This is somewhat of a spontaneous update and a pretty large deviation from the work that I had been doing on the Odin Project website building out a sample blogging application. Last week, I updated about how I was working on quite a few different things at work. One of those was to perform some role mapping of our employees by pulling data out of Active Directory. I managed to pull out the data using some custom PowerShell scripting, but spent three days trying to get it laid out into the Excel spreadsheet our Business Analyst put together. Literally 1500 columns to fill out, which I managed to make easier using Index/Match. But, it would’ve taken another three days or longer to finish it up.
So my dad had an awesome idea one night. Why not create a simple application that houses all of the data and maps relationships that will spit out the excel spreadsheet in one swoop. I spent all of Sunday working on the application (part of Friday as well just to seed the databases), and at 10:30pm called it quits. If it weren’t for some help from my dad, I definitely wouldn’t have finished it within one day, so I’m super fortunate to have his help. It’s also going to take me some time to understand all of the code that we wrote, but I’m fortunate of having the time to do that in the evenings. So today, I output a CSV that was close to the report format I need to give to our Business Analyst. I just have to run the Index/Match on the file and it’ll be all finished. So stoked. Plus, my boss gave the go ahead to publish it on Github when everything is wrapped up (obviously not giving up any sensitive information). I’ll be using fake data with a Rails gem to fake all of the data.
This job honestly couldn’t have worked out any better. I’m getting more project management experience, plus coding experience that can go on my resume. Also, my boss might want me to take the app a few steps further and connect Active Directory with UltiPro. We’ll see where it goes, but I’m super stoked about how its all playing out. I’ll be back with updates when I publish the repo and just in general. Cheers ya’ll!