Mike's corner of the web.

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Style Pass

2021-08-01 12:30:06

Way back in 2013, I started mammoth.js, a library that converts Word documents into HTML. It's not a large project - roughly 3,000 lines - nor is it particularly exciting.

I have a strong suspicion, though, that that tiny side project has had more of a positive impact than the entirety of the decade I've spent working as a software developer.

I wrote the original version on a Friday afternoon at work, when I realised some of my colleagues were spending hours and hours each week painstakingly copying text from a Word document into our CMS and formatting it. I wrote a tool to automate the process, taking advantage of our consistent in-house styling to map Word styles to the right CSS classes rather than producing the soup of HTML that Word would produce. It wasn't perfect - my colleagues would normally still have to tweak a few things - but I'd guess it saved them over 90% of the time they were spending before on a menial and repetitive task.

Since it seemed like this was likely a problem that other people had, I made an open source implementation on my own time, first in JavaScript, later with ports to Python and Java. Since then, I've had messages from people telling me how much time it's saved them: perhaps the most heartwarming being from someone telling me that the hours they saved each week were being spent with their son instead.