We had a big problem at my Job with employee contact information listing. Microsoft Server has this thing called Active Directory, that stores all kinds of contact information, but in order to edit the thing you have to be logged in as an administrator. In order to sort of get around this problem, we had another directory that was just an excel spreadsheet floating around. If you wanted someone’s contact information, you could check the excel spreedsheet, or look in your outlook contacts, which was kind of related to the active directory thing.
I started looking into this and found a python module that let python connect to Active Directory. After a bit of screwing with it, I got it to work and talked to my boss about creating my own program to access the directory and make changes, so that we could let other people make active directory changes without having them go through us. He said ‘OK’ and I began cranking out code. I’d never done much with Tk so I learned a bit of that, and got started. I had just gotten to the point where you could enter a name to search for, and it would get a list of all the results, when Adam told me he’d found a solution online. It does everything my little program was going to do, but with much more ease and style.
I felt sad as I closed my text editor, knowing I could finish this program but now there’d be no point in doing so.