How I developed an interest in coding
I started a new jon in January this year as an admin assistant. I took the job to escape from the unsociable hours of bar work and for a slightly higher rate of pay. Initially I did what I was asked to and didn’t really question the methods by which things were done having never worked in an office environment before. Very quickly I realised that many of the tasks performed every month dealing with figures were done in an incredibly inefficient way.
I started a new jon in January this year as an admin assistant. I took the job to escape from the unsociable hours of bar work and for a slightly higher rate of pay. Initially I did what I was asked to and didn’t really question the methods by which things were done having never worked in an office environment before. Very quickly I realised that many of the tasks performed every month dealing with figures were done in an incredibly inefficient way.
For example, a spreadsheet arrives every month containing about 600+ rows of data; each row is identified by a 4 digit code. I was given a few lists of these identifying numbers and asked to find and export the corresponding data in the monthly spreadsheet to new sheets. Their current method of doing this before I arrived involved a printed list of the identifying numbers, a ruler, and manually looking through the excel file before copying and pasting individual lines to a new file. I knew that there must be a more efficient way to do this; the only problem was I had no idea how, having no coding experience at the time. I started googling the problem and discovered the ozgrid forums. Very quickly I found some relevant code and set about trying to use it for my monthly spreadsheet. Eventually after cobbling together bits of code from various sources I had semi workable solution. I set up my list of identifying numbers in sheet 2 of the workbook. If the numbers matched the cell in the first sheet was highlighted in red. Using macros I managed to write code to sort the highlighted cells to the top of the sheet before I then copied them to a new sheet manually. At the time this seemed like a fantastic achievement given the way it was done before. After a little more thought I realised that this was also an inefficient way of doing this task.
I brought up the subject with my friend Shaun, a developer, over a drink on a Friday night. We had a lengthy discussion about the whole idea of coding and I was pointed in the direction of Stack Overflow. I popped my code up and received some excellent feedback very quickly from Siddharth Rout (http://siddharthrout.wordpress.com/about/). I couldn’t believe the quality of the reponse I got. Immediately I knew this was a much better way to learn coding than googling problems and trying to cobble together code from different resources. Since then I’ve started from the beginning and begun teaching myself VBA for excel at the office and in my own time. Shaun also pointed me in the direction of www.codeacademy.com and www.udacity.com so I’m also getting to grips with Javascript and Python.
Initially I just saw this job as a way out from a job I hated but it’s allowed me to realise a passion. Coding is the first thing I’ve been generally interested in and eager to learn more about for a long time and I can’t see my enthusiasm disappearing anytime soon.
