This is the third in a three-part series about strategies for synchronizing data between systems during a software replacement project. You can read about one-way integration and two-way integration if you want to catch up.

When replacing large existing software systems, we need to be able to use both systems in parallel, or at least parts of the systems. And to achieve that goal, we often need to share data between the two systems. In this three-part series, we’ll look at a number of strategies that you can use.

Much has been written about the technical challenges of rewrites. In one of his most famous pieces, Joel Spolsky argued that rewrites are almost never a good idea. On the surface, it seems illogical to spend a lot of time and money duplicating code that’s already working, and in a lot of cases, it doesn’t […]

You probably use open-source libraries and frameworks on a daily basis. They’re incredibly handy for solving common problems, like how to build an administrative dashboard or how to manage global state in a JavaScript application. One could easily argue that open-source licensing and distribution is the main reason that computers are so ubiquitous today. If […]

Say you’re about to begin a task that will involve working with some files. Perhaps you’re creating a diagram or encoding some GIFs. Where do you put the files?

I suspect almost everyone reading this blog has taken notes before, especially in a classroom setting. As my career has progressed from college student to professional developer and finally to a managing partner, I’ve also found that note taking is useful while developing software. In fact, note taking is a transferable skill—one of those abilities […]

If you are doing any sort of object-oriented development, you’re bound to reach a point where the number of objects in your codebase is greater than the amount you can keep in your head. Eventually, you will have so many different types of objects (services, managers, service-manager-helpers, etc.) that it gets hard to remember what […]

While rewriting some validation logic recently, I got to thinking about how “validation” tends to be an umbrella term that covers related, but distinct, operations. So I went back to the basics in order to find more accurate terminology for each step of the process.