Emails, phone calls, and tech support. Talking with Drew from the bike shuttle company and helping him setup and save some custom reports to watch and monitor his online sales and online client facing scheduling and bookings. We setup three reports for dollars made from online bookings (invoice payments), riders and assignments (flex grid stuff), and invoice line item details with quantities, descriptions, and booking info. Also sent out a number of text messages to some of the adilas guys. Touching base and light follow-ups.

Went into Smithfield to meet with Cody Draper from the Bear 100. We met at his house and went over pros and cons from the 2022 race that happened about a week ago. He seems pretty happy with how things went. This is his first year taking over as the new race director. We took some notes and chatted for a bit. He is looking to push the system forward. We did some consulting and will be modifying things before next year's race. Good stuff!

Phone calls, emails, and light tech support with one of our clients.

Meeting with Cory to go over projects. Cory was asking all kinds of questions from her little list and from email chains that have been going back and forth between herself and our clients. We then moved on to some new projects and getting numbers, estimates, and quotes. One of them, a client wants a bunch of data out of the system. As we talked about it, they are wanting huge one-to-many relationships exported into a CSV file (comma separated values). We spent some time and talked about relationships and where CSV files work great and where JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) files work much better, especially if you have multiple deeper or more complex relationships.

We spent some time talking about the client facing scheduling and where we are heading. We have determined that we will end up with three different types (for now). The three types will be listed below. The main variables that we are watching for and tracking are: What is the date or date/time combo (when)? What product are they wanting (in case there are multiple options - what)? And how many people are participating (quantity, seats, participants)? Those are are three main variables we are watching - when, what, how many.

Plans for different types of online bookings:

1. Daily/weekly reoccurring with multiple participants. This deals with known and pre-set dates and times. We already have the rough schedule and just need to see who will be participating in each preset event. This is a normal one-to-many relationship with time being the one and the participants being the many. For example: like a shuttle service or ongoing event - pretend that we are going to offer a shuttle from point A to point B twice a day. We can hold 35 people per trip. This is a perfect example of the daily/weekly reoccurring with multiple participants. Think of selling seats or counts per event.

2. The next one is very similar but instead of being a daily/weekly reoccurring event, it is more of a special event or unique event. This will still allow for the same one-to-many relationships, but the dates are not as constant. That factor, the frequency of the date/times makes each event be unique. For example: Say you had one trip to a certain destination with multiple people going on the special trip or something like that. Because we have already plowed the path for the reoccurring one-to-many (listed above), this one should be pretty easy. Think of booking seats or counts for a special event (non-reoccurring or reoccurring but with special date/times).

3. The third option for scheduling time will be the one-to-one relationship. This is more of an open calendar and setting up what time slots are available. For example: Say a person wanting to schedule an appointment or get a haircut. The company or users would setup a basic template of allowed time slots and then allow for those time slots to be filled. The one-to-one relationship comes with one element of time holding info for a single client or customer. Basically, the quantity is assumed at one. This type of online scheduling could be used for campgrounds, doctor's offices, hair or nail salons, consulting services, etc.

After we discussed these options, in some detail, we talked about settings, next steps, and plans. Good meeting.

Meeting with John and Cory to do a code review on the discount engine project. John started out by talking about a class that he is taking at school and a section called "Requirements Engineering". He is going to pass on some information to both Cory and I. One of the main goals or strategies of that requirements engineering is being able to see and quantify those requirements.

We talked briefly about taking the time to get it right vs having to go back (again and again) to do other maintenance or backing to back track. I agree with that, however, there are times that you just need to get it done and you know that you will have to circle back around and fill in the gaps. There is not just one answer for every possible solution.

Most of the meeting was a code review session. John walked us through the process and did a great job verbally walking us through his code. If we had questions, he would take and show us on the discount engine why, what, and how he was doing certain things. I thought that he did a great job explaining his code. We made a few recommendations, but mostly it was him telling us and showing us what he has been working on. He is getting really close and is starting to work on the action page to really get the stuff to stick in the database. The frontend interface looks great.

We got into caching of objects, memory usage, and memory management topics. We spent quite a bit of time going over custom JavaScript that he had to set up to make his little one-pager work. One of the interesting things that he and Wayne are coming up with deals with using the users to help run the database updates based on automation processes and usage within the system. Most of John's new code is all in script vs the older ColdFusion tag based language. He likes that style way more and it feels like other languages that he knows.

The last topic of the joint meeting between Cory, John, and I was dealing with team building and getting enough training to help us all do our jobs and help spread the love, dealing with knowledge and training. After Cory left, John had a few other questions about finances and checking on the health of the business. Great meeting!

Sean and I were talking about online scheduling. We have a good one-to-many solution that just got released to the public. We would like to build out the one-to-one client facing scheduling portion of the system. You can do it inside the system, but that part is not yet exposed to the outside or client portals (ecommerce land).

Steve joined the meeting and we were talking about chipping away at the settings to help with the client facing scheduling. That ended up leading into a discussion about our developers and what size and type of projects are good for each person. We have some of our guys get lost (for months on end) because the projects are so large.

One of our goals going forward, will be to use more of a step-by-step guide or wizard type approach with check lists and crumb trails as to where we are in the process. Basically, breaking our bigger projects into super small baby steps. That way they could have one thing to do and could actually get it done. Once that is done, they could start on the next piece. Basically, a small and limited focus with defined parameters vs an huge open field.

Recording notes form the past week. I have been under two different deadlines and haven't had time to get caught up. I can actually breath right now. Yeah!

Prep work on the client facing scheduling project with Bryan. We also did a full one-hour demo with the guys and gals from High Valley Bike Shuttle. We had a number of adilas folks on the demo as well. I think that we had 12 people on the demo. I did a portion and Bryan did some training as well. Good stuff! After the meeting, Cory, Bryan, and I did some additional talking and wrapping things up.

Checking in with Sean. He's been prepping for some different demos. He demoed a hair salon yesterday. They really want some client facing scheduling options. I was going over emails and doing my own prep for a demo on scheduling that we are doing this afternoon. John joined and was asking some questions about the state of business and how adilas is doing. They have permissions and can look around, but sometimes it is easier to ask someone who knows.

The final topic for this morning was talking about dashboards and good-looking eye candy - graphs, charts, and aggregated summaries. That is what people really want.

I joined late. Steve was already on and Sean had already been on and left. When I got on, Steve and I were chatting about the Bear 100 mile race and some thoughts and ideas. Steve had the idea to put some kind of stats or leader board dashboard on the public runner portal pages. A quick 10,000' overview. For example: (pretend that the letters are numbers and that it looks cool) x signed up, y did not start, z started. We then could show where everybody is at... x at this aid station, y at this aid station, this many finishers, etc. 

Good meeting with the Bear 100 radio admin team. These guys and gals will be the data team that helps run the event behind the scenes for the live runner tracking portion of the race. We had six people on the meeting and we spent some time going over the custom Bear 100 runner interface and special custom pages. Small demo, training, and navigating through the different pages of the site. Open Q&A session. Good meeting.

As a fun side note, this is year 7 for the Bear 100 using adilas to help them track the backend runner data. This includes runner details, contact info, aid station times, running legs (between aid stations), and finishing results. The site also has a social side or what we call the public runner portal. From there the runners, their crews, and their families can watch the event, track their runner, add photos, and upload comments and encouragement. Good stuff!

Light tech support on usernames and passwords. Recording notes and doing some clean-up and catch-up stuff. Bryan and I jumped on a meeting and went over progress on the client facing scheduling stuff. He has it working on the view item details page. We still have a little clean-up to do, but it is looking good.

Started out with Cory and I going over projects. We touched base on multiple projects. We even spent some time going over existing code and how it worked and functioned (logic questions on customer terms and invoice due dates). We talked quite a bit about merchant processing and both existing options and future development options.

Cory wanted us to look into some code on one of the homepages that showed the top 15 customer/clients based on invoice counts. We looked for a good while but didn't see anything. I took some notes down and wrote them in my digital scratch file. We may have to circle back on that one.

After Cory left, I stayed on the meeting for a bit. I ended up calling the bank and requesting that our daily limit for expenses on our bank card get permanently increased to handle some of our expenses to the hosting company that we use. We spend thousands and thousands a month on hosting fees. Lastly, Chuck and I jumped on the GoToMeeting and I helped him out with a small bug fix on his local development environment. Busy morning!

Touching base on projects between Cory and I. Wayne was trying to connect but was having connection issues (he was driving). Once Wayne was able to jump on, he and Cory were going over back emails, client requests, testing plans, and projects. Not sure when, but most likely we will be needing a new primary email server here soon. That topic is gaining momentum and heat. We currently have a solution in place, but it feels like we are growing out of that shell (virtually).

Dealing with the email server code, I need to gather things up and get a copy of those files over to Wayne for review. I'll just go grab them off of the old shared server and send them over to him in a zip file. He wants to look over the old code. It is not currently in our master code branch, because it gets deployed on a separate server.

As a group, we talked about the next project for 710 Labs and Hoodie Analytics. They want a good daily inventory snapshot plus info on committed inventory (items that are on a transitional invoice - at the time of the report being pulled). We will try to get to this later this week or first part of next week.

Towards the end of the meeting, both Wayne and Cory and Wayne and John were coordinating plans and meeting times between themselves. After Wayne left, John was giving Cory and I a small run down on the changes and plans for the discount engine. We are going to be putting a deadline on this one as of October 1st. We really need John to switch gears and help out with some payroll and end of year forms and what not.

Steve and Sean were talking about sales, display booths, and conventions. We had a couple of people staffing a live event this past week. They are going to be talking with them today and going over questions and what not.

Steve was asking for updates on a number of projects. They (he and Cory) are going to be starting to implement some due dates on some of the projects that just keep going and going. We need to find a good cap or breaking point. This will be a new change, on some of the projects. Currently, we have some projects that go on and on for months on end. Progress is being made, but the finish line is unclear and thus it just keeps going and going.

I gave Steve and Sean a small demo on the progress and new stuff that we are developing for the online client facing scheduling portion of ecommerce. We were going over things for 10/15 minutes. After that, they both had to bail out and jump on another call with one of their guys. I spent the rest of the time going over emails and follow-ups.

Working on the code for 710 Labs and Hoodie Analytics. Small output changes to get rid of counter sale (dummy) data. Sent out a few emails and tried to run the historical report.

Good work session with Bryan. We were looking over code for the client facing scheduling project. Pushed up new code. Bryan is going to keep advancing the ball tomorrow. Most of our work was following the add to cart process and watching things all the way through to the invoice creation and adding the correct flex grid values. We also started to work on adding scheduling from the view item detail page (second pathway through ecommerce). The full path from the shop homepage is already done. This new stuff is a second way of doing it.

Towards the end of the meeting, Bryan was asking some questions about his other project to show/hide customer terms on all of the invoices. We went over a few things and he took some notes.

Eric and I going over progress and questions on the gift card project. We spent some time looking over code that was trying to mix both client-side and server-side logic. We decided to keep them completely separate. Making plans and decisions.

New week. Sean joined the meeting and we were just touching base on happenings over the weekend. Steve joined the meeting and the three of us were doing a little bit of catch-up. Steve has been working on the gram controllers over the weekend. Small report there. We talked about how we are constantly rewriting our software, daily tweaks and modifications. Good stuff.

Steve showed Sean and I a huge PDF proposal that he and Mike from Herbo and Eco Science have been writing up and getting ready for a possible big contract. The Herbo pitch uses adilas as the backend accounting and frontend POS (point of sale) system. Interesting mix and Mike is really pushing on things.

As we were talking about pitches and sales, Steve and Sean were rolling over ideas of selling or pitching smaller pieces and doing some local marketing on certain parts of the system. Sometimes we pitch the whole thing and that is so big it scares people away. We do tons of little things, we just join them all together to make up the whole system or platform. Depending on the situation, we may need to only expose smaller pieces at a time.

Everybody else left and John and I were doing some back merging of the master code branch into his local code branch. We were manually comparing old and new files. Trying to keep things updated.

Recording notes and time for the past couple of days. Logging things in both the shop (more details) and inside of adilas (summary timecards).

Emails and light clean-up from the day.

Working with Bryan and going over the customer facing scheduling stuff. Lots of code review, testing, and refining things. Today we were dealing with the elements of time look-ups and new add to cart buttons. Other small tweaks and refinements.

Got on a GoToMeeting session with Alan to work on and fix a bug in the USAePay integration. We got pretty deep into services and then cascading new code around to 20+ pages. Good little work and training session. Pushed up new code and did some testing.

Phone call with Eric to go over what we found from our earlier meeting. He and I were lightly looking over the code, without jumping in too deep. After the phone call, I jumped in deeper and spent time chasing down the bug that dealt with the look-up value for a single merchant account.

Steve and Sean were talking about merchant processing and where we are headed. Good ideas and plans. Shari O. popped in and we ended up on a 2 hour call with Newtek and USAePay. We were debugging our integration with the USAePay virtual terminal - merchant processing stuff. We originally did that integration back in 2009.

It got a little bit frustrating because it would work if we only had a single account with the correct API keys. Once we got into two different accounts, then it fail depending on which account was first (alpha sort order based on the account name). We ended up finding a small bug dealing with how the system choose which account to use, in the multiple account environment. An account id was being passed on to the correct pages but it wasn't sticking. At one point, we had Shari O., a guy from Newtek, a lady from USAePay, Eric (one of our developers), and myself on the meeting. We just couldn't figure it out. We were doing traces, testing, creating new accounts, trying it from different servers, you name it. I'm so glad that we ended up finding it.

Emails and recording notes from both today and yesterday. Recording in both the shop and on certain adilas specific projects.

Emails and then working with Bryan. We did another multi-hour work session on the client facing scheduling stuff. Going over AJAX calls and refining the pages to handle errors better and make the process a little bit smoother. Good work session. Mostly working on the time helper page.

Phone call with Eric talking about gift cards and USAePay accounts. Running ideas and scenarios between ourselves to make sure that we have things covered.

Working with Shari O. on the USAePay accounts and settings for a client. She has been working really hard to get things going and fully set and done for the client. Trying to get some of their API socket keys to work and play through for their virtual terminal payments. On and off mute, conference calls, tech support, and GoToMeeting screensharing. Kinda all over the place. We had two different sessions totaling about 45 minutes in total.

Chuck has been feeling under the weather for the last couple of days. We spent most of our time going over the new code on the working with time (elements of time) page. It is looking good. He had a number of to do list items and we were going through them. Making some decisions and helping him test some of the data driven code options. As a side note, some of the pages are getting really big with the new display code mixed in with the older classic theme. This page is over 8,000+ lines of code just for the working with time page. That's getting pretty big, for just one page.

Light talk about the Bear 100 page and using the mobile ready version this year for the public facing race stuff. We need to get the events page up and going.

Small demo with Cory and Sean going over the upgrades and progress on the client facing scheduling stuff (10-15 minutes). Wayne joined the meeting and we jumped into our weekly server meeting. First off, Wayne gave us a report on his wife's progress (health stuff). Going over a number of different subjects. See the attached notes. At the end, John gave us a quick report as well.

Working with Bryan over a GoToMeeting session. We spent the whole time working on the client facing scheduling and going over code, AJAX calls, and detail work on the project. Good work and review session.

Working on the custom data extract project for 710 Labs and Hoodie Analytics. Made the new formatting changes more permanent. Sent an email out to Wayne for him to do some of his magic.

Pretty quiet morning meeting today. Sean popped in for a bit. Checking out options and classes (training sessions) for the upcoming Adobe ColdFusion convention in Las Vegas. Flipped over and did some work on a customer data extraction project for a client.

Clean-up, text messages, recording notes, and logging time for the day.

Phone call with the new race director for the Bear 100 Mile Race. His name is Cody Draper. We went over aid station changes, when I need runner data and bib numbers, and how the invoicing will work. The plan is to invoice him after the race at $4/runner that starts the race. He's excited.

Bryan and I jumped on a GoToMeeting session. We were doing code review and taking a really detailed look into why certain things were added. We were making notes and plans and trying to streamline things. Good session. Planning on another one tomorrow afternoon.

Going over post-it notes and recording entries from last week and this morning.

Meeting with Bryan to go over questions on the client facing scheduling project. He had a few questions and we went over possible options. We will reconvene at 3 pm today to work more on the code.

Use this time id for work done to help promote and do the custom code work for the Bear 100 Mile Race for 2022.

Cory and I going over the quote for the upgrades to the adilas label builder. Cory had the quote open, we talked about each line item, and she asked some questions from a meeting with Kelly.

Small demo on the automated budget settings for the bike shuttle company. We also talked about testing and tech support demands.

Cory had a list of questions and things that she wanted to go over. She asked about how the top 15 customers were figured out on the some of the dispensary homepages. We went into the code and looked around. We went over invoice due dates, how to allow customer/client terms to show up on invoices, and other projects.

The next major topic was parent attributes and parent attribute sorts. We talked a lot about reworking all of the sub inventory pages and our virtual wish list with regards to sub inventory and parent attributes. It is super flexible and very needed. It currently works but could use some enhancements, polishing, and refinement. Never ending process.

Along those line, there has been requests for better bulk tools for both parent attributes and sub attributes, better reports and advanced searches, and ways to speed things up and make it even smoother.

Cory and I went over some quotes and talking about the need for better project management for our internal projects. We are really good at doing just in time project management but some of our project really need some more base level requirement and expectations out of the gates. Sometimes we hand our developers a simple one liner and then they take off. They just need a little bit more instruction and direction in writing vs just talking and verbal. If good notes weren't taken, things fall through the cracks.

Steve and Sean were doing another bout and going over BioTrack API sockets and connection stuff. They are making plans and trying to see if they can get other doors to open up. Some of these integrations with State compliance systems are pretty deep and keep changing. That makes it tough. It also changes from state to state and that makes it tough as well.

We switched gears and were talking about servers, stats, and traffic. We had some slow down on data 0 over the weekend. I showed Steve and Sean a couple little reports that both Wayne and I have made to help monitor certain page usage and application flushes.

Cory joined and she and Steve were talking about Metrc and their servers getting maxed out and having timeouts. We are so tightly integrated, that when we are up and they are down (Metrc) it makes us look bad, even though it is completely out of our control. More talks about BioTrack and other 3rd party solutions. They keep popping up here and there.

Paying bills and recording receipts.

Quick GoToMeeting with Chuck to go over assigning flex attributes to elements of time and how all of that stuff works. Text messages to developers helping and pointing them in a good direction.

Working on custom code to keep the budget counts up to date on the fly. Lots of testing and distributing code around to where it goes. Pushed up new files.

Meeting with Bryan and going over the flex grid tie-in portion of chaining elements of time and flex grid assignments together. This is how we are virtually claiming seats or availability on the bike shuttle project. After the meeting, I finished up some code to help do a bulk update of the budget numbers that were tied to the flex grid record counts. Currently, this file is not part of the master branch but Brandon has it on his computer, if ever needed again.

Steve and Sean were going over gram controllers and all kinds of ratios and scenarios. It sounded like a deeper need for real mini conversions dealing with ratios, sizes, weights, packaging, units of measure, and such. They were kinda going in circles and ended up making some decisions to just fake it a bit. Basically, they (an outside party) was not providing them the correct information, so our guys (Steve and Sean) were just going to make it work and make some assumptions. The communication back and forth has been non-existent between the state compliance service and our company. That makes it really tough. So, we are just going for it.

I was working on coding in some updates for the bike shuttle and auto updating budget counts based on flex grid tie-ins to certain events and elements of time. When Steve and Sean got finished, I ended up giving them a demo on where the online scheduling is going and headed. They enjoyed the demo and saw some good potential.

Steve had to take off and Sean and I looked at a small marketing video that Danny was working on. They are trying to make a number of small adilas tip videos to help with some of the marketing and sales efforts. Anyways, we will give a few of those a try to see what kind of response we get. After that I spent some time paying some bills.

Emails and clean-up from the day.

Recording notes from earlier today during the different meetings. Both here in the shop and also added some inside of the adilas system.

New changes to the output for the Hoodie guys. We changed how the sub attributes were displayed, took off some URL encoding formatting, and forced some of the JSON object keys to all lowercase. Other light changes, at their request.

Phone call and then jumping on the GoToMeeting session with Eric. Going over some FORM and URL scope variable stuff for the gift card project.

Use for general project management stuff. Add details to the notes.

Emails and recording notes. Helping Bryan with some merchant processing settings. Email back to the guys at Hoodie about one of the custom data export projects.

Meeting with both Bryan and Chuck and going over the progress on the ecommerce side for client facing scheduling. Bryan is further along than I thought. That's awesome and we'll be hitting this project harder in the next few days.

Chuck joined the meeting. Cory was still on from the last meeting. She quickly reported to Chuck about the video for the adilas label builder that he had done. Cory had showed it to kelly and had gotten some good feedback.

After that, Chuck and I talked briefly about 3D printing and building in supports for more complex projects. This was just for fun.

We got into a small session and talked about financials and available hours, based on projects and budgets. We hopped into the system and looked around. After that, Chuck and I spent some time looking at his new code for the working with time page for elements of time. Lots of layout and UI (user interface) changes. It is looking good. Big lift and Chuck is adding tons of new code to help with the layout and such. He is somewhat experimenting with different layouts and formatting options. I thought that it was looking good.

The last topic of the session was dealing with maintenance costs going between the older classic code and the newer snow owl look and feel theme. Some of our pages are doubling due to the amount of code to handle both versions and/or themes. Once again, a maintenance deal - hidden costs.

Wayne was unable to attend today. Just Cory, John, Sean, and I were on the call. We started out and I reported on some of the projects that I had been working on. Two of note were the first round of the bulk update flex grid tie-ins for the bike shuttle company. This is dealing with persons being attached to a calendar event or element of time. I also reported on the update on the time sub date/time notes and expanding the field to allow HTML and more characters.

Cory had some questions about servers and memory management stuff. We talked about projects, costs, budgets, and skill levels of the developer who were assigned to certain projects. One of the side notes here was the high cost of code maintenance. It's part of our game. We just need to charge enough that we can continue to keep things up. Often we get tricked into just charging what the project costs (at the time of development) and totally forget that later on we will have to do maintenance on that code as it becomes part of a bigger whole.

Phone call with a client. Passing on some updates and information. Spent some time looking into a bug that Cory reported. Found the bug and pushed up new code. Emailed both Cory and Steve about what I found with the bug. It ended up being a date sync thing. One of the custom pages had a date sync option tied to the settings. Every day, the sync would check the stored date to see if it had the latest info. It would resave the settings and thus refresh itself. The auto process was saving most of the old settings but setting some of them to a default value vs holding the older settings. That was the problem.

Took the rest of the time and worked on pushing up Chuck's new code to expand the time - sub date/time notes field. It was limited to 255 characters. We expanded it and allowed for HTML in the new text field (65,000 character limit). Ran the database update on all servers and pushed up code and did some testing.

Recording notes from this morning's meetings. Something is always going on.

Steve and Cory were talking about looking up projects in bit bucket (code repository stuff). Being able to check on commits and branches. They were then talking about different industries and how they are financing some of their developments. Lots of games that people play and how do we fit into that mix. While Steve was still on with us, Cory was reporting in on some meetings that she had had with Kelly dealing with the adilas label builder and sub inventory attributes. Both of those subjects seem to be heating up a bit.

Our current goal is to focus and try to get some small victories (projects being done and across the finish line). Cory and I spent some time going over projects. We talked about the need to test everything. Even small stuff. We have had it bite us before. Next, Cory and I looked into a possible bug in some settings. We looked and looked and couldn't see anything quickly. We may have to jump in deeper, when we get a chance.

Shari O. popped in and had some questions about getting a new internal email server. Our current solution has been giving us some problems lately. We don't change any code on our side and it works great, all of the sudden it will be down, and without any changes on our side, it all of the sudden starts working again. Kinda crazy. Shari O. calls it the gremlins or email gremlins. As a side note, later in the meeting she popped back in to let us know that it was working again. Random.

Wayne joined the meeting and got Cory and I up to speed on a few things that he is trying to work on. Performance tweaks.

Cory and I then started going over her list of possible projects, quotes, and estimates.

- Need quotes for inputting sub attribute data all at one time upon PO creation (start with build page)
- Bulk update sub attributes interface
- Mapping of EOT (elements of time) data to sub attributes (settings for cultivation and manufacturing)

Along the way, we were talking about options and settings that relate to the concepts of the data assembly line, recipe/builds, showing subs in the packaging and production pages, and managing recipe/build output better. Lot of talk about bulk edit tools for sub inventory attributes, batches, phasing, sub locations, and moving subs along a known path or virtual assembly line.

Dealing with the data assembly line concepts, I was telling Cory how we setup both rules and assignments for smart group buttons (tiered pricing buttons). I was mentioning that we could use something similar to help setup and do the mapping between elements of time, sub phases, sub locations, sub groups, and monitoring the progress of certain things. We need the rules (what or how to do things) and the assignments (who or what to connect or monitor). Using the two pieces in combo (rules and assignments) we could then have the computer and/or system help us monitor progression and progress. They are good at that, they just need instructions and the who, what, when, how, and why and they can do those jobs over and over again.

As we keep rolling more and more towards the concept of fracture (future adilas project) I would really like to keep working on the data assembly line concepts and using rules and assignments to get the correct flow and mapping in place. I see that as important as we keep going forward.

Steve and Sean were going over sales and issues syncing up with Metrc values. They are working on some changes. That seems to be an ever-moving target.

Steve had some code questions for me, and then we went over some ideas and options dealing with when to loop and when to not loop over arrays, based on the values needed. Light code help.

I spent the rest of the morning doing emails and recording notes from yesterday.

Finished up the first round of the bulk edit flex grid tie-ins page. Lots of testing and small tweaks. Pushed it up online and let a few people know about it to go in and do some live testing.

Deep in action land for the bulk edit flex grid tie-ins. Tons and tons of crazy dynamics. Getting closer and closer to what we need the page to do. It's a refinement type process. Start with a jumble of data, then slowly whittle it down to usable pieces, then actually make the rubber meet the road and make it stick in the database.

Back working on the bulk flex grid tools. It took a little while to get back into the project. That makes it tough. It's been a couple of weeks and then a couple of weeks before that since we worked on this project. You sort of lose a little bit of traction due to time away from the project. Anyways, got it back going, reviewing code, and slowly making progress.

Most of the work this morning was dealing with gathering and organizing the bulk edit process. Lots of data coming across, some of it is the same (no change), and some of it has been changed. Trying to keep track of what has been changed and what pieces need to be taken care of. Lots of dynamics and looping to get the dynamics to all work out.

This might be kind of techy but, the big bulk edit page keeps track of each line item id number, each field is named so that it has the line id embedded into the field name. We also track what has been changed based on some JavaScript on that page. The JavaScript keeps a list of values and then passes it to the action page. Once on the action page, we build a structure to hold all of the id numbers to keep it organized. We then loop over what has changed and figure out field names and corresponding values and place them in arrays that are assigned to the correct line id's. Once everything is sorted out, you have to loop over the correct arrays and do database updates to make things stick. Imagine if you had a hundred fields being passed back to you through a bulk edit process. If you only changed 5 fields, you only want to update those values, all of the other data needs to stay as is. It can get pretty deep, very quickly.

Recording notes from my meeting with Wayne this morning. Lots of refinements and memory management stuff going on. Small tweaks every day. Slow and steady.

Emails and going through things. Wayne joined the meeting and we chatted about the cfinvoke tag (code inside of ColdFusion that calls a method or a function in a library of code). We also got into how if it (the cf invoke tag) is used in a loop it uses a lot of system resources and memory. Basically, it has to copy the whole CFC (coldfusion component or class) every time that it is used. If it used in a loop, it won't be able to cache it and it rebuilds it every time, however many time it loops. Anyways, we have a number of these spread throughout the system. Wayne was saying that we could speed things up if we made some changes and used the Application.cfc to setup the initial component or classes and then refer to that in our loops vs building it every time on the fly.

We went over some samples and he showed me what it could look like. He is going to start making some changes and we'll go from there. Eventually, we'll need to cascade new code all around the system. One little step at a time. As a side note, our whole conversation this morning was having a "progression over time" type feeling. Basically, we start out with something, then it grows, then we modify it to make it better and faster. All part of the process.

Next, we got into some other talks about memory management and efficiency of certain tasks and procedures. Wayne was talking about some new try's, catches, default error throwing, and some new flow. Part of Wayne's desire to make these changes deals with automated testing. If we change things, it makes it better for automated testing. Currently, a couple of the things that stop the automated testing is hard aborts and page includes. If we can get rid of those and just use catches and throws, it becomes better for testing.

The goal is continuing to tighten things up and refine things and processes. Wayne is playing with some global trim functions and how best to push those pieces through our code. Right now, we trim everything that a user may interact with (URL and FORM scope variables). Basically, Wayne is "salting" little pieces of experimental code throughout the system, trying to help speed things up.

Emails and then working on the custom data output or export for a client. Pushed up a new file with some changes and sent them an email.

Emails, recording notes, and small bug fixes. Working on some pagination issues when doing customer searches - both basic and advanced. Bug was reported by Sean. Trying to clean off my desk a bit.

Good phone call with John. We were going over progress on his discount engine project and touching base on general business stuff. We covered all kinds of topics. Most of it was dealing with changes, communication, direction, plans, carrots (rewards), and punishments. We also got into topics dealing with budgets, changes that are coming, and numerous upcoming projects and details about those projects. I thought that it was a good call.

Finished up some changes on the custom data export and data extract for a client. Pushed up a temp file and did some testing. Sent an email with information and plans.

Recording notes from yesterday and today. Making a few entries in both the adilas shop (these entries) and some over in the main adilas site for subs of time and project timeclocks. Emails and other clean-up stuff.

Looking into server page stats with Wayne and Cory. Small bugs and tracking down sources. Wayne has released his new monitoring services on data 0. We were looking at page views and what not. The top page was the view cart page with over 22,000 views in just the first 5 days of launching the monitoring service. This is just on data 0, not even that busy of a server. Our servers get hammered, daily!

Cory had a number of questions for Wayne from emails and other projects that are circling around. We spent some time talking about memory issues on both the server-side and the client-side. This is kinda new, but we are starting to see more client-side memory issues. A normal page, the server handles all of the memory stuff. We can mostly control all of those pieces. On some of the new and fancy heavy JavaScript pages, it gets to be a big client-side load in order to keep all of that data quickly at hand (data loaded on the client-side in the browser). We will keep working with stuff, but may have to break things down into smaller and smaller pieces.

Some of our pages may need to be refactored. They are doing too much and/or requiring the browser to work too hard or store too much info. This may be something that we need to be aware of for our future fracture project. We have to balance both client-side and server-side memory management stuff. Just because we can use AJAX and JavaScript and cool data tables, that may not always be the answer. At some point, even those things fail. We need a good mix of both and make it as smooth as possible.

More work on the code for 710 Labs and the custom data extract that they are wanting with all sub inventory attributes and invoice line item data.

Working on the 710 Labs custom data extract and data export. They wanted all of the sub inventory attributes to be passed back with every sale and line item. Working on the new code and writing new logic.

Phone call with Eric going over questions and flow for the gift card payments and project.

Meeting with Cory to go over the quote line items for the adilas label builder. We made a small Word document and added in all kinds of notes, verbage, and estimates on hours for each section. That document was sent to Cory via email and also uploaded inside of adilas for that label builder project. We also did some training on adding media/content to sub inventory items. Lastly, we went through some older notes and tried to make sure that we have/had all of the MVP requirements. Productive meeting and making good progress.

Working on new logic and added custom data extract files into master for a client. We were making enough changes that we needed to start tracking those inside of a branch. Originally, they were just on the side - a one off page. Now they are part of the master file system.

I sent Sean an email with a link to some business consulting that was done back in 2019/2020 by Jonathan Johnson from Epic Enterprise. I also sent his a 9 page document that had even more notes, ideas, and brainstorming for our company and where we are heading. Good stuff.

Chuck checked in and we quickly reviewed a few things. He and I met yesterday so we were pretty much on top of things. As a side note, he did inform us that he got admin permissions for our YouTube account and will be helping there.

I spent most of the rest of the session working on an error that Cory got from Kelly. It was a cause and effect error. The other day we increased the character limits on one of the fields. That was working great. The cause and effect came into play as those new bigger records got pushed over to invoices and quotes as additional customers and additional contacts on those invoices and quotes. Anyways, we got it all figure out and pushed up new database updates and new code to all servers. Finished up the session doing emails and clean-up there.

We were going to have a server meeting but Wayne was helping someone who needed his help. It was just Cory, John, and I on the meeting. We were giving a number of verbal reports back to Cory on different projects. I was showing her some code and some of the challenges of what is wanted and needed. Making progress.

Cory and I listened to John talk about the discount engine project. We are looking to wrap that project up here in the next short while. It has run on for months. Our current plan is to at least end this phase of the project. It may get turned over to a different developer to finish up the heavy backend wire-up job. John has mostly been working on the frontend GUI (graphical user interface) and getting the main admin discount engine page tuned up for managers and such. There is still more work needed on tying in other pieces, but that will be part of the next phase.

One thing of note, John was talking about having his discount engine code do a database update on application start-up vs a normal scripted updates that gets ran manually. I don't have a problem with that, but I just want to make sure that we don't tax the start-up process too much. Just a thought.

Sean joined the meeting and was asking about a small bug. That conversation lead into a further discussion about other cause and effect errors (change this or that and it affects this or that or whatever). It is amazing how interconnected a system may become.

Working on storing and converting complex datasets for a custom client data extract project. Working on a scratch file to make sure that it would work.

Recording notes from the earlier part of the day. Some of the notes are here in the shop and some inside of adilas per project.

Small side note - Transitions... Sometimes we flip between projects hour by hour... that costs money in the transitions. What if we did things day by day vs hour by hour. It sure would wear us (the developers) out far less if we were able manage it. Transitions can be a killer on time, budgets, and moral.

Meeting with Chuck and going over layout and display options for the "working with time" page (part of the elements of time section). That page has tons of dynamics and was built as a mini prototype for what we want fracture to do and be. Basically, the page uses templates and then either hides, shows, uses dynamic naming, aliases, incorporates settings, permissions, and even eventually sort order and display order. This "working with time" page was built in 2011 but has pieces that we want to do and use throughout the whole system once we move to the fracture level. Ask Brandon for more info on the subject.

Chuck and I were going over design options. We brought up the current page in a simple mode, a medium mode (settings and data), and then in an advanced mode (more settings, more data, and more dynamics). We were drawing pictures and running things through fake mock-up ideas. The page has to be able to handle all of the different possible combinations of settings, templates, defaults, subs of time, flex grid tie-ins, and other dynamics. Each section will end up being in a container of sorts to help with web ready responsive design (mobile friendly). Lots of talk about nav, standards, and where we are heading. The other major variable is how much data is tied to a single element of time. It is just a quick virtual post-it note, an appointment, a project, a timecard, a vacation booking, or clear down to a dispatch level event? Elements of time are very diverse. The amount of data could be huge or super small per element of time, based on the template and the settings and the amounts of sub info or subs attached to the main element of time.

At the end of the meeting (last 10 minutes) we flipped and talked about a small bug that was found and reported to Chuck and also his new promo video for the adilas label builder.

On a conference call with Shari O. and a rep from Newtek. We were going over specifics for two different clients and their merchant processing needs. Both sides were educating the other side as to flow, processes, and needs. I had to bail out at 1 pm to get on a new meeting but Shari O. was trying to help negotiate rates for a client where they, Newtek, couldn't provide the correct hardware device.

Reviewing a small promo video from Chuck dealing with the adilas label builder. The video is about 5 minutes long and pitches the adilas label builder project and what we want to do with it.

https://vimeo.com/744675016

Zoom meeting with a client and a 3rd party marketing and communications company. They wanted to see if they could get a client's data out of the system to help feed their offerings (marketing and promotion stuff). Interestingly enough, this meeting was requested by our client and them wanting to use adilas data and be able to get it out to other (mulitple) 3rd parties. All of it was dealing with marketing efforts, communications, notifications, and promotions. We, as a company, aren't very good at that (the actual marketing part of it), but companies that are good at marketing need the data that we are collecting and holding for companies. Things such as CRM, POS, inventory tracking, histories, etc. We have all of the data. It just isn't organized into marketing avenues and pathways yet. Keyword, yet...

Anyways, we went over things like: opt in/out, loyalty points, capturing and recording digital signatures, transferring data, as well as push and pull type options for data events and actions. Lots of talk about API sockets and RESTful API's.

Great meeting with Eric going over his progress and questions on the gift cards and gift certificates. This will be part of special accounts inside of the system (tying into existing pieces and sections). We are planning on doing single corporation gift cards for now. Once we get that done, and if someone needs it, we will tackle cross-corp or multi-corp gift cards. That gets more complicated and we could charge for that and/or those options.

Eric was going over a number of scenarios and use-cases. I loved hearing it. I could tell that he had thought about a number of great scenarios, processes, and even logic level decisions. Checks, balances, validation, flow, pages, permissions, etc. Good stuff. I was really proud of him for that. Basically, try to break it and make it stand on its own.

Part way through the meeting I grabbed the screen and we looked at existing database tables, data, and options. We were drawing and brainstorming on additional ideas. We talked about quick search options, checkout options and flow inside the cart, invoices and payments after the fact, ecommerce integration, and other advanced options. Good meeting. He is well on his way and making great progress. All of this will tie-in and be a part of the special accounts section. We already use customer loyalty points in that section of the system. More things will be coming in future months such as: in-store customer credit, vendor discounts, punch cards, lunch cards, retirement packages or accounts, and other virtual or actual special account. Good stuff.

Steve, Sean, and Cory were on the morning meeting when I joined. Cory was only there for a little bit but after she left, Steve and Sean were talking about setting up a rough schedule for some of their sales guys and gals. Our model has been very open - you have work to do, do it when you can, record your hours. What we are finding is some people need more structure and our super open model is causing people to fail due to the lack of structure. For example: I know that I can dictate my own hours but I know that I work from 9 to 5 on certain days. I plan accordingly and thus have a base structure of what I'm shooting for. I can change it at any time, but base structure gives me a starting place. Some of the new folks coming into our model are used to having a set schedule and then having to abide accordingly. With it being so open, they kinda get lost, don't have a plan, a goal, or anything set. As such, they tend to let whatever the day brings dictate their output and schedule. That is great, but sometimes there needs to be a bit more structure.

So, Steve and Sean were talking about helping their guys and gals setup a base schedule and then if they need to modify that, they can, but at least they have a set schedule. Interesting. I love freedom but it can be bad if not structured properly (and to what level - it may vary).

Phone call with Shari O. and a merchant processor company. We were going over accounts and needed options. After that I sent Cory a text message about some client training that needed to be done for one of our clients. Other emails and follow-ups.

Emails, paying bills, and recording notes.

Online with Shari O. going over settings on merchant processing. We ended up looping in a tech from Newtek to help us look at the settings. He decided that he would need to make some changes on his side of the fence. We'll go from there once we hear back from them.

Chuck's label demo went for about 45 minutes, then we rolled into a meeting with Wayne and then right into a second meeting with just Steve and I. Here are a few notes.

- Chuck was going over the new adilas label builder or label maker design. He was doing both a verbal and visual walkthrough of the prototypes screens. Light back and forth on feedback and ideas. It's looking good. He will be doing a final video here in the next couple of days.

- Wayne had some questions on parts, parent/child items, getting part quantity counts, and part status fields. Going over code and database stuff for a project that he is working on to get rid of duplicate parts or items.

- Steve and I talking about budgets, direction, maintenance, and priorities. We were brainstorming on ideas such as meeting with the guys every week for an hour to help them out and get an idea where they are at. Getting things done. Sometimes our guys get distracted. We know what to do but we aren't doing it. If our guys need help, they need to get ahold of us. As we delegate, we then need to inspect what we expect. Small chat about managing techniques.

Steve and Cory were talking about pages, packages, and sub inventory. Shari O. popped in and we ended up having some light budget talks. The four of us talked briefly about the state of adilas and where we are going. Lots of good things going but we do need to be careful. On a different note, many things are changing all around us - including code changes, settings, clients, needs, expectations, etc. It's a moving target.

Light talk about what is an MVP (minimal viable product) for what we are doing? Even though we have so much functionality, do we have all of the required pieces? There are still some things that we need, even for an MVP - although it be a large MVP.

Cory was asking questions about projects and what not.

Steve and Sean were doing some deep dives into some of the packages and helping to auto clean-up some of the sub packages. It seems like samples are crazy and can really clog up the system. They are given freely and sometimes don't get managed as tight as actual inventory. While they were doing that, I was doing emails and recording notes from last week.

emails and recording notes from the week. Crazy how quick it can get away from you. This isn't bad, but one of the new changes is that Steve wants things recorded inside of the adilas account on the different projects. I'll figure it out, but I'm currently recording some things in the shop (where I record most of my primary notes and such) and also inside of adilas (just as sub notes on a bigger project). Interesting.

I joined later on. Helping my wife Heather after ankle surgery. When I joined, Cory, Shari O., and Steve were on the meeting. I was pretty quiet for the first part. Mostly just listening. We went over numbers and budgeting stuff. As we were going over some of our projects, Steve was recommending that we include Mike on some of the upcoming features and marketing efforts. There was also some talk about real time sales tax redemption and money transfers. They are (Stev and Mike) are trying to figure out some angles on state compliance systems and using sales tax redemption and tracking as a possible angle. Good ideas.

Cory was recording the budget numbers. We also talked about other projects and bids. Lots of verbal reports. At the end, Cory sent around the budget spreadsheet numbers.

One of our clients wanted to see all of the sub inventory attributes on a custom data export. Doing some testing and prep work.

Meeting with Eric and going over settings and priorities on his current projects. We also talked about backend database triggers, ETL (extract, transform, and load options - data warehousing and internal aggregates). After Eric left, Cory and I were going over other projects. Here are some of the things that we were talking to Eric about.

- Gift cards
- Sales tax aggregation
- Possibly pushing data through API to Weedmaps and Leafly
- Inventory snapshot
- Prescott shooting range - driver license scans

I was late getting in, helping my wife out. Sean was checking in and he reported that he just got off of a phone call with Steve as he was traveling up to Denver. Working on emails.

On a meeting with Bryan. Talking about settings for the client facing scheduling stuff. We talked about adding in photos and descriptions on the main booking page. Looking at layout and display options. We also took some time and setup his local environment with time templates, part categories, items, and flex grid settings. We did some local testing and got him some data to work with.

We went through a number of local scenarios and parts of the manual flow processes. Brief look at his automated email stuff. Talking about other small projects, if he needs some fillers.

Working with John on his custom JavaScript on the discount engine. Going over ideas and being a second set of eyes. We went over some options and I recommended that he build a small scratch file to practice some of the pieces before trying to make it go live and be fully integrated.

Small session with Chuck going over the adilas label builder and his new prototypes and mock-ups. Light back and forth on ideas and suggestions. We talked about doing a video and mini campaign to help raise funds for the adilas label builder. Other talks about internal and external fund raising. Putting the power in their hands (our clients). This could be funding options, tools, create, update, modify, delete, and use as needed. The more tools that we provide and let the users use them, the better our product becomes.

We talked about doing an internal pitch and pitching our ideas to Steve as well. If we get his buy in, that helps the whole project fly and it gains access to other networking and funding options.

Lastly we went through some ecommerce stuff to help Chuck with his project to help with the client facing scheduling project. We are making progress on all fronts. Good stuff.

Light research on some business info from Jonathan Johnson at Epic Enterprises. I want to pass on the info to Sean so that he can review it. Wayne and I spent some time going over indexes and possible code wrappers and helpers. Then we flipped over and worked on some new corp stuff (adding and editing corporations inside the system).

We have a couple of new projects that are somewhat mixing. We have the change from MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables (database engines inside of MySQL database). We also have a project called the monitoring system that has some cool things that are coming. We have to mix and blend all of the pieces together.

Chuck jumped on and we chatted about 3D printers and building things that we need. Wayne and I finished up our meeting by going over parts, find and replace functions and code snippets. Wayne is going to do some backend clean-up on some of the servers and will end up either using the find and replace stuff and/or pointing users there if duplicates are found. Either way, planning some light clean-up on the databases and servers.

Text messages and touching base with a business consultant that we worked with previously. Switched gears and working on code for Chuck's changes to sub dates and times for elements of time. Steve had requested those notes to be expanded and to allow for HTML if needed.

Helping Chuck with some ecommerce settings inside of his development environment. Cutting a check for Aspen. She is working on some training to help with HTML and CSS stuff. Other follow-ups with our internal guys and gals. On the phone with Eric going over projects and getting a verbal update on things that he is doing.

Working with Cory to go over our plans and making a proposal for the PayPod folks. Coming up with an estimate and who would do which part of project. Lots of prep work and project management type stuff. Cory has the actual proposal document.

Talking with Wayne on the server meeting about master branches vs other deployed code branches (on other or certain servers). The more servers that we have with specific testing or production branches, the harder it is to manage all of that. We have some code that needs to be live but still may be in the testing phases. That can screw up all of the other live production servers. It can get interesting.

We spent quite a bit of time going over the add/edit new corporations code, issues, and errors. Shari O. has been sending a series of emails out to us to let us know about certain problems, once again, we have some servers on one branch and others on another branch. It can get a little bit interesting. There is basically one branch of code that is hanging up the others, we'll get it all smoothed out and going.

Cory and Wayne were going through a number of small issues and small bugs. They were also coordinating and planning some future testing dates and times. One of the things that is coming up is a data capacity and memory issues. We have some of our clients that are getting so much data, it is getting hard to deal with all of it.

John and Wayne were talking about long variables vs normal capacity variables. We may need to expand some of our JavaScript variables into longer length capacity variables. It got pretty techy talking about memory, caching, garbage collection, and efficiency stuff.

Steve and Sean going over some deep ins and outs of custom gram trackers. It seems like the state compliance rules keep changing and certain vendors are and are not providing the correct information. Basically, they are trying to do super detailed math and stay within certain limits and rules but the incoming data (much of which we can't control) is missing vital pieces. It becomes really frustrating and makes you wonder why you are spending so much effort, when you can't control all of the variables and pieces.

Steve and I talked briefly about the SBA loan that adilas took out. The first payment is due in a couple of months. Steve got pulled into another call with a guy and then was going to be jumping on a Zoom session with one of our guys. So many moving pieces. I was doing emails and catch-up from yesterday.

Working with Bryan on ideas for the client facing scheduling project. See the attached notes. Lots of talk about doing this first round with hardcoded custom variables vs system-wide dynamics. Too many moving pieces to fit within our timelines. We are trying to take baby steps.

Meeting with Cory, Chuck, and I going over the label builder. We went over all of the notes that Chuck had on the opening page. We looked at visuals and made some decisions. Good starting place.

Most of the meeting was going over the notes, mock-ups, walk throughs, and coming up with specifics. Somewhat of a detail work session.

Meeting with Bryan and Chuck on the client facing scheduling project. Touching base on where each of the guys are at. Chuck is working on design and Bryan is working on the backend. Bryan showed me some scratch files stuff. We made some plans and then talked about options on both the frontend and the backend. Chuck bailed out and just Bryan stayed on the call.

Bryan and I decided to go full custom (hardcoded values vs variables) for this first round. He and I spent the rest of the time going over steps and options.

Emails, phone calls, and helping Dustin with some code. We ended up having to get Wayne involved to help us figure it out. Basically, Dustin's local branch was old and then when we went to make a new branch, there were updates that he needed that were being required for his new branch. We had to manually updates some database tables and then everything worked fine.

Cory and I going over projects. We talked about custom uploads for bulk expenses, referral tracking (promotion codes), merchant processing (working with the Datacap company), and automating emails. We also got into some talks about SMS and phone stuff. Basically, companies are wanting more and more communication options and even extending that out into marketing realms. Lots of requests and wishes for tools along those communications and marketing channels. We also talked about 3rd party solutions, pros and cons, and doing our own internal enhancements.

Talking about sales and follow-up calls and emails. Steve, Sean, and I were going over some emails that we got over the weekend. We decided that we would reach out to one of our clients, as another potential client wanted to ask some questions to some of our existing clients. Making plans and getting ideas from each other.

Cory joined the meeting and we broke into a small project overview and question session. She was out of the office most of last week and just had a pile of emails and questions for Steve and I. There were 3rd party solution needs, emails, small bugs, and new requests. It doesn't seem to slow down... and if it does, it isn't for very long.

Cory and Steve were going over the compare Metrc inventory page and talking about ideas to help shorten up that page. We have a client that is getting so many sub packages that it is causing problems (too much data). We talked about other possible bulk tools and ways to help them clean-up there data and/or be able to easily filter their records and results sets. Kinda funny and kinda not, but we build and break, build and break. Our clients keep pushing things to huge extreme levels. All you can do is build and break, build and break, try to respond and look forward as far as you can. It becomes an interesting game.

After that, Cory was bringing forward some new requests to be able to duplicate PO's with sub inventory packages. We have been able to duplicate PO's for years now, but not with sub inventory packages because those are all fully independent and have varying sub attributes and usually it's not a straightforward duplication process. It requires too many other questions, variables, and switches. Anyways, that is heating up and we may have to figure out a way to get that going.

Working with Bryan on his AJAX (asynchronous transactions). Going over some training and explaining the client facing scheduling project in more detail. We were looking at and working on Bryan's scratch files.

Talking with Aspen over lunch. She is working on some HTML and CSS (web design) training. She is wanting to work for Adilas and do different things. We went over some technical stuff from her classes and then rolled into some business logic and Adilas pain points. She may end up helping me with some research and getting projects prepped and ready for the guys. Talking about ideas and options. Aspen is my daughter. She will be attending her first year of college this year and is looking to help out where we need some help.

Working with Bryan and looking at a bug on the automated emails. We did some live testing and debugging. We had to get rid of a few references to the session scope. This was a switch between test and live. The fully automated process won't be tied to a user logging in and doing an action. It has to run by itself. Small fix and pushed up new code.

Database meeting with Steve, Wayne, Alan, John, and I. The primary topic was splitting up the bus and making motorcycles (datasouce project or world building project). Basically, the current database is big and has both shared tables and corp-specific tables. We want to split things up so that the whole thing will be faster and more nimble. The whole meeting was dealing with ideas, notes, and brainstorming along those lines. See attached for multiple pages of notes from our meeting. Lots of good comments from all parties on the meeting.

Steve, Sean, and I were going over progress and ideas on merchant processing. We got a report from a client that they are using one of our gateway integrations and it has been going very good. We talked about progression and how the first one we did for a gateway, nobody knew about it. We then did a second integration for the same gateway using newer tech. That is the one that is going great. We may end up having to convert the company that is using the older integration to the code that is using the newer tech. Sometimes things get lost in the shuffle.

Steve was talking about interactions with 3rd party solutions and making sure that we have money and agreements done up front. We have had too many use us and/or stiff us. We need to cover ourselves.

We were talking about how quickly things change. We tend to build something or make an advancement and go right on to the next thing instead of trying to pitch it, market it, or get a return on our investment. part of that is personality, and part of that is just pressure (we need the next thing), and part of that is the lack of communication (what is new and cool and how do we get that word out?). Anyways, we are aware of it, we will need to keep working on it. Sometimes, we literally have golden nuggets and we just bury them or they get buried because so many other cool things are happening.

Both Steve and Sean are really trying to focus in on merchant processing and figure out a way to get something put together that is as easy as Square (simple POS system with integrated hardware and software - able to take credit cards on the fly) but as powerful as adilas. Just for fun, they were calling it the Square Crusher (aka a similar or competing product). Just being silly.

Cory joined the meeting and had a number of questions from some of our clients. She was asking both Steve and I about our takes on certain things. One of the email requests was dealing with discount campaign tracking and ways of using and tracking promotion codes. Cory and I will talk more about this next week. I have done a ton of this, with my other company, back in the day, but we don't have this built out for adilas or adilas clients yet.

One of the places that we are weak or not as strong is in the marketing and marketing tools for our clients. I'm forecasting, but I'll bet that we will see more of this type of promotion code tracking, flagging and tagging, and tag management stuff come across our plates in the next few months. It is important and seems to be heating up. We will build it out and make it part of our internal and ecommerce offerings. Plus, we'll try to market it ourselves... push it out there for others to use and see. We've got to start doing more of that kind of stuff.

The last major topic of the morning meeting was using API sockets. We tend to build API sockets for other outside parties to use (pull technology - they pull the data that they want based on settings and permissions). We also talked about using other 3rd party API sockets and being able to push updates and records as they happen (push technology - just in time and being able to control how much data is being pushed). We may have to find a mix of both options, but we need to remember that both options exist. We tend to see just one side.

Along with that, we have some clients that are getting bigger and bigger datasets. That becomes a problem. Say we design it so that an elephant could be moved from place to place. Without telling us, our clients move on from elephants, which are already huge, into whales that are four times as big as elephants (just an analogy of sorts). Anyways, there is a constant need to keep making the channels and pipelines bigger and bigger and faster and faster. If we exceed our limits, sometimes we have to keep modifying things and keep pushing our limits in order to get into the game. Hardly ever does it just sit still. Constantly moving targets.

Spent another 45 minutes working on adding in new date-pickers throughout the system on older code pages. Ran into a few errors and let Alan know about them via email.

Working on adding in date-pickers to the normal adilas code. Popping from page to page and fixing things on the fly. I also met with Bryan and we pushed up about 17 files that had new code and/or changes dealing with the automated email stuff. Back on the date-picker stuff after helping Brayn. Merged in all of the changes that I had, so that the ball keeps advancing.

Meeting with Bryan. We were moving his code from top secret out to the public folder. This is just so that the system can do some automation for automated emails and invoice due dates.

This is an expanded elevator pitch - submitted by Sean Carlton on 8/17/22

Adilas is a complete business solution for business-minded companies. We handle all of your operations, such as Point of Sale, E-Commerce, and Inventory Control, and tie them directly to your Financials, such as Time Clock and Payroll, Accounts Payable and Receivable, Profit and Loss Statements, and your Balance Sheet. We operate in high-compliance industries, such as Cannabis, Firearm Sales, and Liquor Stores, as well as high-value Unit sales, like Car and Trailer Dealerships. No company is too big or too small, with complete systems, starting at $97 per month. As great as Adilas is, "out of the box", we also offer very affordable customization to fit your flow and processes, instead of making you adapt to ours.

Just pushing it up for the record. Good stuff!

Emails and tech support. Checking on internal email processes. The email stuff was struggling. I was then working on merging in code for Chuck. I ended up doing 5 branches of code that were dealing with a new date-picker.

I also had a quick meeting with Bryan going over automated emails and new code. After that, I jumped back on the date-picker pages and got everything merged in for Chuck. Hundreds of files had been updated. Good stuff!

Meeting with Sean over the GoToMeeting channel. He gave Steve and I a new expanded elevator pitch. We went over that new pitch and made some suggestions and ideas. We also spent a bunch of time talking about merchant processing and how things are organized. I showed him the datacap website and I was pitching their ideas and how they connect to multiple gateways and use multiple pieces of hardware to make that happen. I'm excited to see if that will work out. Eventually, we want to either use what they are doing and/or create our own process along those same lines. Good discussion.

Switched branches and started to get back into the bulk flex grid tools for the bike shuttle company. Didn't get much done but at least got flipped over to that project again. Hopefully more progress tomorrow.

Recording notes, both here in the shop and some subs of time out in the main adilas.biz account. We are trying to track time from all of our guys and gals and put it in one place. I have more freedom out here in the shop world vs inside of adilas. I'll keep recording things out here as part of the developer's notebook and then put some summaries into the main adilas world (system). working on the last couple of days. It is amazing to see how much changes just in a few days. The whole thing (app and/or system) can flip and roll and move, faster than we can even keep up with it. It's pretty crazy!

Spent half an hour doing emails and reviewing mock-ups from Chuck. His new mock-ups are prototypes for the new adilas label builder app.

We all jumped on the server meeting. Wayne was showing me his new monitoring services (watching for form submissions and URL values for internal pages per user per server). We went over some of the custom stuff, encryption, and ended up doing a huge asynchronous database update using AJAX and JavaScript. The update did a series of loops and reported back as things were happening. We are switching our database table engine from MyISAM tables to Innodb tables inside of the MySQL database. That was kinda a big internal switch.

Wayne spent some time and showed me around and went through the code with me. I know that we can use some of those same asynchronous techniques to speed up some of our long running reports or processes. Pretty cool.

Wayne was pretty creative how he blended session values, ColdFusion, method calls, AJAX, JavaScript, database updates, and reporting all into one small page flow. It was cool to see the pieces and then watch them work in real time. I enjoyed it.

After that, Steve has some questions with his VPN connection (VPN = virtual private network). Wayne helped him uninstall and reinstall the VPN software. They got it working again. Steve uses his VPN to push up code via FTP to all of the servers. We use that all of the time. If we don't FTP the files, we have to redeploy and pull master code branches on the different servers. Sometimes, the FTP route is much faster, and we can target single servers if we have to do some live testing that relies on certain data or certain sets of settings (data and configuration stuff).

Wayne left and Steve and John started going over timeclocks and internal timecards. Steve gave John a number of new permissions to be able to look around inside of adilas to check and look at numbers. John then gave Steve and I a small walk-through demo on the discount engine. Steve and John spent a bit of time talking about graphs, charts, and adding in eye candy to the system. Currently, it doesn't have much eye cand or sweet visuals to help show the data that we are holding. If truth be known, we are holding tons and tons of super awesome data, it is just hidden and only shown in a tabular format right now. Also, the users have to ask for the data right now, there is nothing that is pushing the important things up to the surface (push technology or using dashboard type utilities). It could really do some cool things if we got the right charts, graphs, sums, counts, and other business intelligence (BI) stats and values. That's where we are heading.

Steve and John were talking about the future fracture project and how each page will end up getting its own page level settings. Things like: What to show? What to hide? What tabs or sub sections will be displayed and what interfaces will be the default per person? More talk about settings, dashboards, and making the data sing and talk vs just holding it all. We really want to get it out into the business intelligence (BI) level. That will be so cool!

Wayne and Steve were checking in on servers and server-based projects. Wayne was reporting in and giving some light estimates as to timelines and possible rollouts. After that, Steve and I worked on some code for a page that he is working on to help push up some outside client data into the system (customer data import). We worked through some code and logic dealing with lists within lists and how to pull the correct data out. We ended up rewriting some of the code and doing some testing. We got it all figured out and moving forward.

Shari O. and I met on the GoToMeeting session and went over new USAePay accounts, settings, and logins. Part way through I got a call from Calvin and we chatted for a bit. Shari O. and I jumped back in and were looking at more settings and playing around. As part of the meeting, she was showing me what she does to track and correctly process the reoccurring invoices that done inside of adilas. There are a lot of places that we could help her out (automation). We may have to circle back to that.

As part of our meeting, we also went in and looked around on some of the new Trinity Payment stuff as well. Basically, a small look-y-peek into their backend card processing interface. It looks good.

Work session with Bryan. Checking out code for the auto email project. Looking over code and going over the project flow. The branch is showing multiple merge conflicts, so we will have to do a manual merge (that takes a little bit longer). We also hit a snag on one of the include files (send email action pages). It is called from outside in the public folder but it resides inside the top secret/secure folder. That folder is protected and requires a valid login and session. The code worked great during testing but as soon as it goes live, it will be called via an automated schedule vs a logged in user. Basically, the validation on the secure page will block it from being used due to a missing login. We will have to restructure some code and put a standalone file out in the public folder to help do the same process.

Towards the end of the meeting, we flipped over and were going to look at some of the AJAX stuff that Bryan has been working on with John and Dustin. We were having conflicts while switching branches. We will reschedule a time to look deeper into this. Making progress.

Meeting with Chuck on the client facing scheduling stuff. We went over ideas for the MVP (minimal viable product). Talking about flow and structure. I took a number of screenshots (see attached). We also talked about how to deal with custom shuttles (unscheduled elements of time). After that, we rolled into what might come after the MVP rollout.

We spent a little bit of time looking into the label builder and Chuck's new layout and prototypes. We got into some JavaScript stuff and looking at custom code to control a JavaScript canvas. We also looked into a mock-up of the custom label homepage that Chuck is working on.

Bryan joined us and we switched back over to the client facing scheduling stuff and gave him a small walkthrough.

Working and setting up the new USAePay gateway and merchant account settings for our (adilas) merchant accounts. Ran a few small tests from both inside the secure cart and from outside in the online ecommerce bill pay section. Everything went through great.

Steve and Sean were touching base on sales. Steve had a few code questions for me dealing with queries and flow. John joined the called and was asking Steve and Sean about prices and options for clients (pricing structure stuff). Eric joined and was asking questions about gift cards and going over different ideas.

This may or may not help, but I went in and found a bunch of older files that we were had started and worked on dealing with special accounts, loyalty points, gift cards, customer in-store credit, vendor discounts, and other special account stuff. See attached.

Logging into the new USAePay account and looking around. The new one is backed by a processor called Trinity Payment Solutions. Our old one was backed by Newtek as the processor. We are changing some things up. If we go with Trinity, they have given us options to make some passive revenue based on fees and commissions. We are going to try it out and see what we come up with. Good stuff.

Admin meeting. We were going to do some budgeting but ended up getting pulled into other topics of discussion. Lots of talk about 3rd party solutions and our love/hate type relationships. Sometimes, those relationships can be challenging. We also talked about some possible rules for bigger clients and helping them get transferred over to semi-dedicated or full dedicated serves vs staying on the shared environment.

We chatted about a number of up-and-coming projects and ran through some pros and cons with each of them. A number of them are dealing with outside 3rd parties and have some good things but also have some teeth (virtually).

For outside custom work, we are heading towards full pre-payment or getting something upfront and then billing along the way. We have been skunked a few times and had to run things out to bad debt (uncollectable invoices). along those lines, permission was given to Cory to help wheel and deal as needed for certain projects.

At the end of the meeting, Steve was doing some training for Shari O. and myself on his new timeclock and timecards for our internal co-owners and what they are working on. Good meeting. I sent around notes to all of the key admin team members.

Emails, recording notes from earlier this week and today. Phone call with Eric going over ideas for gift cards and pushing that project forward. Eric and I also chatted and talked about doing research and project analysis and if a client needs that, that we could charge for that as well. Basically, breaking up estimates and quotes into project analysis and code development (two parts to the whole). He's got a lot of stuff going on right now. Busy, busy!

Meeting with George from Datacap. He was referred to us by Matt from Solvent, a different card processor and middleware type business. Basically, they were pitching that they have one API socket integration set and it is integrated with tons of backend processors or merchant vendor systems. Anyways, we have a client who wants to interface with some software and hardware and we don't want to deal with interacting with each and every gateway independently. So, this Datacap company has done the gateway interactions and integrations for tons of gateways and merchant processors. So, if we do the 3rd party integration with them, then we could virtually hook into all of their possible gateway and processor connections. It adds another layer, but it also makes our job so much easier vs having to code to every hardware device and every merchant processing gateway. This could be a great option for us. Anyways, we'll check it out.

After the meeting, Cory and I got on the phone and chatted about possible options. We think that Eric could be a great fit for this project as a full stack developer from the adilas side of things.

Poor Bryan - he was having major internet issues. He and I got to chat at the beginning and at the end. Steve came on and we got to hear from Steve for a while (I'll share some notes below). Part way through, Bryan's internet connection was going in and out and the poor guy kept trying to connect and then got booted, time and time again. I was on the whole time, Steve most of the time (while he was on the meeting), and poor Bryan in and out the whole way through. Finally, Bryan sent me a text message and said that he would hook up with me later on. He was making a great effort but some of that was out of his direct control.

Anyways, here are some of my notes:

- Bryan and I spent some time looking over Chuck's first round mock-ups. I was drawing and showing Bryan what we were thinking about. We got kinda techy and talking about flow, processes, settings, and ideas from the mock-ups. Good session.

- Steve popped in and he and Bryan were talking about videos and marketing. Lots of good back and forth. Bryan's brother is the one pushing the videos. Steve would be very interested if he (Bryan's brother) wanted to work on a commission basis - he does the videos and then gets a kickback from sales.

- We have tried a bunch of different things. Trying to figure out where we get the best bang for our buck - ROI (return on investment).

- Small section talking about our sales and marketing teams and how they have to deal with a level of client rejection. If they get too much, it tips them over the edge, and they start doubting their skills and confidence. Pretty natural but very much a real thing.

 - The costs (huge costs) of training someone to be high-level power user in adilas. You almost have to take an adilas power-user and then go from there vs trying to get a non adilas user and get them trained up. The costs are too high, and the skillsets need some in the trenches experience. Interesting!

- Steve was talking about allowing people to invest in marketing and then try to get some ROI on those efforts. It's really hard for us to do it internally, based on funds and available personnel who could really do what needs to be done.

- YouTube and YouTube influencers - that seems to be a very modern trend that is getting some results. That also takes someone fulltime who is pushing on things, knows what they are doing (adilas power user), has a following (other people like them and what they do), and they keep creating new content (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). You need a mix of all of those pieces.

- Adilas has been a frontrunner and forward-thinking company since the get go. We just haven't been able to capture the full market. We were doing software as a service before SaaS became a buzzword. We were doing cloud, web-based software, paperless office type functions way before they were cool. Tons of other frontrunner type approaches. We have been pioneers and out on those front lines. We've been doing this for the past 20+ years. We started wtih modem speed internet connections and Microsoft Access Databases. We've come a long way. So, how do we market that? That seems to be the question of the day.

- Bryan was trying to reconnect to the meeting and Steve and I were just talking. I mentioned that Heather (my wife) said that we are too broad and trying to help too many people or do too many things. In the very next breath, I mentioned to Steve that I had a phone call with one of our clients (Drew at the bike shuttle and coffee shop) and they wanted all of these other things. Some of which were standard and some of which were custom. Steve was saying that we are caught somewhere in between those two realms. Some want it to be simplified and others want even more with choices, settings, permissions, and pick and choose functionality. It gets crazy deep.

- Seems like people want everything under one roof and they want it for free. That's a tough ticket (super powerful, low cost or free, looks great, and is easy to use). Sounds great! Sign me up! How do we get there?

- Just thinking about possible funding options - What if we were free (the whole adilas transactional core) and just charged a small cover fee? Credit card do it... everybody wants to use a credit card processor because it helps them make sales and run their business. We would also do something along the lines of the value add-on core model where we provide the main adilas core (full adilas account that takes care of all of the transactional data - what it is right now). We then could charge for any of the additional layers. We could even charge for the core and then add-on fees or charges for the higher levels. All kinds of options. Just as a quick review - Levels are: 1. Transactional core, 2. Industry specific skin/functions, 3. Custom code, 4. Business Intelligence (BI) (sums, counts, aggregates, stats), and level 5. Enterprise level (multiple corps in array and interconnected with roll-ups, roll-downs, controls, and full control over the flow of data.

- We can also sell other professional services, training, consulting, analytics, custom code development, design, marketing, hardware/software integration, etc. We are not limited as to possible avenues where we could monetize our efforts. Currently, our monthly application fees are our bread and butter (SaaS type levels of a monthly subscription or usage license). We could sell digital real estate (web hosting, database serves, mirrors, shared hosting servers, semi-dedicated servers, fully dedicated servers, and other special server configurations). We can sell storage (active and archived or cold storage - for data). We could flip our model so that is fully based off of usage, throughput, bandwidth, storage, counts, amounts, and transactions. Tons of options.

- We sure are gaining a lot of feedback and insights on what we can do with fracture (future adilas project). This is where we are headed. We just aren't sure how to fund that. We have an awesome testbed; we've done tons of little prototypes (they are working and in production), have tons of feedback from our users and other outside critics, we've been making plans, we have learned tons of lessons dealing with settings, permissions, interfaces, transactional data vs aggregate data, speed, servers, configuration options, look and feel, solving pain points, and bringing all of these pieces together. So.... what is our plan and what can we do to bring these pieces more fully to market? Where do we go from here?

- Switched gears and started talking about using some other video conferencing software packages. We've been using GoToMeeting but have been having some issues. Steve and I briefly talked about Google Meet, Discord, Zoom, or whatever. Just looking at options.

- Steve left and Bryan was able to rejoin for a few minutes. I told Bryan that Steve was very thankful and grateful that he, Bryan, is adding his timecards and time clocks to the adilas system. That is very helpful.

I got on a little late, I was helping my son out. Steve was on a meeting with Kelly. When I jumped on, John was on there. We touched base on a couple of things and then just worked on our own. I was recording notes and going through emails. He was working on his own projects.

Talking with Cory about tips and how to handle that scenario. We talked about just running the payments higher and then dealing with the tip (negative cash out). We looked at it all the way through to the P&L and balance sheet. That seems to be the best way to do it.

Back on the custom label builder app. We are going through things and making plans. We are wanting to do more mock-ups on the label builder and then pitch those to the client who may want to fund things. Talking a lot about flow, promises, and pitching the pitch. More plans and then physically looking a the code. We didn't get all the way through it but making progress. We fixed some session scope locking issues.

At the end of the meeting, we spent some time and were going over some other projects and touching base on things.

Phone calls with Eric about the USAePay and EMV/chip readers. He is going to check in with the bike shuttle guys to make sure all is well. On the phone with Shari O. going over a plan. We talked about the new USAePay account, EMV/chip reader stuff, and options for handling tips on invoices. After that, I spent the rest of the time working on the Trinity Payment stuff and getting setup on the new USAePay account. I ended up doing a lot of emails back and forth and on a tech support call to try to get things ironed out.

Phone call with Drew and the bike shuttle/coffee shop stuff. He was asking some questions and we went over a bunch of different items and topics. Here are some of my notes:

- eCommerce and client facing scheduling. He is really wanting to know a timeline on when that is going to be done and finished. He is spending tons of time right now on the phone and doing everything manually.

- Tips - He wanted to know how to do tips. We talked about techy talk and credit card stuff (normal sales vs pre-auths). We talked about unlimited line items, over payments, after the fact values or relationships, etc. Lots of ideas. Not sure where to go with it. I'll check with Steve and Shari O.

- EMV/Chip reader - they have some hardware and want to get someone over there to help them out.

- They would really like some sort of mobile checkout and mobile payment option. They are out of the shop and people just want to pay them right there vs going back inside and what not. Sort of a quick sales (all mobile).

- They would really like the bulk edit on flex grid tie-ins. The page is prepped but not fully online yet. Currently, they have to edit individual lines at a time.

- They also want to get some custom stuff done with monitoring availability on shuttle rides (virtual seats that are available - we are using budget settings inside of elements of time - expected and actuals).

Phone call with Eric talking about possible outside work and options. It is a client that uses adilas but also has other needs. I recommended that he run it past Steve as well. Just touching base.

Small group discussion about the Discord server and using that for our daily meetings instead of GoToMeeting or Zoom. Light talks about pros and cons. Eric, Chuck, John, and I were on the small group meeting.

After that, Chuck and I spent the rest of the time merging in code branches and checking as many pages as possible. Pushed up about 50 new date-picker files.

Jumped on the morning meeting and Sean and I had a second to catch-up and talk about quotes, follow-up emails, and plans. John joined the meeting and had a few questions. We ended up doing a small session and going over adilas financials with both he and Sean. Just a small update and looking around at real numbers.

John made a suggestion for the sub dates and times and how they are sorted. We flipped things around and now the newest entries are at the top vs the bottom (sort order stuff). Tested and pushed the file live.

Cleaning up from the day and recording notes.

Some of the entries, I was recording here in the shop and then flipping over to the main adilas account and recording small summaries in the sub dates and times for the projects. Steve is really wanting to have us all record our time on certain projects inside of adilas. Trying to see what it really takes and helping Cory to know who is doing what.

Making changes to the custom data export report for a client. I got a phone call and jumped on with Eric for half an hour. We were going over the inventory snapshot (mini aggregate project for item quantities). We talked about ways of building it out and even adding in switches so that we could do some live testing when needed. After the called with Eric, I jumped back on the custom data export project. Made the changes, pushed up new files and let all parties know about the new changes and update.

Meeting with the Hoodie guys. They wanted a 60-day lookback in order to get any of the changes and modifications. Currently, we were giving them a single day snapshot. The problem is/was that the company they are pulling data from is using transitional invoices, and thus doing work after the fact or while things are a virtual work in progress. Along with the 60-day lookback, they also wanted a last modified date/time stamp.

They asked about API sockets and we showed them what we have. Next, we switched gears and talked about real-time inventory counts and values. All of the data that they are getting currently is sales-based data.

Emails and research for a meeting with the Hoodie Analytics guys.