If you found this site via some sort of Google search, you’re probably looking for answers. I won’t get to that now, but I will warn you that I don’t have them. If you’re a friend or colleague of mine you will have let out at bit of a laugh and settled into your chair with every intent of hating what I’m about to write. Well, I’m glad.
In industrial technology applications we often see projects and ideas labelled with ideas that spark value to other techies. Terms like ‘robust”, ‘quality’, ‘efficient’, and, to a lesser degree, ‘boffo’. Far less often do we see technology simply described in terms of ease of use. In fact, I would say it’s downright rare to hear of any steam-powered, hard-left engineers bringing up usability or learning curve when drafting a system designs or applications. Just like football players are interested in beer chugging and cheerleaders, I guess engineers into database normalization and load-balancers.
So what happens when you take that out of the equation? What happens when you take away the pomp and circumstance, when you lose the beer and the cheerleaders? Well, then you have football or, in this case, engineering. Take away the sex appeal of massive, scalable availability and mind-boggling complexity; what are you left with? It’s not frequent, sure, but it happens eventually. You’ve got problem solving, pure and simple. Simple calculations, exercises, tasks, and duties. Sometimes football players have practice, they run drills, lift weights, and sell pizza coupons. Well it’s no different for engineers.
Enter Microsoft Access.
I’m serious, although this is quite a leap (move with me here, I’m trying to keep this short). Access has never, in its entire existence as a RDBMS, won any championship football games, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great tool. It’s the football practice dummy and the barbell and the coupon book, but all of this for engineers. Just like them, we’ve got to do the boss’ laundry and earn our keep. We architect the big solutions, sure, but what about the little stuff? What about the parts inventory for the warehouse? What about the customer contact that the boss does once a week and notes in his journal? There’s also that email list that you share information on, but people keep asking the same questions every year or so and nobody keeps any of the information recorded anywhere? What about office supply orders that Debbie does once a week? It’s all little stuff.
Three times, in three different positions, I’ve used Access (or other simple data management tools) to bridge a gap or improve a process that was being done poorly or not-at-all. Each of these times it’s been a task that I volunteered for, and each time I’ve received more recognition than all of my ‘big picture’ work combined. I didn’t choose Access because it’s fast or robust or sexy (as it is clearly none of these things), but it is definitely quick and easy and portable, not to mention the availability across most corporate IT spaces. It’s not designed to track Walmart’s inventory, but it does get the job done. After all, who cares about an 18% performance increase on the security log queries when I have this nifty iPhone app that lets me keep track of what I eat every day? Okay, maybe that’s silly, but it’s all little stuff. And the reason it makes a difference is because it effects people.
I’m a proud Access developer. It’s not my day job, and I’m glad for that, but it’s an amazing tool. I pledge to volunteer my services to help improve the processes and daily work of people on whom I rely. I’m also going to use it as a ‘gateway database’; I’ll use it to get into American homes and get kids and adults to try harder stuff like MySQL, Linq, Rails, and Hibernate. But for Dad’s big list of home electronic serial numbers, Timmy’s baseball card collection, and small project CRM…well, I’m on board. Who knows? Maybe even the Microsoft or the EPA will use it.
*Remember: a good developer is an active developer. Please stop engineering for engineering’s sake; it’s not healthy. Put your skills to some good use and fix something or teach someone (or vice-versa).
