Blog
Practical writing on connecting business systems: platform-specific guides, integration patterns that hold up in production, and the mistakes that make projects overrun. Written by the engineers who deliver the work.
Latest articles
Integration patterns
What a Dead Letter Queue Integration Actually Buys You in Retail
A dead letter queue is often sold as a safety net for order sync. It is more useful than that, and less magical. Here is what it genuinely protects, and what it quietly leaves on your desk.
Integration patterns
Webhook or polling: choosing the right webhook integration pattern for order sync
Order sync fails quietly more often than it fails loudly. The choice between webhooks and polling determines how quickly you notice, how easily you recover, and how much reconciliation work lands on the finance team.
Integration patterns
Designing an idempotent api integration: getting the keys right
Retries are unavoidable once two systems talk over a network. Idempotency keys are what stop those retries turning into duplicate orders, duplicate invoices and duplicate carrier labels — provided the keys are derived, scoped and stored properly.
Integration patterns
Designing a data flow you can prove: building an integration audit trail that holds up
Most integrations are designed to move data correctly. Far fewer are designed so that, nine months later, somebody can demonstrate exactly what moved, when, and why it produced the figure now sitting in the ledger.
Platform guides
What changes when you put OpenAI behind an internal API gateway
Routing model calls through an internal gateway changes the timeout budget, the retry rules, the cost record and the audit trail. Here is what has to be decided before the first application is pointed at it.
Platform guides
Bringing Anthropic Claude into a support desk: a claude api integration that keeps the audit trail
Language models are easy to demonstrate on a support desk and difficult to defend six months later. The difference is almost entirely in what you record at the moment each call is made.