Methods for the Madness

Posted by jessiehuff on August 15, 2017

Coding could have saved me so much agony!

I’m serious, I wish I would have learned it sooner. Working in the business world often feels like competing in one of those intense obstacle races like a Tough Mudder. You’re constantly running into stumbling blocks from all sides, and it takes some serious skill to overcome them all without a trip here or there. Yet it feels damn good to see how far you and your team can go.

I was the Director of Marketing for an automotive warehouse distributor (layman’s translation: sold car and trucks parts, tools, and paint supplies to other businesses). I remember spending days analyzing promotional data, going through spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet to see how our last promo went and make sure our customers would get the correct amount for our promotional earn back. I won’t bore you with any more details, but I agonized over the thought that there had to be a more efficient way to analyze this data rather than doing it all manually. Surely a program existed out there to handle my problem, but as any corporate employees might understand, the budget was tight and only inhouse solutions were going to work. It sparked the thought again that I needed to learn how to code.

As programmers, we don’t just see the problem as it is, we try to see the most efficient solution. Some say that programmers are lazy (I mean, we do get computers to do a lot of work for us), but I call it efficient. If I’d known about Ruby methods or JavaScript functions, I think I could have programmed my way out of my frustrating analysis or so many of the other reoccurring tasks that are inherent to the business world.

For example, let’s say we want to build a very simple program that greets our customers as they enter our website. The code might say:

So now when we call the method, it will return:

How cool is that? As simple as that example might seem, just imagine the possible solutions you could come up with using methods.

I don’t know about you, but it makes my imagination run wild.