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Ask HN: What is the most annoying integration you've had to build?

by areichert on 10/5/21, 12:50 PM with 7 comments

  • by h2odragon on 10/5/21, 1:04 PM

    We'd contracted to mail stuff to another company's customers, as we had bulk mail equipment etc; I'm the tech sent to their office to procure an actual list of addresses to mail things to. Ask them about their database and no one knows what the words mean. To them the customer list is on the magic computer that got sent from out of state and they only touch with great trepidation and potent fear.

    No unauthorized users could touch the "customer list" machine, so there was no hacking it out of the software in a sensible sane way. None of the rituals in their little book come close to "dump database in CSV" and the thing is equipped with only a modem, a floppy drive, and a big ass tractor feed line printer they run the bills on.

    But the "run the bills* ritual is one they have, and the printer connects to a parallel port, and I can with a little bit of bodge connect my little laptop to the other side of that parallel port... capture the "bill run", parse out the addresses, and finally emit their DB in a useful form.

    Building that was actually fun, but then no one else could assemble the laptop stack to actually perform the procedure so I owned the entire operation for the short time it ran.

  • by giantg2 on 10/5/21, 1:35 PM

    "Ask HN: What is the most annoying integration you've had to build?"

    The ones the decide they didn't need and end up never using. All the wasted effort...

  • by areichert on 10/5/21, 12:52 PM

    Building an integration with Microsoft Teams has been infuriating, especially after working with the Slack and Discord APIs (which were so much easier to manage)... I'm curious what other potential high-value integrations have been difficult for others.

  • by codegeek on 10/5/21, 6:11 PM

    Authorize.net payment gateway using SOAP and XML. Don't want to go there again.

  • by cppr on 10/5/21, 2:27 PM

    On top of gstreamer - it's an absolute mess with no coherent threading model

  • by fangorn on 10/5/21, 1:18 PM

    SOAP server (in PHP 4) to send fax messages using Hylafax.