The REPORT CODES : The Teacher's Story
Greg Gray

I teach in a school district in southern california. In the fall when the district office went to print report cards for the entire district, it didn't work. Who did they call for help? A fifteen year old sophomore, named Tolga Tarhan who came in, wrote a few lines of code and it worked like a charm.

The REPORT CODES : The Student's Story
Tolga Tarhan

I'm a 15 year old sophomore living in Orange County, California. I've been working for my school district in Southern California for 2 years now. Doing everything from fixing dialup modems to making web pages and programing.

This fall they were using a program written by a consultant to generate the Semester report cards. It failed, the program spit out blank pages of paper and everything was misaligned, the gpa calculations were also off.

The employees of the Information Services Department, knowing that I knew perl, which is what the program was written in, called the Vice Principal at my school. The vice principal then met me at my Math Class and took me to a phone, where I called work and asked what was up. They told me the delema and after Math I went to the district office. I already knew the person who wrote this program couldnt write perl worth anything, and I was right. The perl code was sloppy and hard to understand.

But, after about 20 minutes of reading his horrible code I found about 5 or so problems other then the ones the district had already told me. I fixed all the problems and the report cards went out that same night.