People who understand

Having looked at the first tasks on my course, I am amused at their triviality. But then I suppose it's a good plan to ease into these things slowly. One benefit that really struck me this week, though, is that there should at least be some like-minded people on it.

For some while now, a large part of my work has been creating systems to automate jobs for the company, which involves a lot of programming in one way or another, or at least finding solutions to make existing applications do things that they aren't normally meant to. And I like it. A lot. But I feel very frustrated at times that I have nobody to share the difficulties and successes with.

Things have changed quite a lot now, but the legacy of the way technology has been introduced to brethren companies is that most things run on Microsoft Office. These days there is less of a barrier to running whatever software you can justify, but initially that was all there was. And so I have ended up creating Excel spreadsheets, for instance, that act like mini self-contained applications.

But the brethren staff, having no experience of computer use in general, don't bat an eyelid at any of this. The fact that they can't do such things for themselves doesn't mean they think it's difficult - they just assume it's something not too hard that they haven't learned to do. So there's no point presenting a creation that solves a problem in an interesting way, or that took real head-scratching and ingenuity to achieve, and expecting any response other than mild satisfaction if it does something useful.

That's very isolating, in a way. When I finally succeed in cracking a code method that makes a bit of work easier it feels good - but there's nobody I can say that to because none of them understand what the problem was, let alone why the solution is the solution.

The Open University seems quite good in a social sense, in spite of being a distance learning system. There are numerous online forums and regular tutorials, and collaboration is encouraged. I'm hoping that even if the level of the current course is not high, at least I might get a bit of feedback on something that these days takes up quite a lot of my head.