Joy

Greetings my loyal subjects!

I seem to be on an emotional roller coaster this past few days. Despite the previous emo post, a typhoon, and my gay friend going ninja on me and making anonymous comments on the Imperial Blog, I ended the weekend feeling happier.

And now, because everybody hates Mondays, I am going to talk about work.

A client of mine wanted to make the switch from Windows to Linux. They have applications written in Visual Basic that access and manipulate Microsoft Office documents. The thing is, when they said the want to move away from Microsoft, they meant they want to move everything away from Microsoft. Including documents.

The thing is, their Visual Basic applications manipulate the documents using macros (written in, guess what, Visual Basic for Applications). They want to use Open Office instead, whose macros must be written in Open Office Basic.

Thus, this is what they wanted me to do: Find the differences between VBA and OOB, and write an automated translator so we don't have to do it manually.

I of course thought that this was a nigh impossible task. I spent the previous week researching and trying things out and getting frustrated in the process.

But this morning, something wondrous happened. I discovered that Open Office does support VBA. All I have to do is add a single line of code at the top.

See, a programmer's job is to solve problems They deal with long hours of stress and frustration trying to figure out just how the heck to make things work. Heck, even when I'm asleep, I often dream about trying to fix stuff (when I wake up I already have a solution in my head :p).

But when things like these happen, when you find a solution to a problem that you initially thought was impossible to solve, you are consumed by that overwhelming feeling of euphoria that you just want to jump around and scream and dance with joy.

And this is what keeps a programmer going.

Sorry for the lack of angst and sarcasm. I'm just too damn happy today.

Signed,
Her Imperial Majesty