Import & export integrations for an absence-reporting system

Absence reports are a sensitive and crucial part of administration for employers and occupational health services. They must be sent back and forth between parties reliably, on time, and in the right format. This project was entirely about those integrations: import and export of absence reports between the client's main application and a diverse set of external systems.

When I came in, my focus was fixing problems in existing integrations. Some messages didn't come through, others arrived twice, still others caused cryptic errors further down the process. That kind of issue is rarely caused by a single bug; often it's a combination of unusual input, missing validation, and assumptions that once held but no longer do.

I invested a lot of time in making what happens inside the pipeline visible. Logging at the right levels, clear error messages that actually help operations move forward, and small tooling to investigate suspicious messages in a targeted way. Only then could I tackle the bugs themselves structurally instead of speculatively.

Beyond firefighting we also got room to discuss the way of working. Many issues landed with the service desk because agreements with external parties weren't explicit enough, or because failure scenarios had no owner. By tightening those agreements and assigning clear ownership, the inflow of support tickets structurally dropped — not only those about the integrations themselves, but the surrounding ones as well.

Technically we worked in a mixed PHP stack (PHP 5.6 and PHP 7), which once again showed me how important it is to know which language constructs are safe in which environment. Code that runs neatly in one version can behave subtly differently in another — the kind of detail you only catch when you truly know your tools.

A valuable project where I sharpened my problem-solving skills and saw once more that improving integrations is often more organisational than technical work.