Joe's Database Delight

Joe becomes more of a computer nerd with each passing day.

 Trainee software engineer, Joe learns about databases and continues on his journey into becoming a real software wizkid...

The last couple of weeks have been a very steep learning curve in my programming process. I have had some intense lessons in things such as databases and VB6. I started to get a little more confident in my programming abilities, being able to make small functional programs that did simple task. 

I got to this stage and thought I was clean sailing from there and thought it would just be more of the same stuff for a while. Wow, was I wrong! I was given the on-going task of taking over and maintaining our in-house administration tool. This tool was made in VB6 some years ago and we saw it as the perfect project for me to expand my existing knowledge and give me the chance to work on a project that would actually be very beneficial to the company. The first thing that I did was spend a day just trying to get my head around the tool. It was totally new to me and the project just seemed huge. Once I had spent a day or two studying the code and which paths different functions were taking I started to understand how things were working a bit. 

The next step was to actually try and make some changes to it. The first couple of changes I made were very simple but all the same I thought I was doing amazing actually being able to change something for the better in a project of this size! All I was doing was changing the maximum amount of characters that could be entered into a text box. After I had made these changes I was given the task of automatically generating an email and populating it with a subject, a set of email addresses and with a body of text. 

My first lesson was a quick but informative lesson on databases. Derek and Todd ran me through how a database works, how they are linked together and how to call information from the database using queries. Once I had learnt that it was then time to try and pull everything I had learnt together and with a bit of help from Derek I managed to make the function that did exactly the right job that we wanted to achieve. I was so happy with the progress that we had made and that I had made a working function that would be largely beneficial to the company. 

This was not the end though. Although I had thought it was ready to be published and become part of the company’s in-house tool, I was wrong. We discussed making it into a HTML email. It was like being put back to square one again as I knew absolutely nothing about html emails. After doing some research and spending some time with Fiona we came up with the html email that we wanted to be in the body of the email. We then worked out that if we wanted to change the body of the email we didn’t want it to be hard coded into the function. We decided to make the function take the contents of a document which contained the body of the email so if we ever want to change the email we just had to replace what was in the document. 

So, there it was, my first big change to the company’s most important in-house administration tool. Needless to say I am very happy with what I have achieved over a short period of time and I can’t wait for what is next.

Needless to say, we're impressed with how much Joe has learnt since being with Objektum Solutions and proud to have him on the team!