When I am in search of inspiration, I like to revisit Philip Greenspun's Professionalism for Software Engineers .

I don't study programming as much anymore because I find statistics a lot easier to forget, but every so often I'm blindsided when something new comes out and I need to go through that annoying period of learning a new technology.

After being pretty much exclusively a Java programmer for the last 3-4 years or so, I was given the task of writing some macros is VB for Excel. I came into the project with a few vestiages of the OO/C++/Java arrogance, but quickly found myself eating humble pie. First VBA with .NET seems very rich in terms of architecture and I saw something that seemed really fundamental.

Browsers are great because everyone can use them. For anyone that crunches numbers, Excel is the same way. As long as my code works well, I can write an Excel Add-in and people will be able to use it without having to venture far outside of their technical comfort zone.

The XML parser for VB.NET makes it really easy for me perform a simple web request but with fixed field values and load that into a spreadsheet. I haven't yet tackled using .NET to call my legacy DLL in R, but once I do that I will have provided my users with a lot of extra functionality without making them learn a new technology.

Anyways, back to the professionalism. After reading PG's article I was inspired to share this experience. I had been falling into the trap of not writing my thoughts down. Even if no one else reads this blog, at least I do. Hopefully the process of writing will help me get my thoughts organized about new important things like Excel and .NET and prevent me from being just another OO technician.