Income Change Calculator: How I Learned to Code
Over 25 years ago, I shifted my career from an industrial electrician to an analyst. While I had already accumulated a ton of networking and PC experience and had to periodically program PLCs, I didn’t have any experience with modern development languages. Modern programming languages utilize new paradigms like object-oriented, procedural, or functional programming. They use text-based syntax with keywords, operators, and punctuation.
One of my tasks as an analyst was processing pay information for our full-time and part-time staff. Every month, this resulted in approximately 100 documents where I had to calculate their hourly, weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, semi-annual, and annual pay, along with any changes. I realized this was the perfect opportunity to automate this, so I first built a spreadsheet. Then, I decided to build an actual database using Microsoft Access where we could record the employees and their changes.
While that worked well, it wasn’t easily accessible by all management staff. I needed to learn how to integrate the Access Database with an Intranet web page using ASP. This was really my first dive into object-oriented programming, and I enjoyed learning how to build it, host it, and provide authenticated access to the data for our staff.
This income change calculator has stuck with me. I redevelop and launch the solution whenever I wish to learn a new language or web technology. I’ve written it in JavaScript, C++, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, FoxPro, and even Python.
Income Change Calculator
Because it was such a useful tool and there were a ton of searches for how to calculate a pay raise, I launched the calculator online using PHP and AJAX.
Need to calculate your income change after a pay increase or pay decrease? Here’s the tool online!
