Thank you Autohotkey!

[Sergio]

Ten years ago this forum helped turned me from a young sapling into a programmer. People used to yell RTFM a lot more in those days but I lived by that damn documentation and it made all of the difference.

Today, a decade later, I was adding a portion of the site where I pay tribute to the open source software in the stack (http://hlx.co/st/). While I didn't write it there, I thought I had to say it here; this community helped me get the career that I never thought I could get. Not just as a programmer but as an entrepreneur.

Sincerely, thank you!

[Capn Odin]

That's great, I'm interested to know what part of ahk if any you turned into a career ?

[joedf]

Haven't seen a post from you in so long!

[Sergio]

That's great, I'm interested to know what part of ahk if any you turned into a career ?

It's helped in probably more ways that I can list. But to give you some idea:

* Prior to AHK I wrote in HTML & some actionscript. So the bulk of all of my programming knowledge came from AHK. Even if I'm mostly applying those principles in Python today, they were learned here.

* I still use AHK to make UIs today. Most of my work is serverside & automation so the UI just needs to be a platform to convey information or collect new data. I suppose I should be using VB, but up until now it's allowed me to leverage the same results without the investment of learning a new language.

* Lastly - and most importantly - I use AHK in projects where other languages fall short or when the timetable to produce a result is ASAP and working in AHK would shave even as little as an hour off the result.

* * Integrating disparate software that do not integrate otherwise. IE a software with a UI & no reasonable means of importing/exporting data

* * Creating disposable software. These tend to be tiny tasks where if the programming time is greater than an hour, it's just not worth it. So a software that pings a site, checks for a criteria and alerts the user about the current criteria would be a prime example. Though I understand that this level of hyper-bootstrapping isn't so common outside of ecommerce.

* * Creating software which maximizes a person's time. Sometimes that entails just mimicking a point & click process to turn a 5 minute task, repeated all day, into a 30 second, no-thinking task.