Re:The First Time I Used Programming At Work
by bane on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @12:21AM
(#3980467)
Recognizing that automation is possible is very hard. A quick tip, if you can find a pattern in a task, you can probably automate some or all of that task.
My first internship after college had me taking technical tables in old Word documents, and rewriting them as old-style HTML tables. These documents were often thousands of pages of tables, and there were hundreds of such documents.
It took me a while to realize that, over a few dozen tables, I had come up with a manual system that was just a series of copy/pastes of various HTML snippets in and around the copy/paste of the table contents in a text editor. At the rate I was going using my copy/paste method I was processing tables at about 2-3x the rate of the other interns who were hand typing the markup in the table (the average was about 20 tables per day, I was doing a solid 50-60).
Thinking for a minute I whipped up a script to do the work and my metrics went through the roof. All I had to do was copy/paste the table contents (I couldn't come up with a way at the time to automate that bit of tedium), then run the script. In a day I went to doing 6000-8000 tables a day. My boss, who fortunately thought it was pretty cool, had me train the other interns and we finished the project months ahead of schedule.
So even if a complete solution wasn't to be found, automating even part of it was a massive boost to productivity.
My first internship after college had me taking technical tables in old Word documents, and rewriting them as old-style HTML tables. These documents were often thousands of pages of tables, and there were hundreds of such documents.
It took me a while to realize that, over a few dozen tables, I had come up with a manual system that was just a series of copy/pastes of various HTML snippets in and around the copy/paste of the table contents in a text editor. At the rate I was going using my copy/paste method I was processing tables at about 2-3x the rate of the other interns who were hand typing the markup in the table (the average was about 20 tables per day, I was doing a solid 50-60).
Thinking for a minute I whipped up a script to do the work and my metrics went through the roof. All I had to do was copy/paste the table contents (I couldn't come up with a way at the time to automate that bit of tedium), then run the script. In a day I went to doing 6000-8000 tables a day. My boss, who fortunately thought it was pretty cool, had me train the other interns and we finished the project months ahead of schedule.
So even if a complete solution wasn't to be found, automating even part of it was a massive boost to productivity.