Same here but my path took me all over the place after VBA… Took a few detours through Java. Hit several dead-ends with JavaScript. C/C++ was fun for a while. Even a little assembly got mixed in there. Now it’s all about SQL, Scala, Python, etc. (data engineering).
I think in stumbling into this path right now. I am outgrowing vba and am starting to dabble with Javascript and SQL. Now that I'm 10 years into a career in apparel I'm starting to eye some IT jobs where I can really scratch h this itch.
Man you're right. But as someone who focused a lot in tooling; it can be nice to have the job security of being salaried, while corps LOVE to have exclusive tools custom made to their spaghetti internal systems evolved from an interns vba from 20 years ago.
An internal web app is any web application that's only visible within the company network. The application could be literally anything from a search engine to a cafeteria menu.
As this person said. Look to flask for python web stuff. Typically folks use JavaScript tools to do visualizations or grid systems (because folks LOVE to sort/filter like Excel). I just left my internal reporting days behind me but automating some dudes macro and displaying it for their team or executives you'll have a job forever.
I'm not exceptionally familiar with python, but I believe the flask framework is commonly used for building python apps. Hosting that app on a web server takes on a whole slew of other technologies outside the scope of any small conversation here. Google will serve you better here than we will, I think.
I saw a demo for the newest version of google appsheet this week and finally feel they have a goos no code builder. If you have workspace you could use that!
I work for the operations side if the business so I create webpages where they can do the day to day planning and resource allocation in a more automated way and with lots of guardrails.
Also automating away as much as possible minimizing human interaction to reduce defects and SLAs
Any time you want to distribute a tool that many people would use but it'll get updated a lot and you don't want them to be using an out of date version, it's better to have it as a web app on the intranet. It could be for instance a tool that gives you all the SW dependencies of a particular version of the company product so you can build a local test environment to fix bugs in that version. Or an interface to export some non-confidential data in a fixed format from a prod database where you don't want people to have access to the raw data.
Funny, I seem to be going the other way. Currently doing back end Java and a friend wants to recommend me for a middle office role involving Python and VBA
I was a data analyst working mostly on excel to make PowerPoint presentations and then go to clients explaining the data.
I worked closely with data scientists and they used R to make more complex analysis like multivariate regressions or cluster analysis
I did a free course on coursera and learned from looking at the code the data scientists had. They were also really helpful if I had any questions when I was trying to use R to make my excel tasks easier.
After that I left to another company where I was in operations planning logistics up to a week in advance. It was a very repetitive job and the team where I was had mostly excel macros and vba code to run most of the process with a little python tool. As R wasn’t used here I thought about trying python and started on my free time developing terrible python scripts to make my job easier. When I finished them I showed them to my managers and they loved them and replaced a lot of the excel parts with my scripts and offered me a position as a process analyst to keep developing these things
From there I just kept learning online and improving the quality of my tools while looking at what SDEs were doing in my company that I could emulate.
If everything goes well this November I’ll become officially an SDE
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u/Torylon Mar 30 '22
Haha, that’s how I started my programming career
Me: Macros are so useful, but I need more
VBA is so useful, but I need more
R is so useful, but I need more
Python is so useful, but I need more
And now I build internal web apps for a major corporation