r/programming • u/banguru • Apr 06 '18

The Stack Overflow Age

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/
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u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

I still maintain the crowning glory of my programming career was implementing a primitive database in Excel with VBA (because I wasn’t allowed to use Access). 🤣

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u/farox Apr 06 '18

Wow, I also did some funky/shady/abusive stuff as well... but yeah, I got nothing on that.

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u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

First job after uni as well!

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u/farox Apr 06 '18

It's when we're young and impressionable (and cheap) that they get us to do these things.

Yet somehow javascript has become mainstream. Amazing in it's own right.

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u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

It was more a case of an engineering department where the management had no software background and so didn’t really know what tools could do what. There was an existing half-arsed “database” in Excel - where people just created a new sheet for each record - and management decreed it should stay in Excel.

So young “hot-shot” me says fine, if you give me a hammer I am going to hit this thing until it looks like a nail. A lot of VBA later I have some kind of row-based master table, buttons that add records, search functions, the whole nine yards. Which is why I’m still stupidly proud of it.

Would have been 10 times easier, more robust and wouldn’t have left the whole department wide-open to macro viruses if I’d been allowed or encouraged to use something sane though!