As a developer, you get to work on pretty interesting topics. Most of the time, I would say. Not always. There are things that a developer is asked to do that can not be seen as interesting. Behind those boring things can be opportunities.
Wording is one of them. Changing text inside an application is a tedious and boring process. And because of that, it's also error-prone.
I work with customers who change the wording of some parts of applications regularly. Of course, they ask me to change the texts. They go over the application and take screenshots that they annotate with changes they want. They hand me a document over, usually a PowerPoint or a PDF. I start the task and try to go thoroughly through each one of them. This is a very demanding task for a developer: it doesn't require anything else than manual work. The exact opposite of what a developer thrives to do.
I lately had to do that a lot for a customer and I reached a point where I couldn't stand it anymore. This is where I got the idea of creating a system that would allow the customer to do that themselves. The first implementation of this idea is pretty simple: create an application that lets my customers modify texts in the product themselves. This application is able to generate the new text files. The customer just has to give me the results and I put it as is in the code. No error. At least not from me.
With this application, a product team reduces errors in text changes, increases time to release them and reduces costs by keeping developers free from this manual tedious work.
If you are interested into the product, it is available here: https://tl8.io. It works with Angular and the ngx-translate library. You can find there the application to download, available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Among those little things that take time are low hanging fruit problems to solve. Behind a pain often hides an opportunity.
KM
Photo by Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash
