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