Internal tooling · In production
Replacing a broken integration with a nightly sync
The vendor integration failed most nights, so a colleague reconciled two databases by hand.
Quiet, invisible, recurring work
The built-in integration between our member database and our email platform failed more often than it worked. The fallback was a person: someone on staff reconciling the two systems by hand, pushing unsubscribes back into the database and carrying address changes forward into the email platform. Recurring work that nobody's job description mentions.
A two-way sync that only speaks up when it breaks
- Confirmed the member database's API supported writes, which made a true two-way sync possible rather than a one-way export.
- Wrote a nightly job that reconciles both directions: unsubscribes back to the database, address changes forward to the email platform.
- Deployed it to the same server already running my other services rather than setting up new infrastructure.
- Made it quiet by design. Notifications fire only when something breaks, because a nightly "all good" email is noise, and noise is how real failures get missed.
Outcome
The manual reconciliation is off a colleague's plate. The job runs on its own and speaks up only when it needs a person.
Most of the automation worth doing in a small organization looks like this: unglamorous, invisible when it works, and giving hours back to someone whose actual job is something else.