Every industry speaks its own language. I learned to enter the room.

Every project was a new context with its own vocabulary, and the same word meant different things in different rooms. A visit to a dentist is the appointment plus the procedure plus the follow-up. A visit to a restaurant is the seating, the order, the bill. The first month on any project I did not write code. I learned the vocabulary. Because the fastest way to build the wrong software is to build it fluently in the wrong language.

The contracts were a study in operator personalities. The dental clinic that asked for a heavy patient-management system when what they needed was a simpler scheduling app, and how it felt to propose the smaller thing and be right. The restaurant that wanted every feature on the menu and could afford none of them. The retail founder who had built the previous version himself in a spreadsheet and did not need convincing, only scaling. Reading the operator turned out to be half the job. Nobody had put that in the job description.