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I am fortunate, in that I got a lesson in not over-engineering things very early in my career. My first programming job was a 3 month contract at the maintenan
by lacampbell 9y ago
I am fortunate, in that I got a lesson in not over-engineering things very early in my career.
My first programming job was a 3 month contract at the maintenance department of an international airport. They had a bunch of information in large, unwieldy ERP system and wanted to automatically generate job sheets for the different maintenance crews. So I did the simplest thing possible - I generated an excel file from the ERP system, then using that file as input, I outputted different excel worksheets for the different crews.
It was very plain GUI app that had one or two buttons. I remember being a bit worried that it wasn't nearly fancy enough for 3 months work, but everyone seemed pretty happy with it.
Later on I found out that - before me - they had hired an experienced software developer who had worked on the same problem for 6 months, and at the end of that 6 months had apparently not produced a solution. I had done the dumbest, simplest thing - not because I had any insight or wisdom, but because it was really the only thing I had the skills to do. But I delivered.
It was a brilliant, accidental first lesson in not over-engineering.
- Can_Not 9y agoSame here, I've watched multiple devs come into my first job with agendas of extreme over-engineering and unnecessary rewrites. I think the company is actually pretty lucky that they haven't gone under from all the damage.
- gaius 9y agoI generated an excel file from the ERP system, then using that file as input, I outputted different excel worksheets for the different crews. As a complete aside, you might be surprised how far you can go with Excel these days. Do you know it has a built-in in-memory columnar database now? You can have millions and millions of rows of data in there that you can use in tables and charts completely independently of the size of the grid. Pull back a huge chunk of data from the DB and slice and dice it to your heart's content locally. I look at people buying expensive "business intelligence solutions" and I think, it's right there on your PC all along and you don't even know it...