Your Problem is My Field Day

I love to solve problems. It makes me feel good inside my head.

Years ago, I was working as a Japanese document translator. Usually I would translate from Japanese to English, but sometimes I would translate from English to Japanese. I was a bit out of my depth, but I needed the money.

A Problem is an Opportunity for Innovation

One day I got an assignment. A transliteration assignment. I was one of a number of language professionals working on this project. The rules that we were supposed to use to conduct the transliteration were very specific. So I decided, rather than doing the transliteration by hand, I would write a Python script to do the work for me. It opened the input files, iterated over each line in the file applying the rules, and output the results in the file format that the client required.

Quality Service Means Happy Customer

The result was that my work deliverables were deemed to be of the highest quality, because I followed the stipulated rules perfectly. Rather, I wrote the script to follow the rules perfectly, and it worked for me perfectly every time. The customer was very happy with my deliverables, and I only wish that there was more work to do.

Sky is the Limit

This was just the beginning, and I sincerely believe that there are no problems where computerization cannot reduce the amount of labour required, while raising the quality of the work product and offering the gift of reproducibility.

Reproducibility and Design Thinking

It is not the computerisation _per se_, but it is such things as the reproducibility and the design thinking that radically increase the efficiency and quality of the work output. If you have a problem, I can put computers to work for you.