Humanities geeks
I made our Visual Basic for Access programmer very happy yesterday.
A few weeks ago, I had occasion to crawl through the code behind our census data-entry database. During that crawl, I learned how the screen navigation is coded. It wasn’t relevant to my task at the time, just a “oh, hm, that’s how that works, interesting, Visual Basic rots” thing.
Day before yesterday, I tested the code-rewrite on the database that purports to handle the 1920 census. Now, as bureaucrats will, they rewrote the census form in 1920, moving columns hither and yon, so the screen-navigation code based on the 1910 census didn’t work for 1920 at all.
Yesterday my boss asked me to write up how the navigation ought to work. Because I knew how it was coded, I was able to produce a nice clear set of needed actions for each field. The database guy was so thrilled he sent my boss no less than three “gosh, this is really cool, thanks!” messages, which my boss duly forwarded to me.
Nice to make somebody happy. Goes to show, too, that it’s worthwhile to teach humanities geeks some programming, rather than leaving it the exclusive preserve of the IT priesthood. Sure, I’ll never write huge enterprise-level apps, but even with my limited knowledge I can make the lives of those who do write huge enterprise-level apps considerably easier.