About Me

"Self-learning ability is the ability to set goals and solve unfamiliar and challenging tasks. The desire to take on a new challenge is fostered in you because you feel a sense of accomplishment in your daily life."

This is something I found on the Internet, that almost perfectly applies to me (and maybe to you?). Programing was not something I learned in school but something I picked up during my work. Naturally I got hooked and took a deep dive into Computer Science to learn more about this subject, sacrificing my own free time along the way and not regretting it even to this day.

Ever since I was a child, my way of thinking was almost pure logical. As it goes, logical tasks were easier for me, while literature was just a pain. A funny thing was, which I only realized later in my life, that my literature teacher always put me in her advanced class. She loved my interpretations of poems and readings, even if she disagreed with them. Well, to each his own.

Looking back at it, she might just wanted to hear my logical explanations of this things, but anyway.

I learned machine engineering for 10 years after leaving elementary school, which was during high school, technical school and later at University which I had to abort 3 years in, due to financial issues. That is when I started to work in IT and learning about programing.

At the beginning I only worked at the service desk, where I answered calls from German and English speaking customers (sometimes Dutch). From there I climbed the ladder to Level 2 and finally as a Software Distribution Engineer L2. This is the position where I got introduced to my very first scripting language: VBScript

Next to SCCM I got the assignment to manage Group Policy, and with that came logon/startup scripts. Those scripts (hundreds of them) where all written in VBScript and I did not understand those. As you might have guessed from the first 2 sentences on this page, I sat down and learned it by practicing. As most of you, I too started with the famous "Hello World" line, and since this scripting language is not that difficult to master, I got a grasp of it pretty quickly.

So, I finally understood what the logon/startup scripts did and documented them all, which came in handy later on when we did a cleanup. So here's a good example why to document your work.

Of course this wasn't just about reading scripts, but to write them as well. Some were to make a 5 hour work be done in 5 minutes, or to automate some basic tasks, generating reports etc.

I had a problem with this language however! They were not that easy to handle for others since they required the opening and changing of variables. Even if we worked with input files, those still were not that user friendly. So I turned to OOP and to VB.NET to try to solve this (yes, I choose it because of VBScript just to not strafe away from the syntaxes).

My first programs developed in Visual Studio included an Active Directory search tool that gave the selected properties of AD Objects (User, Computer or Groups) back into a grid with headers, that was in a report ready format (copy-paste done).

The next was a Security Group membership updater (a modified version can be found on this site), since we used group-based software distribution. Adding several computers or users to one or more groups was always a pain in AD. This one was my most popular tool btw.

Just to mention a few more others, there was my Multi Ping Tool, where the results also went into a grid (again report ready but mostly used for troubleshooting to check availability) or a program that runs variable dependent scripts, but in a user friendly interface with a drop-down menu for all the scripts to be selected from and text boxes with labels which changed its text depending on which script got selected.
So, even with a simple OOP language like Visual Basic and a good IDE like Visual Studio, you can create simple, yet amazing tools.

Speaking of "reports" just a few sentences back, there was a language which I learned paralel to vbscript, namely T-SQL. We were running queries directly from SQL Management Studio to create reports but I couldn't just run something without understanding it, so I started studying this as well.

For some reason SQL felt just natural to me. I learned it relatively fast, and just like that, wrote reports for everybody, updated existing ones (optimized them) and even created queries for the entire SCCM environment making User- and Computer based distribution for example possible with a single security group for each application/advertisement.
I think of SQL in programing as the English language in general: its a very useful language that you should know, even if its just the basics.
Because of that I teach SQL on occasions or while I'm mentoring. It is always good to see if someone understands its usefulness

Next I got to work with a totally different tool, namely Altiris. I had seen this tool during my service desk days, but not really up close. The environment which I was left with was a disaster, nothing documented, tickets which were a year old and so on. Since I had the affinity to learn things very quickly and my problem solving skill were outstanding...

Oh yes, I never mentioned my problem solving skills, but as you might have guessed, I'm pretty good in solving very difficult cases. This resulted in regular compliments, bonuses, employee of the month awards and being pestered by others non-stop :) which is where I need to express that I'm not self-centered but very helpful, very open minded and someone who is easy to get along with. I also have the super power to make friends very easily, because for some reason everybody always trusts me right from the get-go. This is something I cannot understand to this day, its just like that.

Getting back to were I was, I got a difficult customer and an environment that was in ruins.