I have always been an idea person. I like the idea of things and if I like the idea so much, I follow through with it.
An example of this is when I was asked to stay for a week during a project go live from 10 pm to 10 am... well I actually almost jumped at the opportunity. I had needed some time to start getting into VBScript since I had little to no experience with programming, I thought it would be a great place to start. Luckily the project go live was very successful and i was not busy by any means.
http://cbtnuggets.com/ has training courses available to view any time so I started there. During that time we had a run in with a pretty annoying virus. One thing about this virus... actually its a worm. Anyways, this thing created scheduled tasks to do whatever it was doing. I then used the training videos to help guide me through the process... first it was finding out "What is the scope of the problem?", then it was "What am I looking for?"
So just moseying along I determined that if I could get a list of computers from Active Directory, I might be able to find out if the scheduled tasks are in the 'Tasks' folder... it was a little more tricky than that because we had a mix of Windows 2000 desktops along with XP, but after learning the magical "On Error Resume Next", I was set.
From then on, I was determined to make scripting / app development a priority. Everyday tasks can be automated. At one point I was picked to create over 150 user accounts in just 3 days. Then I learned this would continue to happen. I needed to learn more. That's when I remembered that in school we were given an MSDN academy account and Visual Basic 6.0 was part of that. So now I could leverage the power of VBScript and add buttons to it... entry fields... graphics.
I created a password reset utility for our receptionists.
I created a bulk user account creation form.
I created a front end for starting stopping services on remote systems.
All along, I had been using Google to get what I need to know.
I was in a Chapters one day looking around and saw a book called Gray hat Python... It looked intimidating. I wanted to know it. I slowly took python in, thinking it was nice but still sticking to my vbscript guns and just feeling out python... I noticed that python had a little section in the CBTnuggets site, so I checked it out and now I, only seldom, go back to VBScript for odds and ends.
There are a lot of modules available for Python... its nearly limitless
I created a banner application that displays messages sent via TCP or UDP. (not in production)
I created a SQL frontend for our current inventory control system and am linking documentation... make registry changes... yada yada, its very robust.
In an effort to actually make money from learning these things... I decided to try my hand at developing for Android... since its only 25 to sign up for the developer account. Agh, see the problem there... gotta learn Java. Well CBTnuggets offers an intro to Java, so that has gotten my foot in the door.
I created the ohsnAPP Band Name Generator... the free version has 177 downloads so far..
The paid version has 1 download... my brother in law... he didn't leave any comments.. I have to laugh though, I never thought I'd be swimming in the money for developing something that serves no other purpose than making people chuckle. It's a little disappointing, but the real reward is to be able to say that I published something. It's also very rewarding to be able to help others accomplish their needs and know that I helped them in some way.
And while I am developing for Android, I am also trying to learn PowerShell... seems like a really interesting tool and I plan on sharing as much as possible with it.
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