Steve, Alan, and Dustin were on the morning meeting with us. Steve had some questions about a custom gram control that he was working on. Alan was reviewing with us his work with USAePay and helping to automate the invoice payments and reoccurring invoice stuff. The conversation trended towards the use of the external alternate id number and how those fields get used. We are already seeing a need for a one-to-many relationship between normal id's and the use of the external alternate id number (id numbers from outside parties and/or outside systems). Very interesting.

We ended up talking about custom needs, settings, and how to help direct people in other areas. We spent a little bit of time talking about building generic tools and generic database tables vs industry specific and vendor specific tools and database tables. There are pros and cons between both. Generic helps cover the basis but sometimes takes a little bit longer to implement and design and develop. Specific code could be very fast, but you then need to somewhat duplicate pieces as things grow and expand (different parties wanting the same things).

We also got into some talks about frontend development and backend development. Look and feel, user interfaces, flow, animations, and design vs functions, code, logic, database stuff, and backend tools. So many people judge our entire application based on their first impressions (what they see). There has to be a good balance between good tools and good looks.

Working with Dustin on some JavaScript and advanced options. We spent over an hour looking around and trying to figure out how to cross tie some application pieces together. It got pretty deep with some of inspinia and bootstrap code (special CSS templates, JavaScript, JQuery, and HTML output pieces).

Wayne popped in and gave us an update on where he is at on the AWS stuff. Lots of new moving pieces. Our goal there is to get the existing code working out in AWS land before adding all kinds of new code to the mix. After Wayne left, Steve and I were talking about some of the changes in the wind (virtual direction and force of the upcoming changes). Pretty interesting. We may need to get some other players involved and then figure out where they are going to fit in and who wants to do what. Lots of options.