Random notes from the day. Brian Stewart is a friend and 30+ year computer guy and programmer. He works for a different company but we go walking and hiking together in the mornings. We talk business and code while we walk. Here are a couple of gems from today.

- There is a difference between working in your business or working on your business - Brian Stewart on a morning hike.

- Create systems... Instead of setting pass/fail goals... create a small system and then start playing the game. Success is playing the game and working the system. The results will usually end up following. - Brian Stewart on a morning hike.

- Brian and I spent quite a bit of time talking about good cop, bad cop, and helping to setup the community and environment that you want for your company. A lot of the discussion was dealing with finding that balance point between speed, function, stability, and beauty. Not everybody has the same personality and/or skill sets. Lots of mixing and blending. Some of the conversation was how to mix senior developers and junior developers and to help them play well together. Sometimes that mixing becomes an issue and also a who gets credit for what and who gets paid for what. Sometimes a tough mix.

On the morning meeting with Steve, Dustin, Alan, and Josh. We started out and got things going. Dustin is going on a trip soon and was reporting about some areas in the North East that he will be visiting. Sounds fun. Here are some other things that happened on the meeting.

- Helping Dustin with some FORM logic. He has a ton of form field data that needs to be dynamic, grouped, and passed over to an action page and still be able to maintain its complex data format and maintain its special groupings. We went through a number of scenarios and he took a number of screen shots. We talked strategy and I showed him some similar code that is used for duplicating PO's and passing dynamic data from page to page.

- Talking with Alan about the idea of on purpose allowing the view of the pages to fracture and be more controllable. We did a small graphic (drawing) and talked about how we have known form field values. We also have a known database table that could hold the data field settings such as show/hide, defaults, data types, special instructions, sort values, field name aliases, etc. We then talked about how we could potentially use ColdFusion custom tags to hold the logic to dynamically populate and/or build the HTML (web format) pages based on the custom tags. The custom tags are a combo between a function and an include. Anyways, we had a good discussion on that. Alan was saying that this plays in perfectly to the MVC (model view controller) type scenario that we would like to use. See attached for a small drawing.

- We had two other outside parties come into the meeting. We had Molly (an adilas consultant) and a guy by the name of Ryan McCorvey (a user for McCorvey's Pro Shop - Bowling). They both had similar requests. They have different pages and reports (or functions) that are hitting time outs. Both companies have tons of data and Alan and I were taking notes and looking for possible bottlenecks and either slow queries and/or slow database tables. They could do the same reports and actions with small amounts of data, the system just choked and/or timed out when trying to process too much data. Kinda like getting a huge mouth full and not being able to chew and/or swallow. Anyways, we worked with both individuals and took some notes. Alan started looking into some research on what causes those table level slow-downs and what not.

- As we get into bigger and bigger datasets, we have to play well with scalability, indexing, and being able to play the big data game. Interesting how things keep progressing.