs and looking things at the screen. And these guys aren't beginners but professionals. You can't really automate something that doesn't have the APIs for it.

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#44

Post by mjklin »

Why has no one mentioned Autohotkey? (http://www.autohotkey.com)

It was practically made for this use case, and has an active community behind it. It even has its own script editor (SciTE4AutoHotkey) and was recommended as a Kevin Kelly-approved Cool Tool (http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/4147).

My go-to program for my desk job.

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#45

Post by [deleted] »

hjAETGHs wrote: post #35
elwin wrote: post #3

The 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.…

seems like everyone forgot about vba and vb6 already....

[deleted]

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#46

Post by detaro »

pjc50 wrote: post #27
detaro wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the server versions, Windows finally leaves this path, making PowerShell (that admittedly also takes some getting used to) a first class configuration system. You even can do something in the GUI and then check in a log what PowerShell commands were executed under the hood.

From which version of Server? Where does the log go? I have a use for this.

I think it's from 2012? Here is a link that describes it:

http://www.learnmsexchange.com/windows-servers/windows-serve...

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#47

Post by eru »

yason wrote: post #42

This is golden. I've wondered more often than once myself what would it be like to have a "normal" office job. For instance, take some city department or some big firm where things generally flow at a slow pace and require a lot of time spent on work items, doing possibly repeated tasks each week. What would a programmer do? Exactly as described in the article: - learn what kind of tasks the job consists of - identif…

Often you have to change the tasks slightly to make them properly automatable. The fancy term is process improvement. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_improvement

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#48

Post by eru »

thebenedict wrote: post #41

Love it. I started my career in International Development and one of my team's first projects was figuring out how many miles our organization's 1000+ staff flew in a year (why is a separate story). The travel agent could only provide records in PDF. 1000's of them. The intern I shared an office with was assigned to go through each record, type the origin and destination airport codes into an online flight distance c…

And you even learned some Java in the process!

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#49

Post by eru »

learc83 wrote: post #37
mschuster91 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when the rules placing criminal records in public were drafted, these records were usually kept at a courthouse, thus greatly restricting their use to those who actually traveled to the courthouse/archive and manually searched. These days, everything can be searched online and especially copied and stored everywhere, far after expiration. And this is not a good development at all.

Yes, they used to be stored in a courthouse, but most people didn't leave the area they were born in either, so for the average person everyone you were likely to meet knew about your past. Criminal records were always meant to be as public as possible. I do have a huge problem with the content of criminal records, because I have a huge problem with what we consider criminal--drug offenses mostly. I also worry a lot…

> I do have a huge problem with the content of criminal records, because I have a huge problem with what we consider criminal--drug offenses mostly.

In the US you also have lots of really bad laws about sexual offenses (which aren't real offenses by any sane standard; like teenagers sending each other nude pictures).

Re: Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

#50

Post by maxlybbert »

learc83 wrote: post #37
mschuster91 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when the rules placing criminal records in public were drafted, these records were usually kept at a courthouse, thus greatly restricting their use to those who actually traveled to the courthouse/archive and manually searched. These days, everything can be searched online and especially copied and stored everywhere, far after expiration. And this is not a good development at all.

Yes, they used to be stored in a courthouse, but most people didn't leave the area they were born in either, so for the average person everyone you were likely to meet knew about your past. Criminal records were always meant to be as public as possible. I do have a huge problem with the content of criminal records, because I have a huge problem with what we consider criminal--drug offenses mostly. I also worry a lot…

> I do have a huge problem with the content of criminal records, because I have a huge problem with what we consider criminal

While the US wants to know immigrants' criminal history, the US isn't required to care about all of the crimes that show up on the record. For instance, convictions for performing or having an abortion (say, in Brazil) probably won't result in a denied visa.

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