What a great story - thank you for your service, and for sharing!
I have a much, much less impressive story, but maybe someone will find it interesting: I was working at a military library as a civilian, and I automated repetitive parts of our workflow to add books to WorldCat using Autohotkey (We added books to WorldCat so other libraries could request them). I also came up with the idea of using our barcode scanners to check books out to people using a Word document - our library database at the time was slow, far away, and went down regularly. Up till then, no one had realized that you could scan bar codes into a document.
Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the automation I did was unauthorized; there was a shakeup that had to do with misuse of CAC cards, and as part of that, my scripts were discovered and I lost my job.
Still, I think that kindled an interest in programming, and I now hack away happily at personal projects.
I have a much, much less impressive story, but maybe someone will find it interesting: I was working at a military library as a civilian, and I automated repetitive parts of our workflow to add books to WorldCat using Autohotkey (We added books to WorldCat so other libraries could request them). I also came up with the idea of using our barcode scanners to check books out to people using a Word document - our library database at the time was slow, far away, and went down regularly. Up till then, no one had realized that you could scan bar codes into a document.
Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the automation I did was unauthorized; there was a shakeup that had to do with misuse of CAC cards, and as part of that, my scripts were discovered and I lost my job. Still, I think that kindled an interest in programming, and I now hack away happily at personal projects.