Databases, code and fantasy football

My friend, West, works in maintenance as a clerk and has just taken over in the parts room. He has to keep track of what was ordered, when and how often parts are issued out for jobs on the unit. With that info, he gives a monthly report on how much money was spent and how much the department needs to order for the next month.

And it is all done on paper.

West asked me last week if i could build a database for the parts room to make things work more smoothly and easier. After getting permission from West's boss, I went back to maintenance and built a structure for the in Access. It took a while since I didn't know everything the database needed to it would be used. Once the skeleton was assembled, I asked West to populate it with fake data and make some forms to help see how it would be. He also me a list of functions wanted as we discussed project back at the dorm.

With the foundation in place and an idea of what needed to be done, it was time to get dirty. Access is not the best or easiest-to-use development tool for making programs, but it is the best we have available. I probably wouldn't be good at any others since I have almost zero experience. Most of the functions need to be added in with Visual Basic, which I am slightly familiar with after working on the book cart program in the library. The first bit of work on the parts room program was easy to set up. Then West kept asking if this certain thing was possible or if this tweak could be made. All of what he has asked for is possible, I'm sure, but I just have to figure out how to code it. Sometimes the process of discovery can take days, though joy of figuring out the solution is definitely worth it.

To give myself a break from the parts room program I have been fine-tuning and adding functionality to the fantasy football program I made to track stats and scores for the seven leagues in the unit. It's a lot of fun taking a rough product and transforming it into a lithe, easy-to-use beast. Hopefully, I can do that with the parts room program before I leave.