“we don’t have electricity on the south side of the building, but I know water conducts electricity, so just connect the water main to the power grid, then install an outlet in every faucet”

Brad Montgomery on what we do as software engineers. Original at https://bradmontgomery.net/blog/blue-collar-programmer/

I don’t know why or how I ended up at that post but that situation evokes many fond memories of failed attempts at explaining what I was doing sometimes.

For all of its sins (or our inability to understand it back then) XML coupled with XSLT & friends is a nice basis to do ETL transformations.