Lazycoder

Translating for the non-technical

a-medical-student-blogs-about-thinking-as-a-physician: “As Anthony matures as a physician, he will face a major challenge. How do you as a physician explain diagnostic tests, treatments and diagnoses in terms that patients understand?
As physicians, we have an obligation to “break it down” into understandable terminology. I spend much time on rounds developing analogies of disease so that patients will understand what we mean.”

(Via DB’s Medical Rants.)

This problem of translating of the complicated into the simple plagues programmers as well. We tend to “break it down” into simple tasks (e.g. “Try rebooting”) or come up with little analogies to explain what we are doing. (e.g. “It’s like I’m taking this whole row of numbers and flipping it on it’s side”). Clients I’ve worked for are often amazed and what I consider simple or hard to accomplish. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said the words, “Well, it’s not quite that simple.”.

In my current position I have a more interesting task. I end up translating medical jargon to the developers working for me and technical details to the docs due to my background in Biochemistry. It helps a little to understand ahead of time what the data will look like and how it will be used. Most medical data isn’t about the actual result, it’s about the presence or absence of data or even metadata about the number. Sometimes entire groups of lab results really just boil down to a bit datatype. Positive or Negative? Malignant or Benign?

(Actually there is no boolean data in medical data. There is always “Yes”, “No”, and “Unknown”).