The recession hit while I was in undergrad and my incredibly pragmatic and risk-averse self prioritized finding a job, any job, above all else. Given my business school background I was lucky to land a job on Wall Street, more specifically clearing trades for listed derivatives like Live Cattle.

Working on the operations side of the business, employees were rewarded for automating their jobs away. But this was a large, highly regulated, public bank and many internal resources were tightly controlled — I distinctly remember being denied Sharepoint developer access when I wanted to automate something like Gantt chart updates 😢.

The one tool that was universally available was Microsoft Excel. You would be shocked by the amount of the financial industry that’s being held together by fragile spreadsheets developed and maintained by 20 year old investment banking interns.

We had Excel programs that would calculate hundred-million-dollar cross broker payments with ...