Yes. And this is in a company where many other people are programmers.<p>If you are in a corporate environment surrounded by people who don'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.<p>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've even seen people summing numbers together with a calculator and then typing the sum into an spreadsheet because they didn't know about formulas in Excel. That knowledge could free up at least an hour of that person's time per day, which really adds up over many years on the job.<p>Not everyone needs to actually be a hacker, but everyone who's even remotely curious about programming should learn some basic skills in order to automate tasks and make oneself more productive, if nothing else.
This is great. I wish more business analysts had this mentality of "it's faster to learn it myself than wait for a developer." That's a quality to look for when hiring.
I find it sad when someone talks about "learning to making things" as if he had discovered the moon. Humans have been "making things" since the dawn of times out of necessity. Going through life without the need to "make things" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
""Before I could actually make things, I felt like an outsider – who was I to provide advice to these people who actually made things?""<p>This is so true specially when you are working with an amazing team.
<i>Six or seven weeks after I started...</i><p>What exactly were you doing for 6-7 weeks? If you know MatLab & R as well as you claim, I'm hard-pressed to believe that <i>all</i> you accomplished was one git commit, one git clone, and some copying and pasting.<p>EDIT: My point being... he was already a "maker" -- just not using web technologies.
A little meta, but this design makes it hard to comment on posts! I spent about a minute trying to find the comments section, which is a click away, as opposed to a simple scroll.