Over the last month, my colleagues and I have been learning what it’s like to have way too many things to do without enough time. I’ve been stretched farther than I’ve been in a very long time, so I know this is valuable experience that will be valuable in the future.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned so far is just how hard systems integration is in reality. We’ve been discovering the architectural limitations of our main processing system, forcing us to come up with novel ways of getting data into and out of it. Thankfully, after many long whiteboard sessions, integration problems that start off seeming very complex evolve into straight forward solutions. This has lead to us developing our own suite of software tools to easy communication and make our lives easier in the long-run. If we discover a new roadblock, we half jokingly say the answer must be “middleware“. Later, it usually turns out that we were right!