BLOG
Field dispatches.
From 20 years of connecting systems that don't talk to each other.
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The Boundary Principle: Integration Is Border Work
Every integration lives or dies at one seam: a clean, watched translation layer at the edge. Let the wire format leak past it and the system rots.
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EDIFACT, HL7v2, and the Protocols That Refuse to Die
REST and JSON didn't kill the old formats. EDI still moves most B2B transactions, HL7v2 still runs hospitals. Integration is bridging old to new, forever.
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From PNR to Order: Integrating Airline Distribution Without Losing Your Mind
A 1960s record format, an 1980s messaging standard, and a new XML API that half the airlines support. Travel integration means bridging all three at once.
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Error Budgets for Integrations You Didn't Build
SRE assumes you control the service. Integrations sit between systems you don't. Here's how to apply error budgets when half the failure modes aren't yours.
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Building APIs That Still Work in Ten Years
Stripe has kept every API version working since 2011. The decisions that make an API survive a decade are ones most teams skip.
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The Dual-Write Problem: Why Your Event Never Fired
You updated the database and published an event. One of them silently didn't happen. This is the bug behind half the 'data out of sync' tickets we get.
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24 APIs on Workers, $5 a Month, and the 10ms Wall
Edge API proxying really does cost pennies. But the CPU ceiling nobody demos is exactly where integration workloads hit the wall. Here's the real math.
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Outbound-Only: Cloudflare Tunnels as a Zero-Trust Integration Layer
Connecting a legacy on-prem system to a cloud API used to mean months of firewall negotiation. Outbound-only tunneling makes that number zero.
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Three Generations of an Edge Gateway
Uber rebuilt its edge gateway three times. Every client we've watched walks the same path, and pays 5x to retrofit the layers they could have designed in.
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Why Your iPaaS Won't Save You
Low-code integration platforms promise everything. They deliver dashboards. Here's what actually works after 20 years.
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The 2026 API Reality: Multi-Protocol, Regulated, and Agent-Ready
REST-only is already behind. A single integration now touches SOAP, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and MCP, and regulation just made some of it mandatory.
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Draw the Line: What Belongs in an API Gateway
A gateway routes, authenticates, and rate-limits. Everything else is business logic in the wrong place. Here's the boundary we defend on every project.
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There's No Turnkey in Integration
API platforms give you 70% on day one. The other 30% is where projects fail. Why requirements engineering beats tool evaluation.