
Ask HN: Update My Dad - bhollan
So my dad got a computer engineering degree back in the punch card days and ran his own business as a &quot;computer consultant&quot; since the early 90s up until he went to prison for 14 years starting in 2007 and gets out next March (his crime was not computer-related). He mainly used MS Access to develop on-prem apps for small businesses. What [printed] materials can I send to him to update him to modern times before he gets out?  I&#x27;m sure he can catch up after release, but he&#x27;s obviously got a lot more time on his hands now, but no computing access.<p>Also, any ex-con-in-tech related advice is welcome.
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julesallen
Access is still around, still hanging on by one finger in some orgs (search
your favorite news aggregator for whimsical stories). So there may be an
opportunity for somebody with decent knowledge of the Access pitfalls to offer
a service getting clients into modern times.

Is he allowed books (defining your scope of 'printed')? They'd be so much
better than printing a web site.

Becoming a Google Apps consultant might be a good route and get him going
quickly. Knowing how to take a company's workflow into Docs, Sheets, etc., is
as much methodology as it is tech and code. If he's got good people skills,
can see flow at a higher level, this requires very little to get started. The
docs are pretty decent but I don't know how many pages this will take to print
[https://developers.google.com/apps-
script/overview](https://developers.google.com/apps-script/overview)

For something more technical, perhaps take a look at the django project's
docs.
[https://www.djangoproject.com/start/](https://www.djangoproject.com/start/)

It's going to take some work to get things set up and there's a lot of stuff
that's going to be scary new.

But with minimal tweaking it offers a really decent admin interface that's
relatively easy to customize and apply input rules, just like an Access
database.

Python is relatively easy for BASIC programmers to pick up and loops, decision
logic, that kind of thing is directly translatable with very little learning.

I got started professionally with dBase back in the dark ages, jumping from
amateur BASIC on a Commodore PET. If he's inquisitive, hungry, determined, and
willing to put in the hours there's a journey to getting current again.

Good luck to your dad and I hope you get some useful advice from this thread.

~~~
bhollan
I like the "Rescue us from Access" angle. That has good promise. He's never
written a line of JavaScript in his life, so I doubt he'll want to do App
Scripts, but that's another good one. Thanks.

------
blacksqr
A COBOL textbook.

~~~
bhollan
He probably knew COBOL at one point. He used to write in FoxPro for the
longest time. He had an old CompuServe email before we got Juno. My first
email was tagged on with his Juno account in the late 90s.

