Welcome to the beginning of the end of my course of study at OSU. This seems an appropriate time to reflect on how it began.
My interest in programming began through my work at a large federal agency. Among many other things, the work included processing claims that were filed on the Internet for retirement, disability, and health benefits. Processing claims involved gathering, entering, and propagating lots of data from various sources into the claims processing software. This was a high volume, repetitive, and somewhat brain-numbing task. I thought, “Why can’t this be automated? The machine can do this faster and more accurately than a person.” Of course, it could be automated. All that was needed was someone to write a program to do it.
At the time, no one with authority in the agency thought this was important enough to order one or two of the several thousands of programmers in the agency to write such a program. I decided to try to do it myself. I had no prior programming experience. The agency had software for processing appeals with similar functionality to what I wanted. I emailed the programmer who created and maintained the appeals program, hoping to interest him in my project. He responded by sending me the hundreds of pages of code for the entire appeals program and wished me good luck.
Over the course of many, many months, mainly through trial and error and using the appeals code as a guide, I was able to automate this brain-numbing task that thousands of people in my agency did everyday. My program greatly improved my work life. I continued to add functionality. Overtime, I shared my program with others who shared it with others, and it was eventually used throughout the country.
At this point, higher-ups in the agency took notice. The agency had finally developed software, written by real agency programmers, designed to address the same workload as my program. However, employees were using my “unauthorized” software instead of the agency’s authorized software, because my program had a lot more functionality. I had never thought about authorization. I was just trying to make my work easier. In the end my program was banned and its functionality was incorporated into the agency approved software. I was made aware that in my agency worker bees work, and programmers program. Cross pollination is frowned upon.
Despite the unhappy ending, I learned a lot from this experience. I found that I was interested in programming and enjoyed it. Sometime later, I enrolled in OSU.
