Jared Hicks
San Marcos Texas
My name is Jared Hicks, and I live just south of Austin, Texas. I'm an amateur software developer with several applications developed and still in use with one of the worlds fastest growing pipe fabrication companies in the oil and gas sector. This blog is to spotlight some of my achievements over my professional and personal life.
My eyes were opened to the tech world back in 2003/2004 while playing the popular MMORPG game RuneScape, where I decided to start writing bots and clients to cheat at the game. During this time and for the next several years it was very important to develop these botting clients and scripts in a way that mimicked human interaction with the game. This created a little bit of a challenge, as you weren't able to just instantly change the mouse pointer's coordinates, you had to develop a smooth algorithm to get the mouse pointer from A to B. While a lot of people chose to develop these bots in Java.....I decided to suffer and went with Visual Basic 6. This continued for several years, ending around 2009, I'd risen up in these small communities as.....someone hardly even close to famous, my work was mediocre at best, and I did eventually try my hand at scripting for other bots in Java with some light success as well.
Over the years I've moved on from VB6 to even lesser known and used languages like AutoHotKey, VB, and eventually C#, never fully jumping into the depths of Java, Python, or even C++, though I have spent some time trying to kindle something resembling a working relationship with them.
Lets fast forward to 2014, hired on at a very large pipe fabrication company for the oil and gas sector, this is where I was introduced to AHK. During the interview process it was made clear to me what my role was to be and that was to take over some of the applications developed by former employee's, one of the main ones being written in AHK. I had zero working knowledge of AHK, but by the time I started my first day of work I had written three or four small applications and had a good foundation of the language. I ended up creating dozens of small applications to increase productivity and reduce the occurrence of human errors, as well as saving several large projects by creating tools to parse and modify the data inside some of the data files the client would send us.
By late 2017 I'd left this first company and joined another well known company, same field, working with a lot of the same people, and I brought my knowledge of AHK with me. I began making a few applications but soon teamed up with an actual developer and was able to start practicing in C#. Love at first successful compile, I was finally using a real language, and I didn't want to stop.....really, I would continue coding far into the night, often in my free time, developing tools for my role, with the goal of making my job easier.
The two tools you see in the projects page are passion projects of mine, I've since given them to the company for free, but those show the progress of my coding skill. I started on the Item Upload Tool very soon after starting to learn C#, and I'm so proud of it, it connects to several SQL tables, performs a lot of calculations and generates many useful reports that we use downstream. The software has replaced the vast majority of every single process we had to do manually in the role I was in. It has allowed our team to remain relatively small and even take over a few other roles from across the company. During its 4 years of use, there has been only1 bug found by a team member and every update I push would get a very thorough check prior. Near the end of my role with that company I developed the Material Take off Report processor, this application takes a very ugly report that we run almost daily to get a list of materials from a client that we then purchase. It then cleans up the report, does some linking up with SQL tables for checks, some math to convert quantities adds a certain percentage for scrap and exports a really pretty report that we then upload into another application.
I am still with the same company, only performing a new role now, and I'm only just getting my feet wet with some smaller AHK apps to increase productivity, about 14 so far, but once I get everything a little more lined up I plan to develop a clean all in one application in C#.
No comments:
Post a Comment