Those that people always bitch about and those nobody uses.
Having said that, I think that it is clear to most, if not to all, my feelings on programming.
In case it isn’t, let me clarify.
It’s all well and good for anyone who likes to stare at tons of lines of code for hours, reading it all into their heads and then visualizing what the code is supposed to do, and then add one little semicolon, then spending hours figuring out what went wrong, and then ultimately hunting down some darned semicolon and blaming it.
So early on, when my father, a software engineer, attempted to get me interested in programming, I got the basics and then moved on to another field – operations. That includes maintenance, design, infrastructure, troubleshooting, applications and much much more.
So I become the de-facto go-to guy for all things technology-related and begin to expand knowledge on the workings of systems, including how systems talk to each other, how people talk to those systems, and so on and so forth.
As time progresses, and my knowledge increases, I learn more and more about automating tasks via “shell scripts” or “batch files” and more and more until I get a decent idea of what Windows Scripting Host and Visual Basic Scripting languages are all about, and learn how to automate lots of things on a large set of users/computers at the same time.
So all this scripting has created lots of little utilities that are used and I can come up with more of them, once a repetitive task has been determined.
The reason this comes up is because last week, I wrote a fairly large amount of code to automate moving a user’s network printers from one print server to a new one, with virtually no interaction needed on the user’s part – and much less on our end, had we have to do it manually.
I’m happy to share – but I think I could rewrite the entire thing for a more streamlined purpose, now that I know how I wanted to design it in the first place.
If anyone out there needs a VBScript for moving users from one network printer server to another, let me know, and I’m happy to send you it.
The final conclusion was that I loved doing the whole thing, but at the end I felt too much like a programmer, and that wasn’t something I thought I could do, day in and day out.
So there. I gave it a shot, and I know enough to do what I need to do.