An Army Medal For Coding In Perl

shocking writes: Arizona National Guard member Vivin Paliath was surprised to be commended for writing Perl scripts and Excel macros while his unit was deployed in Iraq. His work automated a number of previously manual processes that were part of the logistics processes of his unit. He wrote, '[A]s a programmer, I'm constantly looking for ways to make my job easy. I didn't want to sit and add qualifications, and print licenses one by one. I was too lazy for that, and worse, the whole thing was horribly inefficient. So I decided to figure out how to automate the process. ... I started writing Perl scripts to query the data. By the time we had reached Iraq, I had a working script that generated licenses as text files for all the soldiers. The script only took a second or two to run, and the longest part of the process was simply printing out the licenses. But I wasn't done yet. I was still annoyed that I would have to add driver qualifications manually. So I wrote another script that would go and add qualifications to drivers en masse. The script even had a configuration file where you could specify what qualifications you wanted to add and to whom."

Comments

Shoulda got a purple heart

[Anonymous Coward]

...for coding in Perl.

Re:Shoulda got a purple heart

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't give you a Purple Heart for shooting yourself in the foot.

A virtuous Perl programmer

[Chelloveck]

Sounds like someone who embodies the Three Virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. Well done!

I'm always amazed at what non-programmers are impressed by. Code up some major application, and... Why doesn't it have this feature? Why does it have that workflow? What kind of colorblind dyslexic idiot designed this UI? But whip up a simple script to automate some repetitive, routine task and you're a genius!

Re:A virtuous Perl programmer

[Kaenneth]

Years ago I was the IT guy for a local government budget office.

After I stopped the servers from crashing any spending an hour rebuilding every day, and fixed the backup system so it actually backed up data, I had plenty of free time.

Instead of hiding in my office looking busy while playing MUDS/Nethack I took the time to sit with individual users, and quietly //observe their workflow.//

They spent most of the day comparing two columns of numbers (one from mainframe, one from SQL) for equality.

After a quick VBA prototype, they ended up with simple daily reports of where the numbers didn't match, saving about 40 hours a day between the 20 analysts.

The key thing many IT guys miss, is taking the time to fully understand what the users actually need/want; but instead jump to conclusions that everyone wants what a programmer wants.

Re:A purple heart?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I think you meant the Perlple Heart...

"Office Worker" can go into harms way ...

[perpenso]

We used to call guys like that pogues, and we didn't give them medals. On the other hand, if you could introduce efficiency in military bureaucracy, or any bureaucracy really, good on you!

Careful where you draw the line between "fighting men" and "office workers". I knew someone who was a Yeoman, does the ship's paperwork, on a destroyer during WW2. He only did paperwork between the fighting. When the ship went to general quarters he put down the pencil and became part of the crew of a 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun. For those unfamiliar, this was not a gun where the crew had some protection inside a turret. Bofors' crew were on deck and exposed to enemy fire, debris/fuel from aircraft destroyed and friendly fire.