Programming Revisited

After my first couple of posts I spent some time thinking about some of the things I might want to write about. My mind wandered in all sorts of directions including things I would want to make a record of now that my son is getting to that exploratory stage in his life. I think for my own sake, it's in some way beneficial to me to record some of the things I've done and experienced so that he can have a lasting understanding of his dad that he can read or turn back to anytime he wishes. I've done so much in my life so far and I've gotten kind of worn on the social media thing that blogging seems to just make more sense.

Today I was thinking about going through some of my old college programming projects and see if I can capture those results in a form that might make some sense to him or maybe even inspire him to learn to program on his own. As I flipped through my old class files, I came across the Visual Basic programs I wrote. It took me a while to remember that I used Visual Studio IDE to create them. To collect the screenshots for the code, I had to install the program which, thankfully, is free.

I haven't done any serious programming since college for a variety of reasons but primarily because it consumes a lot of time and I haven't felt inspired to spend that much time indoors tied to a computer like I used to. For some odd reason though, God has moved me to revisit those skills I once spent so much time developing. Maybe He wants me to look back on the things I have accomplished or maybe He has some other reason for me to be going in this direction? Either way, this is not something I've really planned out for anything but something I felt compelled to revisit at an entirely new point in my life.

This program is actually very simple. It includes a drop-down menu that allows for selection of an appliance. Then, input the values in the provided fields and it calculates the cost to run that unit. Add the calculation to the sum field to the right and it totals everything together. It can also throw errors for improper input as well as clear the fields to start over. Not overly complicated, but a good exercise program for learning how to use the IDE and developing program structure and flow.