Integration Love Story med Jenny Andersson

Introduktion

Welcome, Jenny, to Integration Love Story. It’s a pleasure having you.

Hey, thanks for having me.

We’ve been asking to have you on the show for a while now, but we’re glad we finally made it.

It was hard to coordinate, and I don’t live in the same city — life happens. But we are here now, and that’s great. Thank you for having me.

And congratulations on your ACE Aviator nomination back in August.

Thanks. And where’s my t-shirt? I didn’t get one.

We can try to fix something. Shout out to the ACE community — send out the t-shirt.

But before we dig into integration and everything this podcast is about, please introduce yourself — and add something extra that maybe people don’t know.

Hey, I’m Jenny. I live in the north of Sweden, in a town near the coast called Sundsvall. I’m there together with my two children, who are six and eight, so it’s quite a busy life schedule.

I work at what was recently Tietoevry Tech Services — we’ve just switched name and now we’re called Victa. I work as an integration architect, building integration solutions mostly towards Swedish public sector customers, but also with industrial customers. We collaborate a lot with our Dynamics 365 teams.

Something that maybe not everyone knows is that I worked as a pediatric nurse before I went into IT. My bachelor’s degree is actually in nursing, not in data science.

Från sjuksköterska till integrationsarkitekt

The obvious question — what happened?

It was when I had my first daughter. I felt I wanted to do something else, but I was kind of clueless about what. My sister had studied system science and was working as an integration developer, and she said I would love it. I said no, there’s no way I’m sitting behind a desk all day — that’s never going to work.

Then she sent me some programming exercises, like small beginner things where you build hello world in Java. And I got hooked. I really enjoyed it. So I started studying data science, but after half a year I got offered a job.

And that was it. Quick transition.

Yeah, and I think what you can bring from nursing into this work is actually quite a lot. It’s the people side. To build good integration solutions, you need to know the systems — but you also need to know the people who are going to manage them. How are they using it? When you understand that, you get a really good solution.

And the ability to translate. As a nurse, you get all these medical technical things and you need to translate them into how this is actually affecting a person. It’s the same in IT — you get all the techy lingo and you need to translate it toward the customers, so they actually understand what you’re doing and you can build that trust.

En vanlig arbetsdag

What does a normal Jenny day look like?

We usually start with some scrum meetings. I jump between different projects, so a day can differ. But typically: a scrum meeting to catch up, align with the team and figure out what to focus on. Then I jump into customer meetings — it could be strategic talks, architecture deep dives, or I also help out with pre-sales and investigating new opportunities.

Lately I’ve been working a lot with BizTalk migration, helping customers modernize their integrations. Lots of focus there.

BizTalk is interesting. It’s robust, it’s been working for a long time. I don’t like when people say BizTalk is dead or old — it is what it is. It’s just not relevant anymore, but it was really good. And I think a lot of customers would still use it if it weren’t for the end-of-life date.

Spaghetti-arkitektur och när saker går fel

We carry over a question from the last guest: what’s the biggest integration mess you’ve seen?

I’m laughing because it was actually quite recent. A really large industrial company. In Azure. They managed to dodge basically every best practice you could dodge. I don’t even understand how it was possible to miss everything.

Resource groups spread everywhere, resources spread everywhere, no one knew anything. They had built incredibly complex solutions with web interfaces and SOAP API integrations that were so advanced and difficult that no one understood how they worked. The situation was: “Yeah, this is working. Can you just please take this over? We don’t even know where the code is.”

They were copying JSON from dev to production — that was their deployment process. And they had hard-coded values throughout the entire codebase, so they’d have to sit and manually swap out the dev values for production ones every time. Then things kept breaking and ending up in production again and they couldn’t figure out why.

How do you react when you walk into something like that?

It’s a sensitive situation, because the customer has built something and you don’t want to step on their toes. But you need to be honest. The way I approach it is to go back to the facts: this is what you have today, these are the risks, this is how we want to solve it, and this is where you will end up if we can help you. I’ve never been in a situation where that approach hasn’t been appreciated, because the customer is usually already aware they need help — that’s why they contacted us.

You can be honest without saying “this is a really awful job.” You can say it in nicer words and still be honest.

And you need to meet them where they are. No one created that mess out of malice — they did it because they wanted to solve a problem. What you usually hear is: “We lost a lot of people, there are a lot of new ones, and I took over this mess from someone who took it over from someone else.” Lack of time. That’s usually why.

Det största egna misstaget

What’s the most honest mistake you made while building integrations?

I’ve been a little lucky — my mistakes haven’t been catastrophic. I’ve had colleagues who accidentally missed sending paychecks for an entire municipality. Mine wasn’t quite that bad.

Early in my career I was working with a municipality on an older integration platform. The platform was divided into workspaces — a production workspace and a test workspace. Sometimes when you needed to do bigger changes, you had to close down the workspace, do the fix, and restart it.

I was at home with sick children, in a hurry. I did my fix, restarted the workspace, thought everything was fine, turned off my computer, and put away my phone. A few hours later, when I got back to my phone, I had a lot of missed calls from colleagues asking why these old workflows had started up again and were sending a lot of files to an old bank.

I had restarted the wrong workspace — an old copy of the production environment.

How long did it take from the moment you got the call to realizing it was you?

Pretty much immediately. The moment they asked if I knew anything about it, I said: “Yeah — I probably restarted the wrong workspace.”

It’s what happens when you get comfortable. In the beginning you double-check everything — this is the right workspace, this is the right workspace. But then after a while you just click click click and you’re done.

You should never get too comfortable.

Framtidens teknik — hybrid, AI och nästa steg

What technology do you see coming that could change the space?

AI — I think it’s mandatory to say that. If you’re not staying up to date with that, you’re going to have a hard time, maybe even in a couple of years.

But what we’re also working on a lot right now is Logic Apps hybrid, on Azure Local. We have a customer we’ve started migrating from BizTalk to Logic Apps hybrid. That’s a really fun project to be in — the Microsoft stack from hardware to software. And it enables AI, because once you have that deployment in place, you can add AI functions on top.

Real-life examples are valuable for the whole community. It’s a risk to go out first, but you also learn a lot.

Integration Love Story

Let’s go back to the actual love story. It didn’t sound like love at first sight.

Definitely not. My hiring manager — the first person who hired me — took a huge risk hiring someone with half a year of study experience. And he didn’t exactly sell it well either. He said something like: “Well, integration isn’t sexy, but—” and I never really heard what came after the “but.”

I think it was a slow burn. The moment it really clicked was when I realized it’s not just about the code or the integration platform — you also need to know the system, the process, the people.

Early on I was working with integrations toward Swedish schools. I had to learn a lot: how are the schools set up, how are the classes structured, how does the municipality handle sensitive information about students. And I realized: I’m learning so much more than just the technical part.

I think that’s when I felt, wow, I’m in love with this and I can keep doing it for a long time.

Good things take time. You have to date for a while before you know.

Superpower som integratör

What would you say is a non-obvious superpower to have as an integrator?

Listening. I think that’s it. Listen to the customers — it builds trust, and when they feel heard, they’re more open. In the end we’re just people talking to other people. If they don’t trust you, they won’t buy in to the solution. And trust starts with actually hearing them out.

Avslutning och fråga till näste gäst

If you could pass a question to the next guest, what would it be?

I like the magic wand question — some version of: if you had a magic wand and could fix anything in your daily life, even if it doesn’t make sense, what would you fix? Like a mapping that matches all your socks when you take them out of the washing machine.

That’s a genuinely good question.

Thank you so much for joining us, Jenny. This was an amazing conversation and we’re definitely going to have you back.

I hope so. It’s been wonderful to be here.