A while ago, I spent nearly 40 minutes staring at a monitor, trying to debug a broken integration with a legacy SOAP API.
The API wasn’t throwing errors. The payload looked practically identical to the vendor's sample documentation. Almost.
After comparing the two files line-by-line until my eyes went blurry, I finally spotted it: a single element had moved down three lines.
That was it. The data was there. The value hadn't changed. But because the XML structure was slightly out of order, the receiving system silently rejected it.
That’s the exact moment I realized just how soul-crushing manual XML debugging is.
