Here at Conglomerated Golden Handcuffs 'R Us Ltd, I have the skull-splitting task of translating hypertechnical database, scripting, and code requirements into standard American business English. I've been doing it for awhile, and can usually just cut-and-paste snippets from memory, and, like a vast colon (heh), break down dense technobabble into digestible brain bites.
Like any job, once you master the shortcuts and tricks (what gamers call "cheats"), work becomes more like play. For instance (and shake a geek stick at me if you need to), I have a knack for the spiky line dance of sentence diagrams - my high school comp teacher woke me to the same cool feeling with diagramming as Mom did with Scrabble. They can be more satisfying than crosswords, if you know what you're doing; plus they keep my English mechanics chops all axle greasy.
But every once in awhile, developers barf up blocks of content that make my train of thought jump track:
The product should allow filtered query of the messages + messageArgs by partially ETL'ing the message data by means of a background process (like blockstoreunhexer) that left joins from messages to the translated tables (new tables by lang or not, containing the 'final form' messages), uses that as the "todo list", and final-form-s the translations into the read-tables for filtered querying.
And if it weren't for the elegant utility of the sentence diagram, it'd take hours to sort subject from object from banana peel.
Feel free to point out my errors: that took me ten minutes to create longhand, and about 30 minutes to transpose with Dia. About half the time it took to write this post.
