The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

What is the purpose of “The Integration Engineer” blog?

I believe that the core purpose of technology from the invention of fire and the wheel has been, and always should be, to make life easier for people.  But I have noticed that much of the time, technology is written and supported poorly for this purpose.  At times things get better, and other times they get worse.

What I hope to do here is to share some information and perhaps some wisdom that I have learned both from personal experience and the experience of others.    Some of the posts are technical “How To’ types of articles.  Other posts are philosophical in the sense that they are more rules of thumb or best practice related.  And a few are strategic in their nature, or recommended approaches to avoid pitfalls and achieve goals more effectively.

What about you, the reader?

First, I would like to invite you to subscribe to my site.  Then, if you are involved in the systems integration business, whether it is just getting your desktop applications to talk to each other, or multi-million dollar ERP solutions, the challenge is the same and I want to hear your experiences.  If you have a solution or a problem, send me a note, and we can post it on the blog for all to benefit from.  I can write about it, or you can write a guest post, or we can work together to write a post or more.

How this site is structured?

This site has gone through a series of revisions in both content and structure.  If you have or do read this blog for a year, you will see that some worthy content is rotated.  This is done for three reasons.

First, I take on other projects.  This blog is my hobby, not my job.  I am writing about what I actually do.  These projects make it impossible for me to write as much content as I would like to.  I would love to just write a new post every day.  But the posts that are rotated are not current event content, but factual and constant.

Second, some of what I consider my most important content was written at the beginning of the blog.  After I had been writing for a couple of years I realized that this content was just buried in the archives of the blog, and no one could find it.  So I began to rotate those posts back to the front page.

Third, this is my professional and personal blog.  Second only to my need to share my “wisdom” and experience is my need to have a site to showcase my skills and experience.  So this site is designed to keep skills and information relevant to my career and employment looking good.  Selfish?  Probably.  But it is my blog.

Where did this idea come from?

I started this site to provide a place where I can collect information related to e-commerce systems integration.  I started working with e-commerce systems years ago, and at that time it was difficult to find resources to help provide solutions to integration issues.

When I started I received lots of help from the integration counterparts at the companies we were working with.  Now the role is reversed, People at other companies are asking me how to solve these problems and where to find resources.

And I had the thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just refer this person to a site that had all of this information?”  So I started looking for such a site, and I did find some resources, but nothing that would let me just say, “Go here, and let me know if you have any questions.”

So this site was born.  (In my mind anyway.)  I have a fairly large archive of email and projects that I will be writing about, and attaching resources to help people with mapping and integration.  I want to share these because I am proud of the work that I have done and the things I have learned, but also because the more people and companies adopt good integration practices the easier integration work will become.

If you find this site helpful, please let me know.  I will be happy to hear from you.

roy@TheIntegrationEngineer.com

You can also find out more about me by checking out my LinkedIn Profile.