TechFest 2024

Low code development tools and AI assistants have made it easy for everyone to create custom coded solutions for their business. These tools encourage us to just "bring our business logic" and they will handle the rest. At Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, where we have a small tech team with wide-ranging responsibilities, we rely on low code tools to accelerate our development and create maintainable solutions.
However, when developing solutions on low code platforms, two common issues emerge: (i) business logic doesn't always fit neatly into the constraints of these platforms, and (ii) these generic solutions are rarely optimized for our unique needs. The role of a solutions architect is to interrogate both the business requirements and the low code tools to find where one can be adjusted to accommodate the other, or where creative solutions are required to get around constraints in both. In this talk, I will discuss these themes via a case study on developing a custom integration platform to sync data between our two main SaaS systems: Salesforce and NetSuite.