Business Is the Heart of Software

"Algebra is like sheet music—the important question isn’t whether you can read notes, it’s whether you can hear the music. Can you hear it, Robert?" — quoting Niels Bohr in Oppenheimer (2023)

Most engineers don’t hear the music of a business domain. Their reliance on focus groups and usability tests is proof they are guessing what users need. People living the work every day already know the tune.

When domain experts hand their knowledge to programmers, vital details are blurred—like the game of Telephone.

“To translate is to betray.”

This warning about literary translation fits business‑to‑tech hand‑offs. Precision, nuance, and context drift; fidelity drops. A financial analyst instinctively knows 14% inflation won’t coexist with 10‑year Treasuries at 1%. A typical engineer may not. Invalid business assumptions built into software by engineers may lie undetected for a long time.

The rich "web of knowledge" encoded into the minds of business analysts confers a SUPREME ADVANTAGE which cannot be replicated with LLMs. However, technical errors manifest immediately and most often can be resolved by LLMs.

Write the code yourself and erase the translation cost.

"Software development is a learning process; working code is a side effect." — Alberto Brandolini

Good software is business-alignment first, code second.

The Value Equation

[Value of Software] = [Real‑world usefulness] × [Number of people helped]

Our stance: put every chip on usefulness. A tightly‑focused tool that saves your team hours beats a generic app aimed at the masses. Security headaches fade too—the Add‑in runs locally inside Excel, exactly where your data already lives.

Why Business Analysts Aren’t Already Coding

1. The Syntax Tax

One missing semicolon can stop a program cold. Hunting that typo steals hours that should have gone towards solve business problems. This harsh binary kept domain experts out.

2. IT Gatekeeping

Most firms lock down Python or Node installations, but Excel macros get a pass—too many critical workbooks depend on VBA. The door is open; few walk through.

3. VBA’s Reputation—and Time Cost

Reputation. Developers mock VBA for lacking technical comforts like decorators, short‑circuit evaluation, and true multithreading. In practice, none of these block everyday automation.

Time. Building apps with raw VBA means writing piles of boilerplate. Our Add‑in removes that drudgery—CRUD helpers, validation, plumbing—so you spend time on business logic. Bugs will appear (that’s where learning lives), but the return on effort flips from negative to strongly positive.

Why Business Analysts Should Be Coding

Internal Tools Are Forgiving—and Fun

Your users care about results, not pixel perfection. Ship early, iterate fast, skip design bike-sheds. What happens after a button is clicked is infinitely more important than the color or font of its caption.

Code Expands Thought

“The limits of your language are the limits of your world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Coding is a mental model. It primes your mind to generate ideas. We refer to the combination of business and coding know-how, in one mind, as fusion.

Our central gamble is that unlocking fusion at scale will result in an explosion of hyper-useful, hyper-cool software.

Accelerate Learning

Skip Half the Textbook

You’re not wiring the New York Stock Exchange. Skip memory management, micro‑services, and crypto math. Nail the basics—loops, conditionals, and converting business rules into classes. You are building a golf cart, not the Battlestar Galactica..

Leverage drives Dopamine

Using code to build an application responsive to the needs of your team is deeply gratifying. Code creates a form of leverage similar to bicycle gears. Experiencing technical leverage first-hand is exciting. Crafting pragmatic tools that immediately touch the lives of other humans stimulates a dopamine frenzy.

Iteration drives Retention

It is empirically known human minds are wired to forget. And also that spaced repetition, or revisiting what you learned last week, dramatically increases retention.

Your teammates will invariably provide feedback: "damn, look here — I get an error whenever the data is missing zip code" — forcing you to revisit earlier code. This is a natural form of spaced repetition. And it will crystallize knowledge in your brain.

A hallmark of junior engineers is they produce short-sighted, brittle, and confusing code. This is a direct reflection of the fact they never had to live with their own decisions. They simply march forward to the next textbook, the next course.

Learning to code with "live rounds" forces one to confront the consequences of earlier design choices. The pain of maintaining your own spaghetti is a powerful teacher. The scar tissue accumulated over time transforms theoretical knowledge into instinctual expertise in ways classroom learning never can.

Online Tutorial Suck

Contrast "live rounds" with learning to program a toy "rocker paper scissors game" on CodeAcademy. That's boring, pedantic, and utterly useless. And you never revisit the code. The corresponding dopamine response is weak, and retention is poor.

The bumpy wagon ride of stealth VBA applications is a more fun, and effective, avenue for learning practical principles that matter.

Campfire Stories Beat Credentials

The best storyteller at the fire isn’t the one with ten‑dollar words, it’s the one who lived the tale. Likewise, the best software comes from people who feel the pain they’re automating. Your business knowledge is the story; code is the microphone. Pick it up and the room will listen.