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On Naur, vibe coding, and the people you can’t replace with a context window
22 minute read
Published:
I read Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building this week. It is from 1985, and it argues something that I find more relevant now than it has been in decades: that what programmers build is not really code, but a theory of the problem they are solving. The code is a side effect. The theory lives in the heads of the people who built the system, and when those people leave, the theory leaves with them. Documentation does not save you. The code does not save you. You can read every line of a system written by someone else and still not have what they had.
SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs
9 minute read
Published:
If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.
Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration
15 minute read
Published:
In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.
Automatic AS-IS reports in SAP Integration Suite.
3 minute read
Published:
When you work with SAP Integration Suite, you quickly realize that the hard part isn’t always building new interfaces. It’s understanding what’s already there. Over time, integration packages pile up, documentation gets stale, and nobody really knows the real, up-to-date state of the integration landscape.