How to Program While at the Help Desk

Post #9

Date: 7/13 - 7/17

Activities: Programming a Hard Drive Failure Warning System

Technical Information: SAS Data Integration Studios

Reflection: You can't actually program while working for the help desk. However, Vicki was able to talk to Cameron's manager about having me help assist Cameron on a side project that his manager gave him. Here's the general lowdown: SAS used to have a system where they would scan all of the hard drives that were registered to the company and were connected to a certain hub. The machines would check in everyday and the program would detect when hard drives were about to go bad. Well after a system update, the old program no longer worked and was put out of commission. Seeing as how this would be a relatively simple project, just meticulous and conceptually time-consuming, they threw the project of recreating a new program using SAS Data Integration Studios (DIS) to Cameron and then eventually to me as well. Having been already stuck at the Help Desk for more than a month now, I was more than eager to have a change of pace. I was unfamiliar with DIS so my job was to come up with the abstraction and have Cameron code most of the program.

It turned out that this simple project was a whole lot harder than I had originally thought. We were given no requirements or parameters, we could make the program as elaborate or as drab as we wanted. This level of ambiguity threw me off in the beginning and we spent countless hours coming up with different design plans that we could use. We would often go down a certain path, and realize that the plan had a weakness in it, then toss it out and return to square one, the basics of what we were given. It also didn't help that I was unfamiliar with the programming interface (it was picture and data-table based), so I wasn't sure of the limitations or boundaries of the program, making it harder to figure out how I would go about coming up with a good warning system. After countless moments of brainstorming and starting over, we finally came up with something. There are four codes that are related to hard drive failure. We focused on one that was most related to an unresponsive hard drive. We devised a program where it would read in the specific error code of all the machines that checked into the system and count how many times that error occurred. We had three different levels of severity: Good, Moderate, and Severe. Our program would automatically email the owner of the computer if they reached the moderate or severe stage and also the hardware team to give them a heads up about possibly replacing the drive. It was amazing to watch Cameron put all of our ideas into a giant program with seemingly endless merging and extracting amongst data sets and email automation. I felt so happy when they shortly started using our program just days after Cameron had finished the programming (he deserves way more of the credit).

I didn't experience very many frustrations during my time at SAS because everyone was so darn friendly and helpful. One of the few frustrations I experienced I described above, but the satisfaction of being able to come up with something that useful and actually be implemented overcame the feelings of frustrations that I had prior to coming up with a successful solution. I also sometimes felt helpless when tickets would come in and wouldn't know how to deal with them. The way I dealt with these adversities was just to continue to persevere and to keep trying new things. If I ran into something I didn't know how to do, I would ask someone. I grew much more comfortable at asking questions when before I would have been more hesitant/scared to ask so many times. I'm glad I did so, I was able to learn and grow so much and glean much more from the internship than I would have if I didn't go out my comfort zone of being complacent in sub-optimal conditions

 An outdoor chess set, each piece is about knee height!

Our brainstorming whiteboard