The Systems Engineer Logbook

Eight undocumented behaviours in Shepherd Veterinary Software’s Open API, found while building a two-way sync for a veterinary practice client — including a full-replace update endpoint that silently deletes any collection you leave out of the body. All verified against the live production API, including writes.

How I wired named authors and reviewers into 744 WordPress pages as one schema.org @id entity graph in Rank Math and JetEngine, and the two Rank Math behaviours that only surfaced by watching live markup disappear.

278 pages of travel guidance had quietly gone stale — some of it stating the opposite of current law. Here is how 102 of them were researched, corrected and deployed in days rather than weeks, and the four things that went wrong along the way.

A private lender’s Salesforce org had overlapping Workflow Rules, Process Builder, and record-triggered Flows around loan operations. I stabilized the high-risk paths by mapping control fields, verifying migration parity, reducing unnecessary saves, and testing the behavior that actually reaches users.

A Salesforce record appeared in prior system evidence but was missing from active data and the Recycle Bin. I used independent existence proof, ALL ROWS, deleted-record checks, automation review, and population-level reconciliation to separate a real missing record from ordinary auto-number gaps.

A private lender asked for a property-data scraper. I reframed the request around the operating need, coordinated the external data work, and built a Salesforce architecture connecting loans, current property state, change history, and monitoring.

System Debrief #001: wiring an AI engineering harness into WordPress so finished technical work publishes itself as structured drafts — JetEngine meta boxes, glossaries, one Elementor template, and five traps worth knowing about.