I've spent about two decades working on integrations, and while I've learned from the successful ones, most of what I've learned came from watching them fail. The tech is sound, the go-live date passes, and the failures rarely introduce themselves loudly. The failures that taught me the most were the quiet ones: systems that connected and ran green while someone still double-checked the numbers in a spreadsheet every morning, because everyone knew which system to trust and nobody had written it down.
Over time I realized those failures weren't random. They traced back to decisions made before anyone wrote a line of code, like who owns the data when two systems disagree, what happens when timing assumptions break, and where human judgment actually sits in the process. When those decisions go wrong, no amount of technical sophistication fixes what follows. That's the problem I've built my career around.
What I do
I'm Director of Custom Development at Full Sail Partners, a Deltek Premier Partner firm serving project-based businesses. I lead the team that handles extensions to native Deltek functionality through custom development, provides frameworks for advanced BI Reporting Solutions like Entrinsik Informer, and that built Blackbox Connector, an integration platform that connects Deltek Vantagepoint with the cloud systems organizations run on. We built Blackbox Connector because I kept watching the same failure modes repeat across clients: brittle point-to-point connections, error handling bolted on after the fact, and human work pushed outside the system instead of designed into it. The platform exists to make integrations something people can observe and trust long after delivery, not just pipes that move data.
I got here the long way, starting in infrastructure and systems engineering before moving into Deltek consulting, over to software development, and now leading a team of technology professionals in designing game changing solutions for professional service firms. That path gave me a front-row seat to how technology decisions made for expediency compound into operational friction, and it taught me that the gap between how systems are designed and how work actually happens is almost always where the problems live.
Somewhere in the middle of building ever more sophisticated systems, I had to admit something uncomfortable: the problems kept recurring anyway, because the decisions upstream of the technology were the real work. People, process, and the meaning of data were never soft concerns to handle after the technical part was done. They were the technical part. And if I had any doubt left, the arrival of AI settled it. Frontier models and classic LLMs alike will now happily generate the pipeline, the error handling, and the glue code in minutes, which means the hard part is more exposed than ever: an AI can't decide who owns the data when two systems disagree, and it can't manufacture the trust that makes people stop keeping a spreadsheet on the side. The more capable the tools become, the more the outcome depends on the decisions nobody delegated. The systems are the artifact. The decisions, the ownership, and the trust are the product.
Why this site exists
The information that determines whether systems hold up never arrives in one place. Deltek publishes release notes, vendors change APIs, AI tooling shifts monthly, and everyone I work with ends up reconstructing the same picture on their own. That's the exact failure mode I diagnose inside organizations, so I did what I'd tell a client to do and built a system for it: a pipeline that follows the sources that matter to my work, pulls them into one place, and lets me read, filter, and connect what's actually significant.
What gets published here is the output of that process. It's meant to be a reference point for me, the people I work with, and anyone wrestling with the same questions, so that when a release lands or an integration pattern breaks, the context already exists somewhere shared instead of living in somebody's head.
If that's the kind of reference you'd use, bookmark and follow along.
Pete Nuffer is Director of Custom Development at Full Sail Partners, where he leads the Blackbox Connector integration platform and automation practice. Full Sail Partners is a Deltek Reseller Partner of the Year.