I would appreciate you read this, it is a bit wordy and maybe not suited for this sub-forum. Please let me know if this is the case. There is code review but it's rather lengthy to post directly here so there is a link to download the workbook.
I started working in a sales role with a small family run wholesaler nearly 10 years ago. They soon realised that I could do a great deal more than just sales because I was leaps and bounds better than any of them with computers. (I have had one since 1992 – you just get good at something when you use it every day). Soon enough the jobs were piling up all over the place and I just didn’t have the time to do it all myself, I turned to excel, which I had used before but had never had the need to master in the past. I realised the old adage rang true “Work smarter not harder” and excel helped me accomplish this but I still had more jobs than I could chew and needed to find better ways to streamline my work and give me the upper hand.
I learned you could use excel to RECORD tasks and play them back in excel, how amazing is this, it was a lightbulb moment for me, I squirreled away for months automating my tasks to some degree just solely recording macros with no programming knowledge and no idea of what the code meant, I chopped and changed it into a somewhat coherent mess of functions that I was using a daily basis to speed up my workflow. Then I realised that this can’t be it. This can’t be the limits of what excel can do…
I started researching VBA and integrating small chunks of it into my work, slowly learning from my mistakes, writing and rewriting code until it worked. Slowly gaining traction day by day learning at home in my spare time, from books and online resources. I’ve reached a point where I think I'm fairly good at it.
But now I need some help!
I’ve now hit an inspiration roadblock and don’t know what to do or where to turn, I don’t know if I should keep working away with VBA or move on, I’ve had a dabble with VB.net, python, r & others and I seem to pick it all up very quickly.
I’m also bored at work, I feel undervalued, underappreciated and overqualified for my position, and I’ve got no further up the ladder I can go (being a small company there is only a few rungs). I want to be a full time programmer and not someone who just puts the knowledge to use for his own personal gain.
I lack the confidence to apply for jobs relating to VBA, and I don’t even know if I am technically any good. I’ve got no friends in the profession & only have the opinions of my office to go by (but some struggle to turn a pc on).
I need some motivation, some guidance and some direction, so I’ve been working on a genetic algorithm to calculate the travelling salesman problem, to showcase what I can do. I've used all the tricks in my arsenal to try and impress.
I’m looking for someone to have a look over it and give me your honest opinion of my code, let me know your thoughts either way, good or bad.
You can download it here. http://%22http//www.schipshop…20V1.15.xlsm%22 or see the attachment to this post.
Any comments would be appreciated, any idea on what I should do next, where I should go from here or what I should focus on? Anything you can offer would be amazing for me.
Thanks
Lewis