Creating DVD data back-ups of code and assets. Recording notes from this week.

Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2022 - Digital Conference - Las Vegas

See attached for my full notes from the conference. Here are a few of them (not all).

- The future of ColdFusion, from Adobe's eyes, is going to be about performance, scale, security, and productivity.

- Everything needs a metric

- Moving more and more things over to smaller microservices

- Making things multi-tenant (able to handle multiple corporations or businesses without displaying any of the other's data). We already do a ton of this... keep going and keep pushing it further. One of the key words that the presenter was using was "data isolation".

- SaaS models (software as a service) - low-friction and focusing on the service side of the approach

- Building relationships not just selling software

- Quick onboarding and time to value ratios

- Creating a layered model

- Building change into the model and into the plans - how quick can you move? Are you locking yourself into something?

- Beware of technical debt - older code - it has to be updated, maintained, and even removed at times (ok to get rid of things)

- See image (photo of a slide) for some take aways from Monolith to SaaS - Focus on SaaS building blocks first, make identity and isolation an early priority, support multiple tenants on day one, don't defer automated onboarding, instrument for metrics - even if you only start with a few, tenant-aware management and monitoring should not be an afterthought, exercise all the moving parts with each iteration, continually ask yourself if you are meeting your agility goals. Many of these are great ideas for our fracture project (upcoming adilas project).

- If you are using tokens - maybe think about JSON web tokens (JWT's).

- Educating the younger generation - creating a training pipeline - re-invent yourself/ourselves from an educational angle.

- Most good jokes have a setup and then punch line. The setup is the expectations and the punch line is the twist. If you set things up correctly, it allows you to pivot or twist if needed. Thought that was kinda fun.

- There are benefits of bad ideas... is it ok to bounce something off of the party based on that idea - sometimes you get more ideas building off of the bad ideas - they tend to be seeds for the next idea or thought.

- It's ok to throw things away - it's ok to go down the wrong path - being creative is not efficient.

- Sometimes you can flip things on its head (180 degree flip) - what would that look like?

- Having a great idea and then having an even better idea of not using the great idea. Treat it like a giant pyramid of ideas. The base has all of the ideas, as you go up, you need to get rid of things to get to the best ideas. If you don't throw anything away, you go from a pyramid (filtered) to a square tank with no priorities or set level of applicability.

- Who is the filter? What ideas pass the test? That makes a difference.

- Find a way to connect with people and bring joy - think of something like a comfort food - consistent - same thing every time - make it loveable

- Most software packages have a 10-year average lifespan - plan for that and plan for change to keep it going

- A full rewrite often ends up in a financial disaster. If you do decide to do a full rewrite, do it for a business model reason not for an emotional reason. Morph through evolution not full revolution (total change). See photos.

- Sometimes it is easier to write code than it is to read code - thus the tendency to want to rewrite things.

- Keep pushing out new things and use permissions and settings to show/hide and make the new features or tools conditional. Base everything off of the permissions and settings.

- Small changes to microservices. Little by little, make the new stuff.

- Use the same (older) database

- 1. Make a case for what you are doing or wanting to do. 2. Set a boundary for what you are going to do - be careful. 3. Next you need a plan or a strategy.

- Same habits, same mistakes! Alter the habits...

- Things are tending to lean towards machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Be aware of those major trends.

- The 7 mistakes that developers tend to make - See actual notes for more info - 1. Fear of failure, 2. Shiny object syndrome, 3. Overengineering, 4. Going viral (most things don't happen that way), 5. Building more features, 6. Building for yourself and other developers, and 7. Burning out. Tons more notes in the actual scans of my notes.

- It is common for us (as developers) to think that everyone wants a full features multi tool (swiss army knife) when in reality, our clients want a simple butter knife.

- We love to solve problems and we love to build and create things

- Don't be afraid of competition in the space that you are working in.

- Offloading and running things asynchronously. Does the action need to be done right this second? If not, queue it up, offload it, and run those processes asynchronously. If you are offloading, outside services don't need to know your app permissions, they just do tasks based on queues or data.

- The value of your team over time - that is huge

- Find patterns that work

- Capacity - keep watching the downstream services - keep things flowing

- Minimal on batches of data and more on just in time or real-time transactions - smaller bites with more accurate results.

- Orchestrating and chaining workflows - step functions - ideally with visual maps of the logic

Good conference. Both Bryan Dayton and I went to the conference. Bryan has his own notes, but these were some of mine. For all of my notes, see the media/content upload for my full notes. Overall, I'd say that we are going in a good direction. Always things to learn and improve on but making progress and going down the right road. Good stuff!

10/10/22 checked and pushed code with Brandon.

Code edited:

classic/view_cart_body.cfm

classic/view_cart_bottom.cfm

secure/custom_cart_5.cfm

Client paying for modal and settings to allow view of sub attributes when not enough stock is available upon adding to the cart or flipping a transitional invoice to a customer invoice.

W-2 for tax year 2022
Test printing too

1099 NEC

1099 MISC

1099 INT

Listening in on a call between Steve, Sean, and a representative from Barbados and the Caribbean. I jumped off after about half an hour listening in over the GoToMeeting session. I then started to clean-up from being out of the office. Text messages, emails, organizing my desk, etc. I also did some scanning of my notes from the Adobe ColdFusion conference.

Sean, Steve, Bryan, Cory, and I talking about reaching out to a client, here in the Logan/Smithfield, UT, area. Talking about what we can offer and who is going to do what. We also were talking about options for mobile payments and getting some new hardware configured for demos and testing.

After all of the others left, it was just Cory and I left on the meeting. I was reporting to her about the conference and things that I learned. Going over projects and talking about a huge upcoming custom data export for a client that has tons of data (lots of CRM stuff). They have flex grid, additional contacts, customers, log notes, and tons of media/content. They would like an export of all of that data. That's going to be a big custom project. Lots of one-to-many relationships. We are also storing close to 500GB of data for them. That could make it interesting.

Cory and I looked at the schedule and booked some time to work with John on finishing up the discount engine project and get all of the backend stuff all wired up. After that, we spent some time talking about value and the value of clean data. That is huge. We went over a number of other projects for Bryan, Eric, Chuck, and John. Our goal is to break things down into smaller and smaller pieces.

Talking about automating aggregates and getting that data to start surfacing and being spread around the site. That is a big goal of mine, for the coming months/years. I want to get it out to the business intelligence levels (BI).

Other topics that we covered were dealing with database triggers, email servers, building in a cost plus - mark-up system, lifespan of software and systems, and other known and upcoming projects.

On a Zoom meeting with Eric and Cory. Eric was showing Cory and I around the site and how to use his new gift card stuff. We made a few suggestions, but mostly it was looking great. Going over flow, logic, and other questions. We also spent some time and went through a number of scenarios and demo transactions. Making plans for the next steps and pushing things live. We still have some work to do on the financials but looking really good.

Emails and cleaning up my inbox. Responding to questions and what not. Checking some code for Wayne that he asked me to look at. Light testing on the update inventory counts pages on my local box.

Emails and answering questions from Hoodie Analytics for a client. Light review of a custom export page.

Paying bills and uploading scans and documentation.

Recording notes. Almost a week behind. Trying to catch-up.

Finished recording notes from the week of the Bear 100 mile race. Crazy week for me.

Steve, Sean, and I were talking about sales and different angles. Sean is going to try to connect with some of our current clients and see if we can help them out and also get some referrals. After that, Steve had a small code question for me. We made a quick tweak to his code.

Bryan joined us and we started looking into the process of building some new online scheduling settings. We have deployed our first small round of the client facing scheduling stuff. It's been pretty successful. The company that is using it has already done almost 30 online bookings for well over $1,000, just in the first week of using the new features. Pretty cool!

Anyways, we will be building out some settings to help make it more useful and turnkey ready. Currently it is all hardcoded and we will gain a lot more if we make it more general and dynamic (data driven).

Both Bryan and I were talking with Steve about the Adobe ColdFusion conference that we went to. We were talking about one of the presenters who was talking about creativity and flipping things on its head and doing 180-degree twist on things. Steve was saying the word "Pivot" and how his business instructor used to use that word in business. A business has to be able to pivot or it can go south (go in the wrong direction) based on budgets, markets, opportunities, decisions, etc. That's a key piece of the puzzle.

Steve and Bryan finished out the session by working together on some settings. Steve was, on purpose, teaching Bryan how to reverse engineer some of the existing settings and how to build on those examples. Small training session. They are basically taking something that works, that was already built, working to add and remove from that to come up with new code and a new settings page. The whole thing was reverse coding and working backwards. Small exercise and challenge for Bryan.

Cory and I going over different projects. We talked about 710 Labs, Hoodie Analytics, and copying chart of accounts between different corporations. We got into a small working session and looked at some live scenarios transferring the chart of accounts between accounts. As part of this work session, we talked about deep mappings and maintaining relationships. We had to work backwards from what we wanted to what we have.

We talked about deferring to people with more knowledge. That is huge and a great way to get things done. We spent the rest of the time following a small bug and talking about what might be needed. It was dealing with daily sales and invoices that were paid or not paid.

Code review with Bryan. Working on an additional popup modal for a shopping cart message for overselling sub inventory items. Working through the cart logic with complex data objects dealing with structs and arrays of structures.

Did some prep work for a later client meeting for 710 Labs and Hoodie Analytics (15 minutes). Created a new page that pulls data by invoice number vs a date range.

Meeting on their meeting platform (Google meet) with both Hoodie Analytics and 710 Labs folk. There were seven people on the call. It ended up that we were looking at code and trying to debug code. We ended up removing a SQL formatting command and it seems to have worked. We did some testing and the new changes seemed to work. After the meeting, I made code changes, pushed up code, and reported back to all parties involved.

Working with Eric on a multi pass through error message process. We were taking out hard aborts in our code and rolling into a more passive multi-error option for post invoice creation processes. The new process appends a series of error messages to not stop the flow but still add the correct error message. Lots of work on the submit cart process and refining that code along the way. Trying to be more efficient in our flow process. Good work session.

Meeting with Bryan and Cory to go over the updates on the sub inventory counts and popup modal in the cart if trying to oversell an item. We were really close. We pushed up some code and did some testing and then had to tweak it just a little bit. Cory ended up bailing out and just Bryan and I finished up the detail stuff. We got it fixed, pushed, merged, and live in the master branch. Small work session.

Recording notes from yesterday. Then once the morning meeting started, Steve and Sean were talking about sales, RFP's (requests for proposals), bigger contracts, and funding. John joined the meeting and gave us a report on the discount engine. he is 99% done with it. We are hoping to get it handed off for code review and final testing later today. That is exciting. Lots of work there.

I was recording notes from yesterday while listening in on the meeting. Busy day of meetings yesterday - 7 hours of meetings with clients and developers.

Recording notes from the past couple of weeks. I was pushing on bigger projects and then had a coding convention that I went to. It got me behind a bit. Most of my time was spent on updating and recording notes. I also did some prep work for a phone call with a new potential client.

During the server meeting, Cory and Wayne were reporting on different issues, problem, questions, and talking about changes to sub inventory. Wayne is working on some new changes to help speed things up there. Wayne was also volunteering to help Alan with some elements of time (flow) stuff for production processes.

One of the big topics was the email server. It's kinda old and has been acting up lately. It's turning into one of our top priorities.

We spent some time talking about servers and specs. We have certain pages, like the balance sheet, that cause heavy loads. We really want to get into some preset sums, counts, maxes, mins, and averages - basically, we need aggregated data. We have great transactional data, we just need to keep moving up the chain and create the aggregated data that is date specific. That will allow us to go both forwards and backwards. That is very important, to be able to easily go backwards as well. Making this change to aggregated data will be huge for us in the future. We really need this as part of our fracture project.

We have a project called the inventory snapshot - mini aggregate project that Eric was working on. Once he finishes with his gift card project, we are going to have him jump back on the inventory snapshot project to help with quick inventory quantities.

The last thing that we went over was between John and I. We are working on a smooth hand-off of the discount engine project. Coordinating times and making plans. That is coming along well.

Looking into some date code logic in the discount engine. Looking over code logic for SQL inserts and updates as well as JavaScript logic. John had introduced some new code that allows discounts to be repeatable on more than just one single day or just during a set date range. The new code allows for reoccurring discounts on certain days of the week and even at certain times. All of it is reoccurring. Those changes are wanted and needed, but it requires some changes to the database and look-up options.

As part of this process, we were having to unroll some of the logic with the days of the week. We made some plans and headway, and he is going to keep tweaking on things and then push up the code. We have time scheduled each day to keep this project going forward.

Fairly quiet morning. Sean checked in and so did John. Nothing too major. I spent time prepping and gathering notes from the Adobe ColdFusion Conference that Bryan and I went to last week. See attached.

Work session with Chuck and the new look and feel for some pages inside of elements of time. Working on the working with time page and the printable time page. They looked great. We made a few small tweaks and merged two different branches together. We sent a note to Wayne and Cory about testing and pushing the code to all servers. We are waiting for them before taking it to the next step.

Bryan and I were going over Bryan's new online scheduling settings project. He is making great progress. We spent some time looking at what he has and making plans for where we want to take it (direction). Good stuff.

On a GoToMeeting session with Wayne and John. We were talking about the discount table and some data that we are storing. The problem is the field called discount day of week. We store all kinds of stuff and it is somewhat misnamed. We talked about a number of possible solutions. As we talked, you could tell that John was doing calculations as to what those ideas would really take to push all the way through the code. I was proud of him for being able to see beyond the current change. That was awesome.

Wayne was wanting to make the changes (he saw an angle that would work) and John was still asking questions. As a side note, it is amazing how one little decision will cascade throughout a single project and potentially affect other projects and/or features. That's part of being a system.

I sent out a text message to Cory and Steve to let them know what the plan was and that it was going to take a small rewrite. All part of the game.

Recording notes from the day. On a phone call with John going over plans, design, and defining project scope. Good conversation and some good ideas to help with project management. More recording notes after the phone call.

Going through logic for showing and hiding gift card data on the P&L and the balance sheet. Lots of talking, discussing, and brainstorming. Eric mostly wanted to get a second opinion on where he is headed. He is almost finished with the new gift cart functionality. Lots of cause and effect type relations.

Recording notes from my notebook into the element of time for the Adobe ColdFusion Conference (october 2022). See the gallery for some slides and media/content for my full notes on that entry.

John was giving Steve and I a demo on the discount engine and the new database changes that he and Wayne were working on early this morning. Looking good. John was also pitching the use of diagrams to help with requirements, flow, sequences, and object models. We talked a little bit about MVP - minimal viable product. I like to switch out the ending "P" and do something like minimal viable person, minimal viable plan, etc. It helps me think of what is needed.

Sometimes, we, as a team, tend to wing it. That works great to a certain level. Then you really need to get that extra planning and project management in place. If not, you end up fighting against yourself, in different ways.

As part of our discussion, we were talking about minimal viable plans and how often, they are in one person's head. We talked about getting that MVP plan on to paper or getting it recorded digitally, so that we can preserve it and share it. See this link for more notes on tools that we use.

The last topic of our meeting was John and I talking about small checklists and upcoming projects.

Small work session with Chuck. He is working on the time homepage for elements of time. We are doing a full new look and feel to the page. Our session today was spent looking over progress, talking about changes, and doing a little bit of wishing and dreaming (what it could be). We talked about making the date jumper a more static piece of the page (older feature to jump dates by hours, days, weeks, or months). Say we were on 10/13/22 and a doctor said come back in two weeks. We could put in a 2, select the weeks option, and hit go. It would move us ahead in the calendar to that time period (days, weeks, or months). Chuck is planning a slight change to make it simpler going forward. Making good progress.

Looking over page level session values for Bryan's online scheduling settings. Light debugging and talking about next steps. That project should be ready by next week. Looking good. As a fun side note, if we get these settings in place, we will be able to remove a number of custom pages, which will make it easier to onboard someone new to online scheduling. It also will give us a place to build out additional settings for time, calendar events, and online scheduling. Good stuff.

Recording notes and doing some clean-up.

Buddy tagging with John and working on the database wire-up of the discount engine for the cart. Getting into the project and kicking the tires a bit. Light debugging on cart level SQL (database stuff).

Reviewing some of the new code that Bryan is working on for online scheduling settings. Trying to make the whole thing more turnkey and ready to be used by other users and companies. Adding in tie-in links to help it go live and point people to the correct settings page. Our goal is to eventually get rid of a number of custom and black box pages. As part of this project, we need to cascade the settings from data 0 to all other servers. Part of the process.

Code review and small SQL database changes on the discount engine code. Added some items to an online to do list for the project. Pushed up new changes to the correct code branch.

Emails and recording notes. Trying to keep track of what we are doing (good and bad) and where we are heading. It seems to be a constant task. Fun, but it takes time. Anyways, trying to get fully caught up. Good stuff!

Steve and Sean were on the meeting. They were talking about different demos and client needs. They did some work and training on the custom label builder and prepping labels for a demo. They were also talking about building a new report for a customer - hot list (active potential new clients). We added a value to the existing flex attributes and built a report and saved it in the favorites. Done. That was kinda cool.

John and I did some coordinating on the discount engine and talked about some timing options.

Both Cory and Steve were on the meeting. Cory was going over things with me and Steve would chime in when asked about certain projects. He was working on custom label stuff behind the scenes. We were talking about numerous projects. Coordinating flow on the Herbo server for what is up for testing and when that code (branch) would be available and being tracked. As a fun side note, some of the bigger projects that have been out for a while are getting done. It's creating a small traffic jam for testing and deployment.

Cory has a new project for an anti-permission (negative permission). This will be a permission that only allows the adding of a new invoice. No bulk look-ups, reports, or edit capabilities. Talking about pros, cons, and details of that permission project. It will be on my development ticket in a couple of days.

Thumbs up to Cory, she is doing great and coordinating projects between Steve and I and who is going to do what. That is much needed sometimes. More talk about settings and permissions. We also talked about prepping for possible rollback while or after testing, if we needed to. Basically, being ready in case we had to rollback code quickly. This is not something that we do all the time, but it depends on the project and what it touches and/or affects.

Group session with Cory and Eric, going over gift card logic and testing. We were talking about testing and Eric made the comment - the coder doesn't do the testing... you need someone else to test it. That is really good advice for us. We have been so small, we would play all of the roles, design it, code it, test it, and deploy it. As we are able, we should start sharing the load and getting other views on the code, logic, and flow.

While Eric and Cory were testing scenarios, I was fixing some logic and going through the submit cart page. Small logic tweaks to accommodate the new flow for multi-error messages without a hard stop or hard abort in the code. If one or more things errored out, the rest of the submit cart process would try to finish and then show any errors at the end. I pushed up my changes and Eric will add to them.

See Peggy's email (attached)

Brittany wants a dynamic QR code

selected>Mini Version - 3 Inch Format - QR Code

Checking online scheduling settings with Bryan. We were testing, making small changes, and merged files into master. We then pushed things up and did some live testing on data 0. We also made a small to do list and Bryan will be working on those small tweaks after our meeting.

Discount engine work session. John and I went through our to do list and got almost everything done. We worked on a new database update to update older discount engine records to be compliant with the new interface. We also did some data clean-up to help flag inventory specific vendors. Lots of local testing. Sent out a message to both Cory and Steve to let them know that we are basically ready for testing. That's exciting!

Emails and checking the bank and looking around the system. Not much going on today in the morning meeting. I joined a little bit late, so I could have missed someone, but it seemed pretty quiet.

Zoom session with Bryan to go over a few post-it notes that have been sitting on my desk for a little while and just need to get finished. We recorded part of the session. See attached. The three main things that we tried to cover were merchant processing and valid options for ecommerce. Some of the merchant integrations that we have are very hardware specific, and thus not a good fit for ecommerce transactions. While we were in there looking around, we spent some time talking about our old PayPal integration. It needs some updating and some loving. The last one was dealing with some settings on sub inventory templates.

There is a 20 minute video attached to this element of time, if you want to see what we went over.

Emails, recording notes, and a phone call with Shari O. going over emails, servers, and USAePay accounts.

During the server meeting, Wayne told us some good news that his wife was out of the hospital and back home. That is awesome! Wayne was reporting on some issues dealing with Alan's code and transitional invoices in the cart. Cory was talking with Wayne about different errors. Trying to clean things up and keep refining it (our app or software platform). They had a good light back and forth talking and questions and answers.

We spent a little bit of time talking about learning from our errors and mistakes vs just having successes. Great teachers... not always fun, but a great teacher.

They were sending emails back and forth and reaching out to clients and other developers. After that, Cory and Wayne were coordinating times to push and test certain branches of code for specific projects. Currently, we have a small traffic jam with projects being done and needing to be tested. Wayne had a good idea to use one of the other servers that used to be a dedicated box and the servers are still up but the client is not actively using that box. We could test on that box very easily and not interrupt anything. Great idea. We may start out that process by installing some server updates, testing, and then going on to the next thing (while our main testing server is being tested for another project).

We switched gears and Wayne was showing us some of his monitoring services. Just for fun, one of the servers has over 5.2 million records from the monitoring service. That has only been running for about two months on that server. That's a lot of page view and page requests. Light talks about traffic and data usage.

John and Wayne were coordinating on schedules. John reported on the discount engine. He is really glad to have that one virtually off his plate. There isn't more than a couple more hours of clean-up stuff that needs to be done. The heavy lifting, minus the testing, has already been completed. What a relief for all of us. It has been a big project. Lots of lessons learned. Cory was doing some planning on the discount engine stuff. She was flipping some user permissions on the old dedicated box to get ready for some other tests.

Emails, recording notes, and phone calls. Talking on the phone with Byan about round two of the client facing scheduling stuff. This would be internal settings, bulk add/edit tools for flex grid tie-ins, and more advanced mapping options.

Recording notes from yesterday and today.

I was late joining the meeting (dentist appointment). Sean and Shari O. were on the GoToMeeting talking about demos and client needs. After they left, I just did some clean-up, recording notes, and looking over emails. Entered some reimbursements from the Adobe ColdFusion conference earlier this month.

Recording notes and to do list stuff. Meeting with Chuck and touching base on projects. Most of the time was spent reviewing notes in the shop and putting summaries inside of projects in the adilas side.

Looking at some small bug fixes with Bryan. These are small things from our post-it note project (stuff that I haven't been able to get to and it just existed on post-it notes on my desk). Anyways, we merged and pushed up some small changes for sub inventory templates and limiting which merchant accounts to show out in ecommerce. Merged in files and pushed up code (4 pages with changes). Smallish stuff.

Going back and recording quick summary notes for a couple weeks back. I got behind during some bigger project pushes for the Bear 100 mile race and the online client facing scheduling projects. The date range that was missing was from 9/21/22 to 10/7/22.

Working on a new add only - for invoices permission. Prep work and actually adding in the new permission on data 0. Next steps is coding for it and then cascading the permission to the different pages. Mostly prep work today.

Danny was on the morning meeting this morning. The topic was videos and marketing. Danny is working on some quick tips and then some deep dives, dealing with different videos. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how best to get the word out. We also talked about themes - do we want to be more serious business or mix and bled and get a more playful theme. We kinda like the more playful theme.

Once the videos are done, we need a way to spread that information and link to those videos from various places within the system or within the site. One of the hardest things with adilas is how quickly things change. It is super hard to keep up and keep our users up to date on what is changing and happening. Often we will build something new and no one knows about it. That same topic "spreading the knowledge or know how" has been and is becoming more of an issue.

Sean and Steve were talking about recipes and production stuff. Sean was trying to figure things out and we finally figured out that one of the categories was missing some sub inventory attributes. We talked about making the error message a better error to help direct the users to what was needed.

We also spent some time talking about look and feel and being consistent. We kinda have a half-painted house right now - switching from classic to snow owl themes (all look and feel stuff). The last topic of the meeting was talking about setting up time with the developers and getting a full rundown on new functionality and doing some of the deep dives or developer level demos.

Small payroll review with John. We bounced to different pages, recorded some fake data, and looked at pages where action will be needed. Prepping stuff for year-end reports and forms.

Emails and recording notes from yesterday.

Small bug fixes. Added some dumps on the developer's update tables page. Trying to find the error. Small tweak to the sub inventory template error on the production recipe/build page. Pushed up files.

Working on the add only - for invoices permission. Made changes to 32 files. Testing and push up files. Cascaded new permissions to each server.

Recording notes from this morning. Both in the shop and inside of adilas.

Steve, Sean, and I were talking about showing stats, system-wide aggregated data and totals across all servers. We used to have these statics that showed how many invoices, PO's, expense/receipts, and deposits we had done. All kinds of stuff. It may be cool to get something like that going again. We were talking sales and what not.

After that, we flowed over into some talks about online scheduling and I gave them (Steve and Sean) a small demo of the new settings that Bryan finished up. We talked about the next level and what round 2 of those scheduling settings would look like. We spent some time and I showed them around in the bike shuttle site as well as what custom code we had done for Beaver Mountain Ski School. Good stuff!

The next topic was digital journaling or journals for whatever. Adilas is setup perfectly to allow any user or business to harness main players, log notes, unlimited flex grid tie-ins, custom fields, media/content, and photo/scans to almost anything. It could be clients or customers, items or products, appointments, events, invoice, etc. Tons of options. That's pretty cool. All of that is done, right now.

Sean was asking some questions about more graphical homepage and getting into some eye candy, graphs, stats, charts, and other aggregate values. I chimed in and mentioned that we have wanted to do graphical homepage since 2013 and earlier. Here is a link to some older entries that talk about or mention the need for digital or graphical homepages. That seems to be what people want.

Lastly, Steve and Sean were talking about demos and getting demos and leads from live events and shows. They are trying to work a number of different angles. It's fun to see them work and try different things.

Cory jumped on the meeting. She had some questions about servers and new changes. If everything goes smooth, she is really happy. If it has any hiccups or goes badly, she seems to get the brunt of the deal. That's no fun. Anyways, she is just being cautious and trying to make sure that new development and deployment goes as smooth as possible. I'm really grateful for that.

She was going through emails and going through a virtual to do list. We touched base on projects, new permissions, verbage changes, and small possible bugs. We also went over some new and upcoming news and updates as well as techy talk for deeper how to's. Other topics that we went over were internal scheduling settings, client data export (custom work), and looking at sales reports and associated drill-down links - trying to make sure that everything matched up and we were getting consistent data back.

I was having issues with GoToMeeting so we jumped on a Zoom session. Bryan is working on some changes with Digitech. He had to take a couple of calls during our meeting. They were to his contact with Digitech. Meanwhile, we took some time and started looking into the code that deals with PayPal and using PayPal out in ecommerce land. We've had a PayPal integration for years, but we decided that it needed a little bit of help and loving. Getting in, figuring things out, and making progress.

Meeting with Danny and going over options for embedding YouTube videos into adilas pages. We would like to use media/content, a custom player page, and make the whole things data driven. We went over some samples and even let Danny build a few pages. As a fun side note, Danny has been building out a number of quick tip videos (under 3 minutes) and we are trying to get those out to the public and spread their access links all over our site (where needed).

Just for fun, here is an older embedded video clip showing a demo of a liquor store and how they use adilas.

Work session with Bryan. We pushed up some code for some tweaks to the PayPal payments out in ecommerce. We ended up pushing the files live so we could test with real accounts vs sandbox accounts. Light testing. We will come back to this and keep pushing on it.

Emails and recording notes from today. Busy in meetings and planning today.

Good conversation between Steve, Sean, Cory, and Brandon. We were going over ideas for sales, eye candy, graphs, charts, and system-wide aggregates. Here are some of our notes:

- We would like to create a MVP - minimal viable plan (product, person, whatever) - focusing on the plan part of it for fracture (future adilas project).

- Brandon pitched the value add-on core model with 5 levels – 1. Internal core (transactions), 2. Industry specific skins and functionality, 3. Custom code, 4. BI – Business Intelligence (aggregates), and 5. Enterprise level (multi corps and multi worlds). Part of our upcomming plan is to work on level 4 - BI or business intelligence (eye candy, graphs, charts, stats, counts, totals, etc.). Make it look good and be quick and easy to get to. Bury the transactional core a couple levels deep, so it is still there, just feeding quick information off of the upper levels (aggregates) vs all of the transactional pieces and records.

- We really want to work on the look and feel of the cart - less is more on the display on the cart

- For graphs and charts, we could use cfchart (code tags) or JSCharts (javascript charts).

- The reports homepage could use some loving

- Surface stuff to help with demos and sales

- Capture the daily, location, and category levels – basically, per day, per location, and per category (on the P&L and BS). As a note, we already have this info... we just need to grab and hold it. Also, we could go backwards on this one... there is already something that exists. We could pull it all in going backwards. There is already a path and a pattern.

- ETL – extract, transform, and load – this is how you get the aggregates = Brandon would be happy to build in this aggregate table or whatever -Steve would like us to talk and work with Eric about the backend triggers and deeper database stuff.

- Lots of talk about database triggers vs smaller microservices - pros, cons, visible, not visible, who has permissions, and best practices.

- We need to remember the API sockets and other ways of getting data both in and out. This needs to be part of our process.

- We tend to get pulled off of a project due to custom code, customer requests, and budgets (time, money, resources).

Working with Eric and Cory on gift cards. We were testing and making some last minute decisions. Making plans for how we will roll this new feature out and who is going to be testing it (internal, clients, companies, etc.). After Eric left, Cor and I took a little bit of time and fixed a small error in the daily sales report.

Small work session with Byan to push up some code from his post-it note projects (old projects that were on my desk but that I could never get to). We merged in some code and pushed up some small changes. I gave him 3 more post-it note projects (round 2). They were dealing with some domain name changes, being able to auto calculate total time based on settings, and adding in a new column on the grouped view for elements of time. See the attached video for more info.

Server meeting. The whole first part of the meeting was Dustin and Wayne going over some new things for cultivation. We talked about doing a new database field for locations and calling it a location type (normal, retail, warehouse, backend, vault, etc.). That almost sounded like sub locations, but we didn't end up going there. I've got a bunch of other notes on sub locations and sub phases.

Kelly ended up joining us and we found out that we thought was a coding error was just a data or user error. Great dialog back and forth between Cory, Kelly, Wayne, Dustin, and I. It was a great session. Here are a few other things that I thought were interesting:

- Being consistent - across the board

- Forcing some clean-up and maintenance

- Talking about reports and proper data drill-downs - getting to the underlying data quickly and correctly

- Mixing different vendors and locations (report settings and filters). If they weren't just right, the reports would return different data (filter stuff).

- When Kelly joined, you could literally hear and feel the difference between a power user and a backend developer. Kelly, as s power user, had so much more depth of knowledge of what went where and how it got there (using existing tools). The developers could look at the data and the logic, but it didn't make as much sense because they had no context for that data. Interesting!

- We are trying to smooth things out. Some of that will be through new interfaces, training, and education.

- Some of the challenges of being so dynamic (as a software system or application). It is both a blessing and a curse (how flexible we are).

- What does it cost to keep clean data and how do we main that clean data?

- We would love to add some trouble shooting pages and/or known error reports or pages. Basically, a quick way to find and fix data that may have an issue. Flag it and then allow them to change it so that it is correct. This would be awesome if we could add this for our fracture project.

- Manual tests and audits of the data - Is it a code issue or a data issue?

- We talked about switching over our email servers and how that project is coming

- Talking about getting system-wide aggregates and how best to get that data in place. This is huge, we just haven't done it yet. We have all of the transactional data records, we just need to virtually let the cream rise to the top.

- Kelly and Cory are going to be coming up with some standard testing forms (what to test and different scenarios for testing)

- Cory had a small list of other projects that we checked in on and got small updates.

- John and Cory were going over end of the year payroll projects, once everybody else left

Multiple different phone calls. On the phone with Steve going over education, certification, and getting a quick ROI (return on investment) from new development. Steve has been talking with Kelly about some ideas and options. She has been a great resource. I was also on a phone call with Chuck. Sadly, he is going to be moving on to greener pastures. He got an offer for over double what he was getting plus benefits. It's a no brainer. Anyways, we talked and chatted, and we'll still pass him over projects as he is able to fit them in. Emails and other text messages.

Sean checked in but otherwise it was pretty quiet today. I was doing emails and small to do list stuff.

Chuck and I were talking about 3D printing and how he is hoping to do more commercial stuff with his printers. He showed me a few Udemy courses and we talked about web design, CSS, and normal JavaScript stuff. We were talking about how, in our line of work (web and code stuff), you have to virtually sharpen your tools (continuing education).

We switched gears and started looking at the time homepage redo project. Chuck was trying to help me learn about CSS grids, flex boxes, and expanding flex in both horizontal and vertical directions. Eventually, we run out of room. Chuck suggested that if we develop for mobile, we may need to drop some data or use modals to show more info (screen real estate). Light work session. We setup some more time for tomorrow to get back in there on the time homepage project.

Small review on the PayPal integration stuff. Making progress. We talked about tying in things better. This deals with small display changes and small verbage changes. Pushed up some files.

Recording notes from yesterday and today. Trying to stay caught up. Sometimes I don't have time to jump from meeting to meeting or project to project and still record all of the thoughts and notes. I have to circle back around. Thank goodness for pen and paper. They are my quickest tools that I can use while doing other tasks (phone calls, meetings, demos, teaching, debugging, coding, etc.).

Started on a custom JSON export for a client (half an hour). Spent the rest of the time looking into the huge file that Wayne sent over as a database backup for all of the adilas corporations. The file was soo big, I had a hard time getting into it. Spent some time trying to break it apart into small bite size chunks.

Breaking up a huge database backup file. I actually worked during three different shifts. I would copy from one huge file into smaller files that were broken up based on the starting letter of the database table names. The three sessions were: 5-6:30 pm, 7:30-8:30pm, and 10:15-12:00 am (midnight). Mindless work, but it just took forever to copy and paste that much data. As a mater of fact, none of my text editors would open that big of a file. I only got one editor to open the whole big thing.

Just Steve and I were on the meeting to start with today. We were talking and going over how to pull parent attributes for custom PDF labels. Sean joined us and they were talking about demos and different appointments. Sean has 3 demos lined up for tomorrow. This is just for fun, but I liked it. Sean was saying "I like to show them the possibilities and then let our clients fill in the gaps". Basically, we sell potential. That is huge to us!

We got into a discussion on the online scheduling and what is done right now and what still needs to be (coming down the pipeline). As we were talking, I was trying to show Steve and Sean the three different phases that we will need to build out for elements of time and the online scheduling stuff. We have one of the three done right now. The second one could be fairly quickly added. The third option, online scheduling using templates and time slots, is not yet finished. Steve would like me to work with Cory to get some of those next rounds scheduled. Here is an element of time that has the three versions or phases to the online scheduling (Id # 9415).

As we wrapped up the meeting, we were talking about other plans as well. Making progress!

Before Steve and Sean left, I asked Chuck to show them what is coming for the time homepage. They really liked what they were seeing. After they left, Chuck and I started talking about owning and starting a business. We talked about problems, successes, inflation, the state of the economy, and how society is forcing almost all homes to choose between money (dual income) or more family time (traditional family roles).

Switched over to looking at code and going over the time homepage changes. Chuck had a to do list and we were going through items on the list and finishing them up and removing the to do list flags. Lots of work with date/time logic, buttons, links, and if statements. We used to have a function called the jump to date. It was only on one section or part of the page. Chuck wanted to expand it so that it could be used more generally. Adding some new code.

Emails, text messages, and recording notes. There were some emails flying around from a client that they needed help. We reached out and it ended up being a false alarm. We had Cory, Wayne, Sean, and I all trying to help them, but it ended up being a user error (nothing that we could have controlled). Not the most efficient, but that's what happened.

Meeting with Chuck and talking about the vertical time views. We wrote some ideas down inside of the notes inside of the time homepage (code view). Lots of math. Going over ideas on how to wire up the page and work the CSS. We even got into fractions within div tags (CSS stuff). Making other plans. Chuck is almost done with the changes for the time homepage.

Recording notes from yester evening and this morning. Putting in my schedule for next month.

Working on a custom data export for a client. They want all main customer data, additional contacts, log notes, flex grid tie-ins, and media/content per client. Big JSON file. Working on logic.

Recording notes and cleaning up from the day.

Went into Beaver Mountain, Logan Office and met with Debbie and Kristy. Good little meeting and show and tell session. My main goal was to show some of the new client facing scheduling options and bulk flex grid tools. We ended up talking about all kinds of stuff. We went over online scheduling, special events, RFID tag tracking, reoccurring or duplicating time, campgrounds, merchant processing, hardware, and systems in general. I really enjoyed the meeting and hopefully the ladies did as well. Lots of potential for where we could go.

See attached for some of my notes. They would like a few tweaks to their existing system.

Got an email from Wayne and he wanted me to test some things. Looking into a bug and testing some new email capabilities. Looking over code on a branch from Wayne.

Monday morning and off to the races (again). Busy morning! Steve and I were working on some code tweak. I reported on a meeting with Beaver Mountain and showing them online scheduling and bulk flex grid tools. That went really well.

We switched gears and started talking about where we are heading, as a company (as adilas). Here is a quick list, the priorities haven't really been set (numbers) but all of these things are on the top of our list (quick list):

1. Online scheduling (we have determined 3 different levels. Number 1 is done, 2 is on the way, and 3 is still to come)
2. Internal scheduling (make it easier - internal - and new settings for time)
3. Merchant processing and quick and easy carts (chip, swipe, easy & pretty cart) - We already have a bunch of this, just refining it and making it tighter.
4. Labels builder and custom labels
5. Aggregates (quick summed up data) and business intelligence stuff (eye candy - light graphs, charts, and other look and feel stuff)

Steve was talking about his approach for doing sales. He does some things for free and then tries to sell them on the upgrades or next levels. We think that we can really do well by selling services and even reselling services from others (internally and externally as needed). As we go forward, there will be more and more focus on the frontend or look and feel of the application (UI/UX stuff).

Our current goal is just to keep cracking on it and doing daily refinement. That's about all that we can control or manage sometimes.

Bryan and I pushed up two different branches of code. They were both small updates and tweaks from what we were calling the post-it note projects. Basically, things that were on a post-it note, sitting on my desk, and hadn't been done yet. We launched some new code to help with total time calculations for auto calculations for element of time based on a time frequency (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc.). We also pushed up some code that helped to fix an older domain name change that was needed for the old adilas for business domain name.

Multi-hour session with Wayne on the GoToMeeting session. We were debugging things out in the adilas API sockets and dealing with sub inventory queries. We went through a number of emails that had been going back and forth. We also got into some database and query analytics and doing analysis of our queries. Trying to get things faster and smoother. Small work session.

There are pros and cons to this, but this was a direct quote from Wayne during our conversation. "Our flexibility is one of our biggest assets." We have a number of clients that use the system completely different, even within the same industry. That is awesome, but it can also bite us. Just part of the game.

Fixing the bulk add and bulk edit flex grid tools. Trying to make them more standard and available for anyone who uses flex grid, not just certain clients. I changed the page names from the bike shuttle company pages to more generic page names, so that we could use those pages for our other clients. Small tweaks and code adjustments to make the new pages work. I also did some work and added in the new bulk flex grid tools for Beaver Mountain and pushed up new code. Sent an email to let them know that they now have access to those bulk tools. That should really help them out.