<story><title>Why I learned to &quot;make things&quot;</title><url>http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3370-why-i-learned-to-make-things</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kyllo</author><text>Yes. And this is in a company where many other people are programmers.&lt;p&gt;If you are in a corporate environment surrounded by people who don&apos;t know how to write code, or even barely know how to use Excel, it cannot be overstated how valuable a basic knowledge of even something like VBA, and a little SQL, can make you.&lt;p&gt;I started learning to program because I was tired of being faced with the same business problems and productivity drags over and over again. Like being asked to log into a legacy system, look up some performance numbers, copy/paste them into a spreadsheet and e-mail it to management. I&apos;ve even seen people summing numbers together with a calculator and then typing the sum into an spreadsheet because they didn&apos;t know about formulas in Excel. That knowledge could free up at least an hour of that person&apos;s time per day, which really adds up over many years on the job.&lt;p&gt;Not everyone needs to actually be a hacker, but everyone who&apos;s even remotely curious about programming should learn some basic skills in order to automate tasks and make oneself more productive, if nothing else.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why I learned to &quot;make things&quot;</title><url>http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3370-why-i-learned-to-make-things</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>diego</author><text>I find it sad when someone talks about &quot;learning to making things&quot; as if he had discovered the moon. Humans have been &quot;making things&quot; since the dawn of times out of necessity. Going through life without the need to &quot;make things&quot; is a relatively recent phenomenon.</text></comment>