02 / Projects & practice

What I build.
What I missed.

ERP, integrations, and automation for manufacturing. The useful details are in the decisions and the failures.

Work and working notes

The particulars.

My work has included IFS and Microsoft Dynamics AX, internal .NET applications, reporting, and integrations. These are some of the problems underneath those names.

ERP / APIs / Operations

Connecting business systems

I develop ERP functionality, reports, integrations, and automation. I also work through requirements with business users and vendors: what information is needed, which system owns it, and what happens when the handoff fails.

Before another application

My first question is why the work has to happen manually. Sometimes an integration is missing. Sometimes the process itself needs to change. I want that distinction settled before adding another application to maintain.

My work has expanded to evaluating platforms and integration approaches, coordinating vendors, and writing standards and documentation that other people can use.

Manufacturing / Services / Shared code

Building alone: the architectural record

In two manufacturing roles, I built unattended services, tools for their operators, reporting utilities, and integrations. The recurring concern was failure: if a process stopped, someone needed to hear about it.

There were failures in my own approach, too. I extracted shared libraries, then copied their files into consuming applications. Two versions of the database connector diverged. Nothing recorded which one was intended.

Home lab / Diagnostics

The configuration was correct. The process disagreed.

I spent several sessions troubleshooting a reverse proxy. The interface showed the correct settings. So did the generated configuration file. Direct connection tests worked. The proxy did not.

What I had failed to check

I changed ports, protocols, certificates, routing rules, and application settings. AI helped generate plausible explanations. We accumulated quite a collection. All wrong.

The running process was still using an old port preserved from a previous configuration. Once I corrected that, the remaining issue was trivial.

I had treated the configuration as evidence of runtime behaviour. It was evidence of the configuration. Checking the live process exposed the difference.

AI accelerated the investigation. It also accelerated the time spent pursuing the wrong explanations. The question I needed was: what is the system actually doing right now?

Correspondence

Something does not add up?

Tell me what happened, what you expected, and what you have already tried.