I have invested in improving my coding ability over the years without really knowing what the pay-off would be. I really started it just as a challenge to learn something new. Lately, though I really feel like my coding has increased my productivity in my day job (Aerospace engineering/program management) in ways that I did not foresee.

First, it helps me process and use much more data than I could have otherwise. I can take data from nearly any source, in any format, and transform it into another format. I don’t have to ask people for a data in some specific format, and I can take data from different sources and bring them together into one. Data that might otherwise have never been used, or never been joined with related data now gets looked at and used. Particular data that I process with code and includes large output from SAP like time charges to get project histories or exporting xml files from MS Project to integrate project plans with other data.

I also increasingly find code useful to communicate. A post of mine from the past describes a note taking app that I created a few years ago. It allows me to take notes as text files and quickly post them to a web site to share. I continue to find that tool very useful. I also use the javascript library D3 to share data in ways that would be impossible with the standard excel plots or even other plotting packages in python or js.