Rant Why did I try to create a timesheet from scratchinstead of using a template (Excel rant, volume 689)

Sounds about the right time as I think I saw it while at college 98-00.

 

I love all my janky Excel based systems I've made over the years. With any luck, some poor soul is still suffering through at least one of them.

Now where is that ****ing stray bracket...

 

I've done a shedload of IT estate consolidations/transformations/migrations, not one of them ever had a CMDB more than 80% complete or accurate, have always had to resort to massive Excel workbooks to keep track of it all. At the end you export to csv and hand to the CMDB team to correct their crap DB, whether they bother or not is for one of the other threads.

One I created was called "Columbus" by the account director because it was discovering new worlds...

 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I got to where I am now

Writing macros in Excel to compensate for the half-arsed implementation of SAP-BW which spat out data with German date formatting…

Using a blank sheet full of macro code to process lots of files exported from the half-arsed SAP-BW…

Writing monstrous project/programme status tracking dashboards…

Writing GUI applications in VBa…

Ripping apart the VBa code in an in-development claims management system written in Access to find the SQL Server connection strings & queries…

Automating my own custom reports from SQL Server databases using custom VBa classes…

Working as a SQL Server developer…

Working as a Data Engineer…

Learning Python…

Learning devops (not to be confused with Azure DevOps) practices and infrastructure as code…

Studying Data Science and working as a Machine Learning Ops (MLOps) engineer…

Moving to a more betterer Data Engineer job where my remit expands massively…

Back when I worked at the Home insurance arm of ThatBank, we had a terminal emulator application that was used to log on to the mainframe back-end… Every time you logged on you’d be presented with an ASCII art logo that said “Figaro” - named after the project that implemented this particular system. Legend has it that the project was called “Figaro” because it was an acronym: “Fuc … Flipping Impossible to Get Any Real Organisation”.

At the same place I also once worked on an NDA’d project that was aiming to close down one of the offices and make a bunch of people redundant. The programme manager obviously didn’t want to give the game away with an obvious project name like “Project Put These People Out Of A Job By Closing Their Office”. In an early meeting he said it should be called “something low-key”… so he called it “Project Loki”… Apparently I was the only one who saw the irony of using the name of a mythological trickster god for a project that was going to make a couple of hundred people redundant…

 

Can still play Civ. Used to be a playable version of Legend of Zelda too, but i assume that's been dmca'd