The early years
I was about 13 when my dad bought a C64 and signed up to a programmer course.
He also signed up for all the available programmers' magazines, and quicly became a member of the Budapest hobby programmers' network. He brought home cassettes from all over the city, and was copying code heavily in all his free time from the magazines. All I saw was
Office manager, admin assistant
Luckily I got a job at an Indian IT company. This was a fully organised enterprise with about 50000 employees worldwide. And all that comes with it: free latest mobile phones (imagine my one touch easy alongside the Nokia N95 8GB, I thought I was in Star Trek), all access to MSDN resources, free coffee and a beautiful office in the best part of Budapest, the Infopark, with restaurants, bookstores and a lovely park. I've got familiar with the wonderful Indian culture, made lots of lifetime friends and started to do yoga.
Houston, we have a problem
I needed an app to be able to report financial stuff to Germany management, so the developers wrote me one, but then they released it. For good. So I had to improve it and debug it, and all that comes with that.
And so it goes
So I've started to examine the code in Visual Studio, and since MSDN had great tutorials, during 2 years I've made many modules to my little app. Some of these were an inventory app, that registered all the furniture and equipment in the office, generated inventory ID's, printed the beautiful labels, only it didn't stick them on.
The next steps, more problems to solve
I've also implemented a tool for the employees, to manage their benefits. Now back then this was very tricky and very important.
What we need - the importance
The race among companies for developers is on, sometimes it's not the money that's matter the most. With us it was the benefits.
Why do we need it - the tricky bit
We have offered a large amount that the employees could spread. Say you have 10,000 as benefits, that you can use for food vouchers (if any of you remember Sodexo, it was a company that offered food vouchers), there was the life insurance, the medical annual membership (which was an annual, one time fee), and pension. All of these had their recurrence, (annual, quarterly, monthly) which made it more complicated.
How - the solution
Now manually it would have taken ages to count all the variations of the given sum, and also I've got a gross amount from the company, so I had to calculate the tax as well as to show the employee, what they get.
This I've solved with a form full of tickboxes, dropdowns, sliders and whatnot. The app had a tickbox for medical (one time fee), sliders, where the steps have been predicted by the ticket vendor, dropdowns with minimum and maximum set, so no bad data could be input. And it showed the full detailed list for the user, what they get and when they get it, for me it showed what do I need to order, or book, and for the payroll it showed the taxes and invoices, with their payment statuses. Decent problem to solve with no university degree.
I wish I had a copy of the screenshot, to show you, it was amazing. :)
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