To start the meeting out, just John and I were on this morning until Cory joined us at 10 am. We spent quite a bit of time talking about legacy code and how hard it is to decipher what is going on and how things look, without having the correct data and/or context of the pages. Some of that deep page rewriting requires knowledge, flow, good data, and why are looking for this or that. It can get pretty deep.

John and I were going back and forth and lightly butting heads (just talking) about where we go from here. We also talked about how sometimes it is harder to transfer info and knowledge vs just doing it yourself. That may be quicker, but it can cause problems later on. If people don't know or don't like something, they tend to start rebuilding stuff or altering paths. There is a huge need for a plan or path to follow. Some of the decisions that we make are between the easy way or the hard way. It's hard to know which way is right every time.

We switched gears and started talking about play sites, branding, and swapping out logos, colors, and other pieces. Someone has to put the data in as well. A demo site or testing site, without any good data, isn't that good. We went over some pros and cons of doing custom code (altering the norm). Then we chatted about options for local JavaScript validation on forms and what not. We have a ton of server-side validation but are needing to add more local client-side validation to help our users out. This helps users know that something is needed before they submit the form.

The next major topic was dealing with copy and pasting. We do that a ton and some of our developers, that's all that they do. It works great but if you don't go back through it, you end up having a small mess. Pretty common. We talked about the costs to maintain things vs building new things from the ground up. Lastly, we talked about getting our developers good local data to test and code against. That is really important and really helps get better pages and gives us a better look at how things really get used and how they work in the real world.