I started working in my first office job at the start of 2009. There were quite a few repetitive computer tasks going on and I felt there must be a better way to do some of the things being done. There was one job in particular where somebody would spend a couple of hours each week copying addresses from an Excel spreadsheet after looking up VAT numbers in another. I was able to write a script to automate this and as a result the two-hour-a-week job now only takes two minutes.

A lot of the things that I write are written in AutoHotkey. Designed primarily for automating keystrokes and mouse clicks it’s also a pretty powerful (yet incredibly simple) scripting language for Windows with an active community on its forums. As well as the already mentioned keystrokes and mouse clicks it can also be used to generate simple UIs, read and write text files and the Windows registry, parse strings, loop through files and folders and many other things. Extra libraries are available in the forums thanks to various fantastic people that add support for things such as accessing COM interfaces and the Windows GDI. For a simple language it is capable of quite a bit and is my go-to language for quick jobs.

I have also recently started to learn Python and am really liking it. Pretty much anything is possible and it is a pleasure to write in.