I'm curious to know, what was the first problem you've encountered, but solved through programming?

For me, since I'm a writer, I try to complete one random writing prompt a day.

However, I always have trouble deciding which one I should do. So, I created a prompt generator in Python.

Whenever I run the program it would display a random prompt.

First (for me at that time) big one: I wanted a music player in which I could type a song name, press enter and it would play it right away!

Couldn't find it so I fucking wrote it.

Felt like a fucking God afterwards!

@linuxxx That's why I want to be a programmer. I want to be able to make the things I need in my life lol

I had this boring job of basically converting PDF files to XML (manually).
At some point, I figured that I could try to automate stuff... And an couple of days (or weeks) later, this giant script cut my work time into half, which made for a decent student job salary :-D
This was my first real problem solving program I guess.

In my youth I was a big fan of flight sims and space flight sims. I played a space flight simulator called Orbiter for the longest time and eventually I got interested in the rocket science behind it.

So I did what most first time programmers do and wrote a calculator app. Except this app would calculate launch azimuths. And since then I've made a career out of software developer.

I really liked watching this guy's stream on Twitch, but would always forget to tune in, so I made a Cron job that would open his stream at the scheduled time.

@linuxxx where is that program? Assuming that it's, obviously, Libre or at least OpenSource 😉🤔

I used to have an excel spreadsheet that I would use to have an overview of my finances, but I also wanted it to have the option of giving a future projection. Whenever I start a project, I use a different excel spreadsheet to list all the expenses and the expected financial gain from the project. I made a (very bad) program that imports both those excel files and I could select different projects, when I wanted to do them and then see how they will affect my personal finance. It could even show a line graph with future projection. I don't use it anymore because it had too many issues (for example it sometimes messed up which cell of the spreadsheet to use as "final balance" because it sometimes changed due to the list geting longer)

@DLMousey
Wow, that's rough. Those guys made a mistake by firing you.