Alan and Steve were working on some tweaks for ecommerce. They have some new code that helps generate tiered pricing code and they were debugging some of the pieces. Around 10 am, Wayne popped in and was giving us some information and an update about the servers and what things he was looking at as far as thresholds and matrix. He is really helping things out and is able to watch things and really get things more and more standardized and monitored. That will be a huge help. I'm really excited about that.

Eric joined and had a number of questions. For example: How do we flag the transactions to know what type they are? (manual, double tuesday, normal, auto, redeem, etc.) What about tracking rules and history changes for the rules? What about changing things (rules) right in the middle of the day and/or middle of the transaction? Eric is thinking we may need a way to change things and then publish and/or commit changes in bulk. That would allow small tweaks to happen and then fully wait for all other changes before really committing things (stages). We talked about a few of these things and decided that we will use 3rd party error logs to track rules and changes. We also decided that we would not do the publish and/or commit changes in bulk. For now, all changes will be live as they happen, one by one.

Alan and I were on the meeting and went over a number of projects that are currently in the works. We went over some needs on the sales tax project. We decided to do one more major push on that project and then push up the code and get things going. We have been close on this one for awhile, but it keeps getting hung up with the moving black box (custom code) target.

Alan reported on his permission and user project. This is a project that breaks users and permissions into a more object oriented model with services, logic, and database access objects (DAO's). Basically, our existing code base checks a three-way connection of user to permission to corporation on every page in the entire system. A lot of that data doesn't change very often. So, in the background, we are spending time and resources checking relationships that are fairly stable. Some pages have between 10 and 20 permission checks. That is 10-20 trips to the database for data that doesn't change that often. So, we are starting to cache (temporarily store) the data in the session scope. If nothing changes, we'll start using session or memory checks vs full database checks. If anything does change, we reflush the session cache and then go from there. This reduces the number of database trips by tons, if you take each page, used by x number of users per day, all with active database checks and queries. Great savings on time, resources, and processing.

We also went over a couple of other projects such as a round 4 for sub inventory and ways we could speed up some of the manual processes for reoccurring invoices, reoccurring merchant processing payments (credit card stuff), and tying things together in a better flow environment. Good meeting and lots of good progress on multiple fronts.

Emails, recording notes, and setting up meetings with developers.

Bryan had some questions on randomizing the PO numbers for a company. They have this thing that they want the PO numbers to go up by 1 if they are on the same day. If not, it randomizes the main PO numbers making it look like they have more activity. Totally smoke and mirrors on the client side. Anyways, we had to go in and do some light clean-up and also make sure that some of his custom stuff is good to go.

After that, we talked about a mobile oil change company that is looking for some software. Basically, they want a way to do a mobile oil change, put in the date and mileage and then have the system text and/or email them when that customer may need another oil change. Anyways, Bryan and I talked about ways we could do that and how we could repurpose different parts of adilas to help them out. We also talked about a future project of text reminders and outbound messages and communication through text messaging. We want to be able to do both bulk texting and individual laser focus text alerting, reminders, and messages.

We got some new graphics from the artist in Salida, CO. His name is Naters Art. See attached for some of the renditions. Some of the dog posses deal with fast retrieval, organized inventory, efficient search, secure storage, user friendly, etc. Fun stuff.

Steve and I were talking about some fun sales ideas and using the new adilas doggie graphics. See element of time # 4216 in the shop for some fun images. We got a bunch of new graphics yesterday from the artist.

Dustin was showing Steve and I some of the new functionality on the cultivation side. It is a nice interface with tons of backend wiring to make it really fly. Pretty cool. Eric popped in and had a couple of questions for Steve and I dealing with mag stripe readers and integrating with loyalty cards and what not. Steve answered most of the questions. After that, Wayne and I looked over a data import on the data 6 server. We talked about some additional pieces that will help the import look and be more clean.

Emails, tech support stuff, and looking into bug reports. Towards the end, Steve and I had a small chat about the assisted living business vertical and providing some guys a quote to use our system. No firm values, but we were playing with options based off of rooms or options based off of facility sizes and what not. Good stuff and Steve is excited to see where things go.

Emails, recording notes, and prep work. Reinstalled Git (version control software) on my machine.

Shannon and I jumped on a GoToMeeting session. After we got caught up a bit, we started working on more content for the adilas user guide. A few of the topics of the day were: discounts, discount rules, gift cards, loyalty points, exports to Excel, CSV, and PDF. We are trying to fill in gaps where we don't have much info and/or content for the outline subjects. We setup a time to meet again next week.

Bryan popped in for a couple of minutes to ask a couple of questions. Most of them were dealing with versions of MySQL and some of the software that we use on the different servers. Pretty small meeting.

Merging in code with Dustin and Steve.

Meeting with Hamilton from Full Circle at 10 am. They are looking for a January 1, launch date. Josh gave us a small update on where he is at. Customer dash board to show coupons, loyalty points, preferences, and maybe even a self check-in (add to queue). A possible manager's dashboard and tracking throughput and what campaigns are used and ratios for closing those campaigns and coupons. Josh is looking to build out some matrix to help show profit, costs, and other demographics (age, distance from store, etc.).

They are looking to add a flag at the corporation level as well as at the customer level on who is playing with Full Circle (who opted in). If both corp and customer levels match up, we can add additional functionality. As part of an advertising campaign, we may just grey out the fields and help prompt the users to sign-up to get the additional functionality.

Josh was talking about a virtual batting average per campaign - how many messages were sent out, what was the ROI and usage, etc. This will be more than just a response matrix, it will include prices, costs, profits, usage, etc. A mix of different stats and variables. Josh is also trying to tie-in things with his new discount rules and discount engine. This is a combo of both existing discounts in the system as well as mixing with outbound campaigns.

There have been some talks on making a standalone version to capture more market share. Basically, a special functional section for adilas users and another one that is just a standalone, that way it may be used in multiple arenas.

Timelines and vision - Josh is going to be breaking things into chunks to help with development and deployment. One of the keys that has been tied in, this past week, was the line item level of or for campaign tracking. That will be a huge key for reports going forward.

Question by Hamilton - what options do I have if I wanted to stand up my own box (server and databases)? He was talking about a go to market strategy. What are the entry points? Options (1, 2, 3, or 4)? Two scenarios, existing adilas users (what do they get) and new users, that don't use adilas (but maybe hit at what they could have)? Basically, Hamilton doesn't necessarily want two code bases but we may have to try to direct them to the main adilas system. Make it a double sale. Hamilton was talking about a mini version of the adilas platform (small and cute and limited) and then over time, allowing his outside users to eventually migrate over to adilas over time.

We talked about a mountain (show everything) vs a ice berg (limited view but more available)... Josh and Hamilton would like to flip the model and expose a smaller portion that looks awesome but has huge potential as they get deeper. It kinda comes down to the entry point (perception). This conversion is basically talking a mini version of the white label concept with a limited entry point. One of the key pieces is the domain name (it has to be pointed to a single server). We also talked about some dual entry points where we have both adilas domains and full circle domains pointed to the same box. Think of it like doors on a building... did they come in from the front, back, side, or up from the floor below? Piece of cake. It comes back to entry points, preferences, and traffic flow.

Hamilton was talking about "dangling" options in front of his clients... virtual up sales of what else if available. If you purchase adilas as a package, it may be harder to up sale the client - they kind of expect the full package. However, if they come in from the Full Circle side, they Full Circle, could sell and/or expose other pieces based on a more modular pick and choose type model. That could be really cool. Once again, showing the full mountain vs just an ice berg with more potential under the surface.

There were some light conversations between Steve and Hamilton about data storage and processing - who is hosting what pieces and where does the traffic come from? In a lot of ways, we don't really care where the clients come in the door as long as they come to play. We also talked briefly about Full Circle being able to expose small pieces as they become available (breaking the adilas mountain into modular pieces that are add-on's and virtual up sales).

As a side conversation, there was some talks about beefing up the reoccurring billing section (reoccurring invoices) and making it more modular and automated. Billing for our services is a big things for us internally. The easier the process becomes, the less time we have to spend chasing it. That leave more time for other tasks. The tuff part is the technical side, the fun part is the selling of the features - from Hamilton. Hamilton wants to use his existing adilas account and setup reoccurring billing from inside the system for his existing Full Circle invoices. We will have Josh and Shari O. help get Hamilton all setup with the reoccurring billing inside of adilas. Josh was stating some ideas about helping to automate things back and forth between the main adilas accounts and the Full Circle billing parts and pieces.

Went into town to work with Industrial Tool & Supply. I brought all of my POS (point of sale) hardware and a projector. I got all setup and then we went for hours both showing them things and trying to get some of the employees up to speed. Most of them were pretty easy going and had a few questions here and there. However, there was one guy who was very outspoken and 50 million questions and what not. That was a little bit crazy.

Anyways, a great meeting. I really think that a few of the people are really getting it and will do a great job. It is amazing how many ideas and great comments you can pick up as you are out and about, in the trenches, per say. Adilas will be better and better the more we all get out there and dig in. If we have to use it, and not just make it, the whole product will become better.

After the sales guys got their training, I spent some time with the accounting ladies and answered a number of their questions. Great session and I'm already seeing some lights come on. One of the biggest things is the ability to edit something... Apparently, in their old system, once you put something in, it sticks and you can't undo it very easy. That seemed to be a reoccurring comment that they kept saying - "I'm so excited that I can edit my stuff. That will be huge.". The other comments were something like - "You mean that I can do that from my own desk and don't have to go use the main sales terminal. That is awesome and will save tons of time." Lots of other fun comments as well.

On the sales side, some of the requests were to make a super simple interface that leads you into the other things. Too many buttons or too overwhelming. They want it super simple. Basically, a help me know the two main tasks that I need and that is it. They also expressed, if I need more options, make a way for me to get to it, but don't put all of it in my face at one time (aka hide it until I need it). As a side note, we had an earlier discussion with Hamilton from Full Circle and we were talking about a super simple entry point and the analogy between a huge mountain and a small ice berg. Even though both could be big and huge, the ice berg (analogy) is easier to chew and approach in a lot of ways (super simple and then more if needed vs getting lost in the size of the huge mountain in front of you). Good stuff.

Another couple requests were: make a simple interface that allowed for users to switch really easy between who was who and who was on what register. Another one was actually putting the word discount as a payment type. I thought that was a good one as well. Lots of good info and ideas.

Quick meeting with Steve to go over some code changes. I spent some time recording notes and touching base with Alan on some projects and concepts. Tons of emails and light tech support stuff. Worked with Wayne, Dustin, and Eric on different projects.

This needs to get tied into the special account project that Eric and Brandon are working on.

Lots of new PNG's from Naters Art for the adilas doggie cartoon images. See attached.

Phone calls and emails.

Alan, Dustin, and I jumped on and watched a demo by Spencer for about an hour. We asked him questions and looked at some of his projects and style. Fun stuff. He showed us a couple of responsive designs that he has done and we talked quite a bit about future vision and where we could go internally, inside of adilas. He uses a lot of his own CSS, JQuery, and AJAX to make some fun designs and great one-pager type layouts with loaders, JQuery, and AJAX calls (get the data on the fly without a page refresh). Great meeting.

Bryan and I jumped on the GoToMeeting session and went over some options for limiting the my cart favorite buttons. We drew out some ideas and options, and then we started playing with the existing cart favorite buttons to see how they work. Our primary goal was checking public vs private buttons and how do those pieces share as others try to use the existing buttons. Once we got that figured out, we went over some other possible ways of harnessing and/or interjecting custom code into the flow and then returning back to the normal flow again. Good session.

Emails, checking servers, and trying to wrap up to do list and mini projects. Sent a quote out to the assisted living guys for either a per facility rate or a per bed rate. Tons and tons of emails.

On the morning meeting with Steve. We went over a couple of questions and then I had to bail off. Steve is looking at adding some new reports to include both parent and child attributes into a custom report. He is also working on some deposit stuff. Never a dull moment.

Went into town to do some training for a new office girl by the name of Hatti. She works with Beaver Mountain Ski School as an office person. We did some adilas training on elements of time (lessons), customers (students), users (employees and staff), and flex grid (custom fields and multi assignments). Good meeting and Hatti seemed to pick up on things pretty quickly. I did some simple drawings and we went through a number of scenarios and features.

Towards the end of the conversation, I popped in and talked with Travis (owner and manager). We chatted about simple POS (point of sale) options, merchant processing, and digital timecards. I told him that they, Beaver Mountain, are only using about 15% of what is possible under the adilas roof. They are super busy right now leading into the season, but hopefully I planted a few seeds and some potential.

Clean-up and to do list stuff. Emails and paying bills.

On the morning meeting with Alan. We logged into the data 3 server and looked at some database stuff. We had some client questions on the invoice table and it possibly being locked for a client. These are corp-specific tables and only affect each individual client (corporation). Numerous emails back and forth.

Eric popped in and had a few questions. Around 11 am, Steve invited a gift cart company to join us on the GoToMeeting session. I chatted and talked them for awhile. I ended up texting both Eric and Bryan trying to check on some custom gift card implementations. I wasn't able to get much ground there and we may have to reach out to the client directly.

I got a bug report from Kelly on the data 7 server and jumped on that to try and fix it. I uploaded some new code for the fix.

Get Janna new account info to help her with the WordPress site back-up stuff.

Did some light research on blockchain stuff. It is a fairly big buzz word and I wanted to see what it was all about. I was reading up on Wikipedia about it. See this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain - A few of the things that scare me are the openness of it (no real spot where the data lives) and updating and/or editing is somewhat frowned upon. That is all we do... we house and store the data, we permission it, we capture active histories, and we totally allow for full editing with a valid audit trail. We actually run a number of the blockchain concepts, with our own little flare. I think we will stick to what we have going.

On a GoToMeeting session with Shannon. We talked about the state of things and where some of the pain lies right now. We then went in and did a work session on getting more content for the adilas user guide. We covered things like GPS tracking, RFID tag tracking, custom labels, custom documents and paperwork, and other subjects such as default homepages, interfaces, and dashboards. Shannon and I will hit it again next week.

Made some custom code changes for Beaver Mountain (local ski area) for their ski school. Added some new ease of use buttons, added some status filters to a couple of queries, uploaded and tested new code.

Light research for a different client on bitcoin and other crypto currencies. Reading over an executive summary for a new startup company in the financial and merchant processing side of things. This is my own comment, but I'm seeing more and more financial based company taking an interest in offering a solution and/or harvesting existing pieces the further along we go. They seem to be the bigger players who help drive solutions forward. It makes sense, but it is kinda fun to see the working and movements of the financial and merchant processing guys in action. Everybody is trying to carve out their space and create a valid and relevant solution. Interesting.

Steve and I were working on a change out in ecommerce land. We were trying to get the inventory counters (do I have enough quantity) to work and alter messages based off of selling just plain parent inventory, showing parent inventory but selling sub/child inventory, or just selling and showing sub inventory. Kinda deep and we had to rewrite some code to help make it work.

We had a client come onto the meeting to ask about some database questions. Wayne Andersen joined and ended up being the main key player that had the answers and basically helped the client out. Wayne is moving into the main server side point of contact. He is monitoring the servers, changing specs, options, and even scheduled tasks. Great asset and a huge help. Good stuff.

Emails and other small tech support things. Wayne also helped me out with data migration for client. We covered a few micro tweaks, but most of the data is doing great and flowing correctly.

Went in to town to meet with Industrial Tool & Supply. We setup some new dates for a test and dry-run and also a live inventory counting date and go live date. I spent about 2 hours with Mindy, the head accounting lady. We went over lots of flow and even popped in and made a number of new expenses. We altered some location and tax settings and answered some other questions that she had. She is picking things up and doing very well.

One of the requests that Mindy has is to help with PO's, ordering, and vendor terms and discounts. For example, say you have some items that you need. If you pay prior to the vendor invoice getting too old, you get a discount. Say something like 20 net 10 (you get a 20% discount if you pay your bill within 10 days). Anyways, I asked Mindy if she would be willing to help work with us to get some of the vendor discounts and vendor special terms worked out and available in the system.

I also spent some time with the main manager, talking about needs and options for our dry-run and go-live dates and events. The other guy that I spent some time with was the IT or tech guy, Zak, we talked about bulk tools, possible import items and prices tools, API sockets, and a digital wish list for ordering. We went over some existing ideas and also how a new idea and/or concept might be really nice if we could gather up all of the wish lists (and/or needs per vendor) and then be able to look at that and use the wish list to help make and/or create the new PO (purchase order). We also talked about a way to keep things clean and easy so that if a certain wish list item was not needed, it could go away without any problem. On the other hand, if something was needed, it could be used to help build out the PO in a quick almost reverse shopping cart type manner. Just for the record, we could use a wish list PO, JSON storage, or something else to help capture the wish list items and then be able to push them out to a real PO or something. Some cool ideas.

On the morning meeting with Steve and Dustin. We started out trying to track down a bug on the data 10 server. We finally figured out that a couple of the database tables were missing a couple of columns. We tracked down the problem and got it fixed. Josh and Hamilton from Full Circle popped in and gave us a small update on their progress. Bryan Dayton joined us and had a few questions about sub inventory and getting correct pricing for an API socket connection. We talked about how prices are determined based on possible options (order of operations). First, does it have any tiered pricing (quantity discounts), then to the sub, then to the parent item. Lots of deferring from one possible place to another.

That conversation and session (subs and getting correct pricing) turned into a small talk about the need for mini conversions and pushing the ball forward in that realm. Crazy how things keep going deeper and deeper and what not. Later on, we ended up talking more about the tiered pricing and how it gets kinda crazy with per item prices and total prices (back into a known total for a certain threshold). Things get pretty deep, pretty quickly.

Emails and tech support stuff.

Started working on a new adilas sales flyer. I will be using the adilas doggie images and a bunch of graphics from our ecommerce site. I will also be combining some pieces of what adilas is (currently) and what we are hoping to become (current future and extended future). I'll attach a copy, but it is far from done.

More work on the new sales flyer. See other elements of time for today for a copy of where things are at.

Bryan and I were working on the data 11 server and trying to get it ready to release. We had to back track and rerun some of the database updates. Some of the updates are cumulative and are built on changes of changes. Once we got everything working, the other pieces started to fall into place better. We will be passing that server off to Wayne next week to have him work his magic and tightening things up and locking things down (security wise).

More work on the new adilas graphical sales flyer.

Spent some time working and training Debbie and Hatti up at Beaver Mountain on elements of time, flex grid tie-ins, and customers (students). We went over some flow, duplicating elements of time, and reoccurring (sessions and/or weekly reoccurring classes and lessons).

Emails, tech support, and recording notes.

Wayne and I were on the morning meeting going over serves and what not. Wayne has some big plans and is even starting to experiment on different server configurations. The next servers that we spin up are going to have a Linux box to hold the database and a Windows box to do the web and Adobe ColdFusion stuff (server-side code). We also went over some other options and even goals of where we are headed. I've been trying to keep things separated, on purpose, for years. I'm feeling better about it and I'm more willing to bend and allow some new technologies to help us manage things better and more efficiently. Good progress.

Part of our server conversation was dealing with FTP (file transfer protocol), using Git repositories, Putty, Puppet, Nagios, etc. These are all server based pieces that allow for us to standardize, compare, and maintain from a single source. Some of the conversation was talking about getting rid of FTP and moving more to a repository based upload and sync for all of the servers.

After we got done talking about actual physical servers and configuration, we spent a good 45 minutes talking about potential changes in the database arena and what options we have available there. We were talking different engines, table types, transactional vs aggregate (summed up data), archived data, indexing, partitioning, etc. Lots of good conversation about table locking, row level locking, locking conflicts, query speed, etc. Pretty deep database stuff.

Like to tie into settings so you can turn on or off. 

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/developers_notebook_home.cfm?q=doggie

Working on the delayed update inventory counter page. Reading over code and making small changes. This was a project that Alan was working on end of last year, first part of this year. Just getting around to code review and getting it ready to go live in the next couple of days.

Great morning meeting today. Steve and I started out the conversation talking about progression and who is doing what. We used to be stuck in a model where both of us were running with all of the pieces. We now have a great team and each person has their own expertise and passions. That is awesome. We spent some time going over some new things, and even some potential things that coming down the pipeline. Exciting.

Dustin joined and we did some code merging for him. We had Eric pop in and ask some questions. Wayne popped in and Eric and Wayne did some testing on one of the servers together. Eric was browsing pages and clicking buttons and Wayne was watching CPU's, memory, and databases on the actual server. Pretty fun to see how things are starting to work together.

Alan joined us and we chatted with him. We went over some of the code and new changes between the live inventory update section and the delayed inventory update section (new feature). We went through a number of scenarios and talked about some other needs in that area. Alan also asked about some plans and how we are going to be heading more towards version controlled deployment, testing servers, and that process. Good stuff.

I merged in some database updates and ran those updates on all serves. Good morning meeting and lots of progress in many areas.

Spencer and I got on the GoToMeeting session. We have a small project that we would like to work on together. Because this is the first real project that we are doing together, I took him on a whirlwind tour of all kinds of stuff. We went over some of the current adilas billing, trending, etc. We went over look and feel, preset CSS options, themes, classic, snow owl, etc. We went over current shopping carts, views, and options. The small mini custom project that we want to work on is a new shopping cart called "short and sweet" - it will basically be a responsive design (mobile ready) and will have a place to scan an item and/or type a item name. It will be a one-pager application that allows for line items to be added, displayed, and other cart/POS functionality either in accordion style options and/or hidden menus.

We also briefly talked about building things from the ground up and using a base structure to create a new theme called "Fracture" or the start of the adilas fracture accounts. The goal there is full modular control over settings from a world or corporation level, a group level, page level, and individual level. Good stuff.

Alan popped in and we got Spencer setup in adilas repository with Git and Bitbucket. Alan also went over a light file structure overview with Spencer to help get him started. While they were doing that, I was working on a small document to help spec out a short and sweet mini cart interface. See attached for the document that I sent to Spencer.

Working with Shannon on the user guide and additional verbage. We covered custom look and feel, marketing, merchant processing, and some new info on mini conversions.

On a meeting with Bryan. We went over some black box questions, talked about upcoming changes to processes and procedures, and then moved onto some server updates for new data 11 box. We copied some payroll tables between data 10 and data 11 to help make sure that the new server was up to date as far as payroll settings and withholdings tables.

Working on the live update inventory counts page. Adding new buttons, verbage, and navigation icons. Trying to help out the page a little bit.

On the morning meeting. Steve, Wayne, Dustin, Eric, Alan, and I were in today. Wayne and Eric were talking query caching techniques and switching between aggregate sums and totals and non aggregated (simple transactional data). The conversation kinda went along the levels of watchers, feeders, hooks, triggers, etc. Eric was saying are we going to be building new aggregates based on the old design or are we going forward with a new design and then build aggregates off of the new design. Pretty deep data model changes. What are the impacts to those changes?

One of the questions came up about testing impacts and how does that work. Are we fixing legacy and/or being pro active and moving forward. One of the questions was the po/invoice line items table. It currently has both PO lines (inbound inventory) and invoice lines (outbound inventory) in the same table. The reason goes clear back to location specific levels of inventory tracking. If no locations were ever needed, we would hold thing (line items) in the different tables. However, if you add an unknown number of locations, that complicates the data model and it get hard to be able to roll the inventory levels both backwards (going back in history) and/or seeing current levels.

Going on to a different topic, Wayne and Eric were talking about a testing server and even stress testing certain queries and/or database tables. They were talking about caching queries and how often do we reboot these servers. Because we use Adobe ColdFusion, we've had to implement a nightly reboot to help flush memory. As Wayne gets into the servers and monitoring things, we are seeing that the servers are working pretty hard by the end of the day and then fully refreshing things based off of reboots. That is both good and bad. We are on purpose flushing the cache and the memory. However, sometimes a cache and/or an item held in memory saves tons of time. We still need to compare the info and see what the differences and advantages are. Like Alan said - we break stuff and then we fix it.

Spent some time working on the live and delayed inventory update pages. Going through the pages and reading and updating the code. Spent quite a bit of time working through page flow and adding navigation and other small filters and helpers.

Went into town to work with Industrial Tool & Supply. I spent some time working with Mindy, their backend office lady, on statements, email options, and basic site navigation and building small invoices and shopping carts. I brought my POS (point of sale) things and we did a little dry-run testing on doing inventory counts and what not. We also found that some of their manufacture's barcodes were off slightly. They provided the data and we did an import of 31,000+ items. The problem was, the import dropped off some of the leading 0's in the UPC or barcodes. We found that issue and started having them scan things and fix things. We have scheduled a full day for next week to do the full inventory. We are planning on having 10/12 people with laptops and barcode scanners to help with the update and inventory count.

10 am - group discussion to talk about servers and new configuration stuff.

- Currently all of our servers are and/or have been setup differently. That becomes a nightmare to manage.

- The server setup is done every couple of months... that makes it hard to remember what the setup process is and/or was. Our goal is to help make our environment become more stable and also more standardized.

- Wayne likes to use a program called Puppet. This allows for a master template and/or recipe to be deployed out to other serves. Similar to ghosting or cloning things. As we install and setup new serves, Wayne could then help and manage those serves. He was talking about server roles, scripts, and applying updates and changes. Setting things up and then maintaining that same type setup over time.

- If Wayne starts taking care of the servers, it enables us to spend more time developing.

- How do we deploy code to the servers? We are currently using Git (source control and version control). We are using phase one where we push code to the server. We would like to use a step 2 process where Git (our version control) actually pushes the code up to the server. When we get to the automatic level of deploying code to all servers, we need to make sure that we have all dependencies in place. This includes our database updates. Currently, the database updates are scripted and then run by users per server. Wayne is talking about a documented process that writes a chain of processes that have been run and still need to be ran.

- We just added a new server - data 11. We are going to be experimenting on that new server and using Git (source control) to push files up to that box. We are also going to be mirroring a new server configuration to help do some side-by-side testing. We are also planning on migrating corporations from data 1 (older server) to the new data 11 server. This is strategic based on trying to migrate clients off of an older server into a newer server environment.

- There is another part of this process - that is testing and running tests to make sure that things are working. Eventually, this could get into stress testing and really seeing where the code breaks and/or cracks (pressure and stress testing). Eventually (bad word), we would like the tests to help keep us upright and to verify that we are still good to go.

- Small discussion about custom code and getting to a confidence level of what is being done and managing expectations with that custom code. There is some more feedback and communication that is needed here.

- We really want this to be a group and a team effort. We are going to need help with ideas, code, migrating, testing, and deploying.

- One known dependency piece is the database update stuff. We have to make sure that the database get tweaked (the landing zone) before we push the code up. We are seeing some sort of cross process where we use Git commits and known processes (order of operations) and then match them up with a record on the actual servers. This would allow us to see code on Git/Bitbucket and also compare that with a list on the actual data servers.

- Small discussion between Windows and Linux boxes. The discussion was talking about database connection strings and where the actually database live (same server and/or remote connections) and where the server-side software exists. How do they connect. We also briefly talked about security of allowing connections between servers, clients, and databases. We are planning on testing things quite highly before anything goes live.

- At what point do you change? It comes down to the burning platform type analogy.

- Small discussion on changes to the database and the code... if brand new and no one is using it, easy pea-sy. Once it starts getting used (people are going and moving at full speed) it gets way more tuff and difficult. We are looking for a moving model and getting consistency.

- Primary goal - keep our customers happy. Secondary goal - all make some money and be able to keep going with what we are doing? Basically, we need a stable process that our customers like and have confidence in what we do and how we do it. That is awesome.

- Wayne jumped in and showed us some of the things that he is watching and monitoring. These are things like: how much memory is being used, how many connections, how many queries per timeframe, CPU usage, hard drive size, and other setting monitors. Wayne was showing us some things from his Nagios server and from his Cacti server stuff. Both are graphing and monitoring systems and what are the trends, traffic, and other server statistics.

- As a side note, we are also going to be upgrading to Adobe ColdFusion 2018 and MySQL 8. Some of the older servers are using Adobe ColdFusion 11 and MySQL 5.6 or 5.7. That should help out as well.

- We will be making changes as the need arises. We don't want to just make changes just to make changes.

- Small questions and answers between the developers and Wayne. Lots of talk about tuning, specializing, and customizing systems, hardware, software, etc. Miss configured settings and getting all of the serves tuned to the right settings. Rollover, fail over, and master/slave type topics. Database partitioning vs corp-specific tables. How do database partitions and indexing effect things? Creating independency between serves and code and serves and databases. Isolation vs shared vs other options. Live data vs old dead data (companies that are no longer using our system). Archiving data, rolling up data and totals, storage, etc. virtual machines vs actual dedicated boxes. Physical locations vs virtual locations of the servers, redundancy, backups, data centers, and even what vendors (hosts) we use. Lots of good discussions.

- Wayne and Alan were talking tons and tons about testing and testing strategies. They were also talking about getting things to the level of being able to apply stress based tests and performance tests. Basically, putting things through the paces. They were also talking about concurrent hits (multiple users doing the same thing) and managing tests based on simulated usage and what not. Good stuff.

- Picking up the low hanging fruit due to no current performance testing and/or performance configurations. As we get into this, we should be able to pick up a few of the low hanging pieces of fruit. That is exciting.

- Starting with the results in mind and then working backwards from that vs writing things and hoping for a certain result. Perception, expectations, vision, and outlook. Some great ideas. Test driven design ideas.

- At the end of meeting, Dustin was willing to help with the testing. That may be a perfect fit. Currently, he has some pretty integrated processes that he is working on and nobody is pulling on him for super tight deadlines (client requests). He is working on internal projects.

Working with Alan on the delayed inventory update process. We added in a usage status field to help us track what has been used, updated, cleared, etc. We also briefly talked about other projects that we are working on and a light update back and forth. Alan was tagged to work on the delayed inventory update changes.

Emails, paying bills, and random things.

While up at Beaver, did some training for the office staff. I had both Hatti and the new girl (can't remember the other ones name).

On with Steve and Dustin. We got caught up from happenings over the weekend and both Steve and Dustin had a couple of questions. After that, we then all of us went on mute and started working on our own projects. My first task was buckets full of emails and what not. Setup some sub account stuff for Wayne on the Newtek site to help manage some of our servers, support tickets, and account details.

Eric popped in and we setup some blocks of time to work on the sub special account tracking stuff - first couple weeks in January. This is for things like rewards/loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc. It will be good to get some dedicated time to work on that project.

Working on a image and media problem with our WordPress news and updates. Going in and making sure things exist before trying to show them. Small bug fix. Published the new and update talking about and introducing the puppy dog, Adilas, as a mascot and/or avatar for adilas. Kinda fun.

Steve, Dustin, and I were on the meeting. We briefly talked about who is doing what, and who is checking in and on what projects. Light game plan stuff. Wayne popped in part way through and had some questions. I helped him out for a little bit and then Steve did some training on what we normally do inside of adilas and how to monitor the corporation stats and usage from inside of adilas. Wayne is looking to simulate some of the bigger corporations and build some stress tests for the different servers. He is trying to get things performance tuned where possible.

After that, we broke into our individual projects. I was working on a new printable invoice that has no special formatting and colors and also prints nicely on a single 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper. I'll calling it the black and white (plain jane) printable invoice.

More work on the black and white (plain jane) printable invoice. I also has an email come in that asked some questions about accessing the adilas API through the URL (web address) scope. I went in and build a couple of samples to help them out. Updated the help file for API socket calls with some of the info. Emails, phone calls, and paying some bills. Lots of random stuff.

More work on the black and white (plain jane) printable invoice. Trying to get it done by tomorrow morning, meeting with a client. Had to modify some corp-wide settings, default printable invoice options, a few small changes to the limited retail dashboard interface, and some other small tweaks.

Finished up the black and white (plain jane) printable invoice. It allows line item photos and has minimal other colors and CSS (web formatting). It is very simple but should do the job. The goal was a simple invoice that prints on a single page of paper. I also went in and worked on the live inventory update page. I added options to select a vendor of all and then the rest of the page requires you to put in some other kind of filter in order to get to the underlying page. That should help speed things up for counting inventory. It makes vendor switching very easy. Pushed up new files and did some live testing. Good stuff.

On site to help with a huge physical inventory count at Industrial Tool & Supply in Logan, UT. Big store with tons of items and a big warehouse. We gathered together and I did some light training on what we were going to do. Then, as we got the different people going, we found tons of issues. We had been give a digital upload of their items and products. We had uploaded 31,000+ items. As we started to do the inventory updates, many of the items weren't there and/or had bad data (provided to us). Their Internet was limited, one of the queries inside of an adilas page was running slow, and we had laptops on mobile carts hooked to barcode scanners all around the store and the warehouse. The items that were in and we had good data went fairly fast. However, you would do 3 to 4 good ones and then hit a wall (time wasters looking for the item, items not found, bad data, Internet connection problems, slow queries, etc.).

The owner was about to call everything off. He had 15 to 20 people there wanting to do things but it kept having hiccups of one kind or the other. In order to keep people working, we had to go to a paper model while we made a plan. We divided up the team into small 2 person groups and some 1 person groups (depending on knowledge and skills). They then went about recording part numbers and quantities on paper with clipboards. A few of the admin team met and decided to use either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets (spreadsheets) to do the same thing but to use the barcode scanners to help eliminate double entry and human error. We went team by team and got each one transitioned off of pen and paper and into Excel or Google Sheets. That was much quicker and faster and was already in a form of digital data.

Two of the ladies started taking the paper sheets of items and quantities and entering them into Excel. We tried doing it in adilas, from the paper copies, but we ran into the same problems with items not found, bad data, slow queries, etc. At that point, I went in and fixed the slow queries in adilas and added a new filter to the main query. That helped out a ton on the speed of the queries and the filtering of the data. I uploaded new pages and tested live. Big improvement.

After that, I went in and built a temp page to help update and reclaim some of the barcodes that were given to us via the digital upload. Basically, Microsoft Excel had removed any preceding zeros (0 padding at the front) of the 12 digit barcode numbers. For example: Say the number should have been 0123456789, well it would remove the 0 and just make it 123456789 (treating it like a number instead of a string or general value). Anyways, this was causing problems. If you scanned a barcode and it had a 0 at the front, it couldn't find the item because the data stored in the database (after the upload) didn't have the front 0's as the placeholders. In order to find it, you had to remove the front 0's and then search again. This would break you out of the normal rhythm of the page flow. Kinda frustrating. Anyways, I built a temp page and ran it to update over 5,000+ bad barcodes. That also helped a ton.

Meanwhile, all of the teams were entering digital data into Excel and Google Sheets. It then became my job to start gathering up the data into one giant master Excel file. I went around and either emailed, shared via Google drive, or grabbed via jump drive data from the different mini teams. When I wasn't doing that, I was working on a new custom tool to import a CSV file (comma separated values file) and then do the inventory count update from that data. I got fairly far on that project by the end of the day. The goal there is to use the Excel file data to do a digital upload of the inventory counts.

By the end of the day, everybody was happy with the progress and we had done a full physical inventory on the whole store in record time. Not exactly what we had planned, but we learned a lot and made some great progress. Long day.

For my record - here are the two temporary files that we built during the day to help with some of the barcode updates and CSV file upload tool.

- extras/barcode_update_helper.cfm

- extras/industrial_tool/csv_item_qty_upload.cfm

Recording notes, cleaning up, emails, etc.

Got on a quick meeting with Spencer to look at the short and sweet simple cart interface. Most of it is just concept right now, but I love the direction. He is using a JSON (javascript object notation) file to load in the menus and actions. He is using icons, menus, and sub menus to provide the needed buttons, links, and functions. Everything is somewhat in its own drawer and slides out and/or expands/contracts as needed. Fun and I can see quite a bit of potential. Currently, he is just making it all happen in CSS, JavaScript, and HTML (simple wireframe with fake and/or default data). I feel like he is trying to think beyond a simple one-time project and he is looking at other dynamic options. That is great.

Meeting with Shawn about where we are at with end of year tax updates and changes. He has a number of new state and federal tax changes. His code isn't all the way done quite yet. We will be meeting again tomorrow. In the mean time, I will be running the tax table copier code that we have. We have to run this same report every year. It allows the payroll system to keep working and running. Then, as Shawn has his new changes, we run each smaller section and it strategically updates just certain pieces and parts of the federal and state withholdings tables. Good stuff.

After my meeting with Shawn, I started checking emails. It looks like there was a SQL injection hack against one of the servers yesterday. A SQL injection is where a hacker takes existing code and tries to find a weakness in the existing code. It basically has the server run a normal SQL query against the database, but part way through the normal process, it tries to break out of the normal flow and set some values, variables, and/or inject custom code. Wayne Andersen, one of our guys, was able to track it down and put a temporary patch on the code. The hacker was calling a sleep command on one of the servers which was virtually locking the database for a certain period of time. Not that I applaud this, but there are some pretty creative persons out there. I'm glad that we have some top level guys on our side. Anyways, I spent the rest of the morning making a few code changes to push up to all servers to keep things nice and tight.

On with Steve for the first part of the morning. We were going over updates and new requests. Lots of moving pieces. Alan popped in and we talked about the delayed inventory counter and updates on some other projects. After that, I helped Steve with an array loop for a custom report. He was converting from a normal query (database feed) loop into a hardcoded or hand-built data array of arrays (multi-dimensional array). After that, Bryan popped in and we helped him fix a small bug dealing with CSS and pulling in certain page variables on a full black box takeover report.

Towards the end of the session, Wayne popped in and we talked about server security and how to virtually "harden" our servers and make them not be "soft" targets out in the world of web servers, database servers, and web sites. It's a pretty crazy world out there and there are lots of super villains (virtually speaking) roaming about. We will keep working and go from there.

Steve and I met up with Russell to go over a number of topics. We had a great meeting and covered a number of fun topics. See attached for some notes from the meeting.

Back working on some more data filters and security update stuff.

We reviewed some videos between Molly and Bryan. It was dealing with some flex grid tie-in search results. We ended up finding some hardcoded values in one of the exports to MS Excel. Changing that back to dynamic values should fix that one. The other one was dealing with sub barcode scans. The problem was multiple packages having the same sub barcode and the code not worrying about the location, just the package.

Pushed up some code to help with the servers.