The Engineer's Most Familiar Stranger: Text

Although we write code every day, text has always been one of the biggest pain points for engineers. In this session, I'll share practical experiences and lessons learned from dealing with text across a variety of real-world scenarios, including:

Playing Japanese games with Chinese subtitles → OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Listening to web articles instead of reading them → TTS (Text-to-Speech) Generating subtitles from audio → STT (Speech-to-Text) with Whisper Writing blogs and building a personal note-taking system Fixing broken PDF layouts by working from the raw content → LaTeX or HTML Writing an entire book in Markdown → Building a publishing pipeline

Rather than focusing on a single technology, this talk explores how different text-processing tools and workflows can make everyday engineering tasks more efficient and enjoyable.