In a recent Virtual Coffee chat, I asked, "What is the favorite software tool/site/thing you've ever created?" A key point to some responses was that sometimes little, quick apps are the most rewarding and impactful. I shared that 2 of my best "apps" ever essentially only required the user to copy messy data/text from one source, paste it into the application, and then the data on their clipboard was automagically formatted the way they needed it.
tl;dr: Just watch the video below.
While working in the telecom industry, I created one of those apps. First, some background. Amazingly, even in 2006 (and still now), the telecom industry coordinated all activity across the global telecom network by all companies (Carriers) faxing and emailing files (spreadsheets, text, Word documents, etc) to every other company around the world 😳. In this example, Carrier A "owned" a bunch of different ranges of possible E164 mobile phone number ranges. If you were a customer of Carrier Z that wanted to call or text a customer of Carrier A, Carrier Z had to get an "IR21" from Carrier A and input all these phone number ranges into their SS7 switches (fancy routers). Now, imagine all this occurring between all mobile phone companies across the world 🤯.
In my company, two poor souls had to track down and parse all the IR21 updates that every other mobile phone company distributed. These often changed once or twice per month. Even worse, just about every company had their own non-standard version of an IR21. Most of these were poorly documented and sometimes were received multiple times with no way to tell if one was different from another. It was a disaster. Our two employees were working 60 to 80 hour weeks trying to keep up with this.
One time, I was visiting the office in Florida and chatting with one of the people living this nightmare. He showed me all the hoops they had to go through to handle this diluge of data. I was in shock. As the department's dedicated nerd and hobby developre, I promised to make something for him to solve this by the end of the week.
I spent 2 days with him to learn all the crazy data formats that each Carrier used. Then, I created a relatively simple HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript single file web page that just required them to paste data in, click a few radio options, click some buttons, and get the data in the right format.
At first, I simply emailed the file to the two employees so they could run it locally on their own computer. Later (see below), I added it to our department's server for easier and permanent access. This new tool virtually automated this ridiculously manual process for them. Within a week, they were both only working 40 hour weeks and had time for more important work.
At this time, I was NOT a "professional" developer. My real job at this company was as an "SS7 Translations Engineer". I spent my days adding phone numbers and routes to our company's STPs. I was just a guy that hated tedious, manual tasks and created little apps to automate some of these for myself and others. Once my boss saw all the benefits of thes little tools, I was hired again later after a 9 month sabbatical to do nothing but create automation tools for our department. If you are looking to get your first developer job, maybe try "becoming" a developer in your current role. I've written an article about just converting your existing job into a developer role. See if you can "break into tech via the side door".
Finally, here is the video that demonstrates the original process and the new process.
Photo by Firosnv. Photography on Unsplash
