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Stedi Buckets is worth getting excited about, or at least so I’m told. We launched it together with Stedi SFTP and I can’t help but feel that SFTP stole the show that day. Receive documents from customers without hassle? That is solving a business problem. But storing those documents? Sure, it’s necessary, but there’s not a lot for me to do with documents that just sit there. Unless you give me programmatic access. Then I can do with them whatever I want and that gets my coder’s heart pumping.

Building an EDI system or B2B integration requires a secure, scalable way to exchange files with trading partners. With Stedi SFTP, developers can provision users and begin transferring files in seconds. Files received via Stedi SFTP are immediately available in Stedi Buckets - a simple, reliable data store – for further processing. With a usage-based pricing model and no servers to manage, builders can easily offer SFTP connectivity to their trading partners as part of a new or existing B2B workflow without incurring fixed costs or operational overhead.

A colleague told me about transaction set variants and now I want to get some more experience with them myself. In a nutshell, the problem is that one transaction set can represent different kinds of documents. For example, he showed me an implementation guide that specified that the 204 Motor Carrier Load Tender could be used to create, cancel, modify, or confirm a load tender. That feels like four different documents to me, but they are all represented by the same transaction set. So, how do you deal with that in practice?

This document is the tl;dr of EDI. It won’t contain everything. It may not answer all your questions. It will only apply to X12. But it will save you a ton of time if you’re trying to decipher your first EDI document.

I don’t blame EDI for failures in logistics any more than I blame kittens for messing up my floor. I only got Sam and Toby a day ago, but they’re the cutest balls of fuzz ever to grow legs and they jumped straight into my heart. Still, as I’m staring at the puddle on my floor, I’m convinced that there's a design flaw in their digestive system. I don’t remember their breakfast being this chunky, or this sticky. Sputter gunk kittens are a new experience for me, so I call a friend and she recommends a steam cleaner.

The concept behind control numbers is pretty straightforward, but to work with them in practice, there are a lot of details you need to understand. For example, an interchange control number is a unique identifier for an interchange and you can use it to acknowledge that you received an interchange. In practice, it’s only unique within a certain scope, trading partners may have their own expectations about them regardless of the standard, and it’s uncommon to use them in acknowledgments. And all of that is assuming that you know what an interchange is.

At Stedi, we are fans of everything related to AWS and serverless. By standing on the shoulders of giants, the engineering teams can quickly iterate on their ideas by not having to reinvent the wheel. Serverless-first development allows product backends to scale elastically with low maintenance effort and costs.

Below is an edited version of our internal annual letter.

Our business is the business of business systems – specifically, we offer a catalog of tools that developers can use to build integration systems for themselves and their customers.

The trick to dealing with date and time in an X12 EDI document is to make things easy for yourself. EDI isn’t going to do that for you. EDI makes it possible to put a date on a business document in any way a human being has ever come up with and that flexibility comes at a cost: it’s downright confusing. You don’t have to deal with that confusion, though, because you don’t have to deal with that flexibility. It all starts with the implementation guide that you received from your trading partner.

When a question about JSONata turns up on StackOverflow, we do our best to answer it. Not because it's part of our strategy, or because we are building our corporate image, but because we like to help out. And we like to impress a little bit, too.

One deployment per hour is far too slow. Our initial deployment style starts with a paths filter to limit what stacks deploy, based on files and folders changed in a commit. We start our project this way thinking it will give us quick deploys for infrequently changed stacks. As our project grows, though, this is taking too long to deploy. Based on our analysis, our fastest recorded deployment time is 13.5 minutes, but our slowest deployments take up to 40 minutes. We are confident we can get our p99 down to 20 minutes or less.

Instead of writing conditions inside of your mapping for simple data conversions, you can now create a lookup table to automatically replace a value that your system (or trading partner) does not recognize with one that they do.

Business integrations are anything but straightforward – they are typically composed of many steps that need to be executed sequentially to process a single business transaction.

At a high level, each step can be divided into one of two categories: transporting data and transforming data. In order to enable developers to implement all manner of data transformations with ease, we've built Mappings.

EDI – Electronic Data Interchange – is an umbrella term for many different “standardized” frameworks for exchanging business-to-business transactions. It dates back to the 1960s and remains a pain point in every commercial industry from supply chain and logistics to healthcare and finance. What makes it so hard? Why is it still an unsolved problem despite many decades of immense usage?