When no connector exists, we engineer one

The engineering spans whatever the problem demands: custom protocol drivers written from captured traffic, wrappers around ancient vendor DLLs so their functionality is reachable from modern services, file-format parsers for proprietary binary outputs, and middleware that mediates between systems with incompatible models of the world. When the target is a legacy application that must eventually be replaced, we often apply a strangler-fig approach — routing traffic through a facade we control, so functionality migrates piece by piece while the old system keeps running. Everything we reverse-engineer gets written down as a specification, with test fixtures that pin the observed behavior.

Production-readiness is where custom work either pays off or haunts you, so we build in the unglamorous parts: defensive parsing that treats every input as hostile, logging rich enough to debug a failure from the record alone, version detection so a silent firmware update is caught rather than misinterpreted. Success is a connection that behaves like a product — documented, monitored, and maintainable by whoever comes after us.

The investigation phase ends with an integration map, not just a protocol note: every system involved, every interface we intend to use, the direction and volume of data at each, and who owns the component on either side. Where a vendor still exists but will not open their interface, we work at whatever they do document and keep a clear line between their responsibility and ours — the spec records what was observed, what was inferred, and what remains unknown. That honesty about boundaries matters more in custom work than anywhere else, because there is no product documentation to fall back on later.

Every custom interface is tested in isolation before anything depends on it: the driver against recorded traffic, the parser against a library of real files, the middleware against both systems in a staging environment. Deployment is phased — read-only first, then a single low-risk write path, then the full integration — with the previous arrangement left intact so rollback means switching off the new component. Where a strangler-fig migration is involved, each routed function is cut over separately and can be routed back. The handover package lists every connection, its interface specification, its monitoring, and the named owner on each side.