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Articles by Evan Lausier
And Then The Integration Became a CSV File in a Folder
Looking through my script library, the same model keeps coming up. An SFTP upload Suitelet. A saved search exporter that writes CSV to the file cabinet. A module for multipart file uploads. A validator for journal entry lines during CSV imports. Payment file templates for ACH. I'd love to call that a coincidence but seems to always happen in some capacity somehow.... Money still moves as a file An ACH file is fixed length ASCII text.
The Three Ways NetSuite to Azure Integrations Quietly Break
Every NetSuite to Azure integration looks clean in the design doc. A tidy little pipeline, NetSuite on one end, Data Factory or Synapse on the other, arrows pointing the right direction. Then it goes live, and about a month in, someone asks why there are two records for the same vendor. Nobody built that on purpose. The demo always works. It's the data that eventually revolts. Here are the three places this tends to go wrong, and what actually fixes each one.
Nobody Ever Calculated the ROI of Email
Everyone is arguing about AI ROI right now. Boards want a number. Consultants are selling frameworks. And the headlines look brutal: an MIT report claimed 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots showed no measurable return, and a Forbes piece this January says 56% of CEOs see zero ROI from AI. So AI is a bust, right? Here is the thing. Ask any of those same companies to turn off email for a week. Just try it. Nobody ever ran a six month ROI study on email. Nobody had to.
The Estimate That Became a Quote
I said "maybe a couple days" on a call last Tuesday. By Wednesday morning it was in a Jira ticket as "2 days." By Thursday afternoon somebody was checking in to see if we were tracking against the two day commitment. Nobody did anything wrong. The person who wrote it down was capturing what I said. The person checking in was doing their job. I was the one who said the words. The system worked exactly as designed. The system is the problem.
Why AI-Generated Code Is Always Good Enough — And Never Great
AI wrote a function for me last week It worked Tests passed Edge cases handled I shipped it. But something bothered me - not enough to rewrite it not enough to flag it in review Just enough to leave a small discomfort I couldn't name. The code was correct It wasn't good.
Every Tool Eventually Becomes Tuesday
I opened my email this morning and there were three product announcements from companies I have never heard of. Each one was going to change how I work. Each one had a logo I will not remember by Friday. I closed the tab and made more coffee. That used to be unusual for me. For years I read every announcement. I clicked through every demo. I built side project after side project just to keep up with whatever wave was supposedly cresting. Now I just feel tired.
I Document Like a Professional at Work. My Side Projects Are a Disaster.
It feels like documentation at work is more of a checking the box exercise sometimes. My own side development projects brought a lot to light. I write business requirements documents. I write functional specs. I write process flows, configuration workbooks, user guides, and the occasional runbook that lives on a shared drive forever. None of it because I love writing documentation.
Why Build a Local MCP Server (And How to Do It in 15 Minutes)
I've been working with MCP servers for a few months now. If you're not familiar, MCP (Model Context Protocol) is Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources. Think of it as the API layer between an LLM and the stuff it can actually do. There are already a bunch of prebuilt MCP servers out there. Ones that connect to GitHub, Slack, Google Drive, databases, you name it. You can plug them into Claude Desktop or VS Code and start using them immediately.
FUNN
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Oracle, AI, and Who Actually Pays for the Race
At some point in the last six months or so, we quietly stopped arguing about whether AI was real ot just the next tech bubble waiting to pop. That shift matters more than most people realize. Not because the debate was resolved cleanly. It wasn’t. The hype merchants are still out there, still pitching dashboards and slide decks to executives who want to look smart at board meetings. The valuations are still stretched in places. The AI wrapper startups are still going to die by the hundreds.
Really Fun!
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What is MCP?
If you've been anywhere near developer Twitter or LinkedIn lately, you've probably seen this diagram floating around. Credit to Alex Xu at ByteByteGo for putting it together so cleanly. It stopped me mid-scroll because it finally gave a clear visual to something I had been reading about in pieces. MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard from Anthropic that gives AI models a structured way to connect to external tools, data sources, and services.
I Analyzed 1 Million dev.to Articles (2022–2026): Here’s What the Data Reveals
From the rise of AI topics to publishing patterns and writing habits. From December 2022 to January 2026, developers published over one million articles on dev.to. Developer communities often reflect where the industry is heading. Some trends you can almost feel intuitively. Tutorials seem less common. AI is everywhere. Some topics fade while others suddenly explode. But intuition only goes so far — it’s much better to look at the data at scale.
MCP Servers Are the New Microservices Sprawl (And We're Making All the Same Mistakes)
Remember 2016? When every team decided their monolith needed to be 47 microservices? And then two years later everyone was writing blog posts titled "Maybe We Didn't Need Microservices" while quietly hiring a platform team to wrangle the mess? Yeah. We're doing it again. Except this time it's MCP servers. The Pattern We Keep Repeating Here's how this plays out every single time in our industry: New thing emerges. New thing is genuinely useful. New thing is easy to spin up. Every developer spins one up.
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Follow Evan Lausier specializes in enterprise NetSuite ERP implementations and cloud solutions architecture. With 18+ years in software, I lead digital transformations for mid-market companies.
Enter Ant Man!
Well this was too fun not to share! I am still waiting for Ant Man to pop out somewhere!! https://x.com/NightSkyToday/status/2018441295065395398?s=20 The Core Claim: On December 9, 2024, Google Quantum AI announced its Willow processor, a 105-qubit superconducting quantum chip.
The 66% Problem
I spent three hours last Tuesday chasing a bug that didn't exist. The code looked perfect. It was syntactically correct, followed best practices, and even had thoughtful comments explaining what each function did. The problem was that one of those functions was solving a problem I never asked it to solve. Claude had decided, in its infinite pattern-matching wisdom, that my API endpoint needed pagination. I hadn't asked for pagination. I didn't want pagination.
Cool Article on API Tools!! https://medium.com/@somendradev23/10-api-tools-every-full-stack-developer-should-know-6f9af40ae0ec
Cool Article on API Tools!! medium.com/@somendrade...
The Lies AI Tools Tell Us (And Why Your Boss Believes Them)
I had an disagreement with a coworker recently. Not a heated one, more of a polite professional one about whether our application could perform a particular function. He was confident it could. I was confident it couldn't. I had the minor advantage of having actually worked with the application for years, but he had something more powerful: ChatGPT agreed with him.
You're Telling Me I Get Paid?
This hypothetical keeps circulating on social media like some kind of impossible challenge. A month in a cabin with food, water, and firewood but no internet, phone, or TV. The reward: $100,000. I need everyone to understand something. I would do this for free. You're offering to pay me? I've spent two decades in tech. I've answered "quick questions" at 11pm. I've debugged production issues on Christmas morning.
Wait, You Mean They're Different?
I've lost count of how many times I've heard someone say "just open it in Visual Studio" when they meant VS Code. Or watched a junior dev download the full Visual Studio IDE when all they needed was to edit a JavaScript file. These are not the same product. The naming is Microsoft's fault, not yours. But let's clear this up once and for all. The Short Version Visual Studio is a full integrated development environment (IDE).
How Does Amex Process Millions of Transactions in Milliseconds
How Your Coffee Purchase Gets Approved Before You Can Blink You tap your card. The terminal beeps. You grab your latte and walk out. The whole thing takes maybe two seconds, and you probably don't think twice about it. But in that moment, something kind of remarkable just happened.
So What Is an API Gateway Anyway? You Encounter Them All The Time and Never Even Know...
ByteByteGo has a great visual to help explain the concept, but think of it like a security guard. Every nightclub has a bouncer. Someone checking IDs, managing the line, making sure the VIPs get through and the troublemakers don't. Your backend services need one too. That's what an API Gateway does. The Problem It Solves Let's say you've got three microservices—user authentication, inventory, and payments.
Software Architecture Design Patterns
Software architects face the same fundamental design challenges across projects, companies, and careers. Rather than reinventing solutions each time, the industry has developed architectural patterns—reusable approaches that address these recurring problems. The diagram below breaks down nine core patterns you'll encounter: Client-Server Architecture remains the foundation of web applications—clients connect through the internet, typically via load balancers and CDNs, to reach backend services.
Machine Learning Isn't Intelligence (And That's Fine)
We need to stop calling it artificial "intelligence." I think we can all agree machine learning is impressive. A model can analyze a million medical images and spot tumors with 99% accuracy. That's incredible. Life-saving, even. But here's the thing—it has no idea what a tumor actually is. It doesn't understand cancer. It doesn't know what mortality means. It's not thinking about the person behind the scan. It's just matching pixels to patterns it's seen before.
The Bug That Taught Me Everything
It was 2 AM on a Tuesday, and I was convinced our production database was haunted. Users were reporting that their shopping carts would randomly empty—not all the time, just sometimes. The logs showed nothing. The code looked fine. I'd been staring at the same function for three hours, adding print statements like breadcrumbs, trying to find where the data disappeared. My coffee had gone cold. My eyes burned.
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