Checked in to see if anybody needs some help. Mostly out of the office all week. Talked with Dustin about some sub filtering of prep queries (working with smaller record sets) and then some form submission and JavaScript stuff. Going through emails and text messages. Talked with Eric and setup some times to work on the loyalty points project. Called and chatted with Shari O. and Steve. Just touching base. Tech support and other random to do list stuff.

Out of the office for vacation and family reunion on my wife's side of the family.

Checking in on the morning meeting. I have been out of the office most of the week. Steve and I chatted this morning about the need for new independent developers and getting people into the mix and into the family. There is a real need there. We then merged in some code from his branches and pushed up files to all servers.

Looking over ideas for loyalty points. Lots of good info on element of time # 3778 in the adilas shop.

What is a liability? What are the differences between real and phantom values? We need the values recorded for both real and phantom, the difference is how firm and/or fixed the liability is. Steve mentioned a term called a "shadow account" (that exists, but may not be fully tangible). We also talked about how it is the actual company that is creating these phantom and/or shadow type liabilities. That kinda changes things... it is the company creating their own liability based off of a point system to encourage customer loyalty.

There seems to be two main part of the puzzle. How many points (ins and outs) and what is the value of those points? Lots of balance sheet transactions.

Simple to more complex transactions... simple gift cards or simple gift certificates, basic loyalty points, punch cards, in-store credits, coupons. As a fun side note, some of these transactions are subs of the balance sheet. Kinda like sub inventory but on the balance sheet side. Maybe we need to think about how the transaction takes place. Is there already cash on hand (paid in advance)? or is it just lowering the total owed, like a form of a discount? Who pays for what? What about coupons that a manufacture pays for or pays a part of?

On the main balance sheet items, we may need another switch to help us know if this is a main account and/or a sub account. We may also need to know if the asset, liability, and/or equity account is real or phantom (shadow). This is kinda fun, but we are seeing a fracture that is needed in order to record the balance sheet items. Everything is breaking into sub accounts.

Going back to discounts and special discounts... do we apply the discount to the cart/invoice on a whole or do we have to re-distribute that discount back through the system?

On a different note, we had a request from a client to be able to permission and/or fully turn off standalone discounts. Also, we are seeing that taxes make the discounts more complicated. We have options to do both in-line discounts and/or standalone discounts. Things get really fuzzy as you try to tax, especially with excise taxes and taxing things at the different levels (per item category, per customer type, per inventory type, etc.).

We had a great talk about "bad debt" payments. Don't worry about the words (verbage), think about the concept. That helps to satisfy the invoice (monies owed to us), the taxes are fully correct,  but it is then showed as an adjustment to revenue (rewards, coupons, loyalty points, etc.) on the income statement. Both coupons and loyalty points are similar. It is the internal company basically saying "I'm going to cover that part of the invoice". We claim that that invoice and/or ticket is x dollars and has y amounts of tax. We then cover the invoice by real monies and/or monies that mean something, but no real money changed hands. Look deeper in this. The main difference is the verbage between bad debt vs rewards or loyalty points.

Maybe we should add some new standard payment types such as: Rewards, Loyalty Points, Coupon, In-Store Credit, Gift Card/Gift Certificate, etc.

We are seeing the need for a good mix of user-maintained pieces, system-maintained pieces, and possibly some mixed-maintained pieces (user and system). We are seeing this in the watchers, feeders, standalone declarations, time templates, settings, etc. We need to let them play where they can and need to, but also make sure they have the tools and pieces to get the job done, even if we control the pieces behind the scenes.

Eric would like to check in on loyalty points around 11 am for a couple of hours. He texted me and said that he was unable to meet today due to some things that came up. So, in the meantime, Steve and I had a great discussion and made some good breakthroughs. Good stuff.

Met up with Steve and Dustin over the morning meeting. I was prepping things for a big data migration between servers. Dustin was working on his settings page. We went over some options and goals for his current project and worked together for a bit. Later on in the meeting, Steve was asking a report about labels and what is going on there. I made a call to Calvin and got a small update. We decided to meet around 1 pm to chat and talk about progress.

After that, Steve and I got on a phone call and talked about where we are going and some internal direction for how we want to deal with developers, budgets, and developer rates. We are seeing that some of the high-end developers are doing the external jobs for a much higher rate than we can offer internally. That is awesome if they get the work. Not so good for us, because our projects get lowered on the priority scale. By us paying them monies that they haven't even earned yet, we may be hurting ourselves. Imagine if you had monies coming in and adding up for work to be done, but you knew that it was less per hour. It then becomes a pain in order to get back to that because you know that the net value of that money is less than what you could earn somewhere else. It almost becomes a thorn in your side vs a positive pick-me-up. Anyways, we had a good conversation and tried to come up with some plans.

We have two bigger, higher-end developers, that we may need to pay their normal commercial rate and stop sending them residual monies. Kinda refactor things and help them fly at there normal commercial rate. That may help get our project back to the top of the priority pile. Interesting concept.

Calvin, Steve, and Brandon were on a meeting talking about using Calvin's tools and products. We talked about some existing pieces, ideas going forward, and even some future or vision stuff. Great meeting and making some progress. We plan on having a similar meeting with Eric to get some good open conversation happening. Both developers are some of our power house developers. They are very good and are super busy. However, they are so good, that our internal projects get pushed way down the priority line. We are planning on setting things up with them so that is it more on a straight work for hire or commercial basis vs long drawn out projects. Basically, doing a focused sprint vs a long multi-unknown, multi-variable project that is under funded and under managed. If we help them be more efficient, we will be more efficient. Making progress.

Talking with Bryan about cross corp mappings and PO/Invoice manifests. We also talked about Amex API's and starting a profile and then adding someone to the queue. These are all some basic projects that Bryan has that are either current and/or up and coming.

We looked at the old cross corp code between invoices and PO's. The old code was fully based on matching text based values. This works to a certain level. Where we need to head is allowing cross crop mapping and allow for variations and dynamic mappings. It needs to get away from hard text matching into actual id mapping. If you map to the id's, the text means nothing and it becomes easier. Steve kept saying that we want to slow down the existing process and allow for the users to help pick and point to different things along the existing process. That means we need to re-work the process.

I think it is so interesting that we are seeing a huge need for more and more cross corp mapping and application flex grid stuff. Pretty cool and crazy to see where things are headed.

We are seeing more and more needs to be able to add mappings and settings, inside of existing corps, even between corps, to help speed up the data transfer process. This could be from parent organization to child organizations or from vendor/manufacture to sub distributors and/or retailers. People need to move data from company to company and system to system. The better we can map things across those ranges, the better we can play the game. I think it is time to at least start working on the application flex grid stuff.

Bryan and I got on a GoToMeeting meeting session and worked on the planning phase for the application flex grid stuff. We went in and looked at the developer's notebook and did some light research. We then jumped in and looked over code that Will had written to help do cross corp transfers of invoices to PO's. We looked at the permissions, the request and grant access options, and then into the look-up and actual meat of the transaction.

We spent most of our time talking about what is needed and how we want the process to take place. Lots of planning and documenting. Bryan has the file where we are making the plan and doing the prep work. Good progress.

On the morning meeting with the guys. Bryan and I used up the first 45 minutes wrapping up where we were at on the application flex grid planning. Wayne popped in and reported. He has been sick for a few days/weeks. He will be helping out with a server to server migration project later tonight. We also talked about an existing project of inter-migrating data between two fully running servers. That is very deep and is actually a C sharp project (server-side software). Very deep.

Steve and I worked with Dustin and tried to help him on his mapping and custom dynamic settings page. We had to go back in time (on the code) and look-up some older values. They still existed, they had just been renamed and it made it hard to figure out if we were still talking and dealing with the same pieces.

Steve and I talked about how in-depth it would be to do a full server to server migration while the systems are up and being used. We went clear back to a project (world building) that started with Highland Vineyard and wanting a full duplicate copy of a corporation so that an older owner could have their data and the new buying company could have their own data. We have had a need here for a long time. It is totally unknown and might end up being a super huge project ($150,000+ level).

At the end of the meeting, Eric popped in to work on the loyalty point and such. We are going to get back together after lunch.

Working with Eric on rewards stuff and loyalty points. We went through a bunch of ideas, concepts, and scenarios. See attached documents for some rough plans and brainstorming. Still in the planning phase.

Working with Bryan on the application flex grid flow and logic. We were going through concepts, ideas, and making notes. Still in the light planning stage but making some good progress. Towards the end of the session, Steve jumped in and we had some good discussions. Part of the process is dealing with a step-by-step approach and/or adding hand rails to the setup.

Wayne, Steve, and I worked on doing a custom data migration for 21 corporations. We prepped things, grabbed all of the custom code, images, scans, look and feel pieces (logos and watermarks), and migrated over 12,000,000+ records. All of that info and data was migrated to a new dedicated server. We had one database table that gave us problems. We ended up splitting it into multiple smaller pieces, in order to get it to migrate correctly. Good combined effort. Long night.

Tech support, emails, and checking on default dates and times. Some of the old code set default dates to a value of 0000-00-00 or a time of 00:00:00. Newer versions of MySQL database don't allow for those placeholder dates. Changed a bunch of values to be real dates but still generic default values.

Jumped on the morning meeting. Steve and Dustin were on there and so was Wayne. Steve and Dustin opened up a Zoom session and worked on that. Wayne and I worked on a huge database field list with tables, field names, and mapping out of the foreign keys (database columns that link tables together in a relationship). We went over 4,000+ fields during our meeting. Most of the time was spent mapping out what foreign key values where and how they mapped to what primary tables and columns. We saw lots of activity in the payee (users and vendors) table as well as the corporations (worlds or business companies). Good session.

At the end of the session, Wayne showed me a sneak peak at a tool he is calling the Adilas Database Sync tool. It is a C sharp program that compares two different databases and makes sure that they are all synced up. I got excited on a few of the cool and creative features. Here is a small list. For more info, talk and ask Wayne for a demo.

- Super cool idea for comparing records... He would put all of the data together in a huge string (column value, column value, column value, etc.). He would then run a quick hash on that data. A hash makes a small 32 character unique code (really small amount for storage). He could then store that hash value. Then later on, when he was checking the data, he could put all the new data together and re-hash it. If the hashes matched (the two small hash values), no updates were needed and he could skip the record. If the new hash was different than the old hash, he would run the update that know what fields to update. This helps sync the data and also allows the system to skip something that doesn't need any changes. Very cool.

- He setup the whole thing to do non-destructive adding and updating based on using recursive functions (building logic as needed vs doing a, then b, then c). He also built in some options for taking care of the exceptions.

- This new Adilas Database Sync tool will have a huge time savings attached to it. Just a day or so ago, we migrated over 12,000,000+ records for a server to server migration. With Wayne's tool, we could set it up to do the sync even days before the actual migration process. It could run while you sleep and even run over days and days as needed. Then, when you are ready to do the final migration (deep pass over the data), most of the work would already be done and only new updates, additions, and/or changes would need to take place. That is huge. This also opens up possibilities of doing some mirroring and having back-up data servers. Very cool.

- We talked about using this database sync tool for doing for testing... We could copy over specific customer data, code against it, do the tests, and then go from there. Huge options.

- We briefly talked about Calvin's Auto Process Tool and custom code options there. Once again, both of these programs use server-side software to get major crunching power while still allowing for a normal web-based interface. Imagine what we could do if we built some connections between Calvin's auto process tool  and Wayne's adilas database sync tool.

- We talked about how developing server-side software using something like C sharp is so much faster than web-based languages. We talked about how many levels of conversion the code goes through and/or does in order to run it... Imagine ColdFusion code being interpreted by Java and Java be interpreted who knows what, and that being interpreted into system or unit code, etc. You get the idea. There is also a huge difference in the timeout windows and how long process are able to run without manual and/or user interactions.

- We could schedule out long running tasks, report, exports, and/or other tasks. We could get away from web session timeouts. That would be awesome. Sometimes it feels like we are trying to fit the whole world through a revolving door (analogy of trying to hit the web timeout rules).

- We could also use some of the C sharp tools to flip indexes and database column level defaults. Some of these things are text fields currently set to latin 1, could be changed to UTF-8 format. We could change default dates and times from default dates of 0000-00-00 to 1990-01-01 (a real date value vs the generic placeholder) and default times from 00:00:00 to 12:00:00. Once again, we could skip all of the web session timeouts and just get the job done. All good things and it could be done very quickly with minimal clicking and babysitting. That is where the value lies. Good stuff.

Looking forward, I'm not sure what the future holds, but I'll bet that it will have both web code, server-side software, API sockets, and other hybrid type solutions. Each thing is good at a part of the game, we just need to mix and blend as needed to get the different jobs done. Exciting times ahead.

Emails, tech support, and recoding details from the morning meeting with Wayne. Next up, working on the training schedule for the upcoming September adilas training event.

Spent some time trying to put together a training schedule for the September 2018, Denver, CO, event. We are going to be at the La Quinta Inn, there in Denver. It should be good. See attached for the first round draft of the itinerary.

On the morning meeting with Steve and Dustin. Alan popped in for a bit and gave us an update. We talked about the upcoming Denver training event in the first part of September. Made a few plans. Light debugging on Dustin's code and then on to other projects. Tons of emails to go through. Spent some time reworking a flyer for the training event. Steve and Dustin were working on their own projects most of the session.

Emails and working on the training event flyer.

Meeting with Bryan on cross-corp mapping and working on the application flex grid stuff. He is making some progress. He showed me a demo of what he has done and we talked about next steps, goals, and vision. We even went slightly backwards and decided to take some things out and add some other things in other places. Light chopping and hacking and making some changes.

Towards the end of the meeting, I was getting a little overwhelmed with everything and spent some time expressing concerns and frustrations because Bryan would listen. Things such as: planning, lack of planning, number of projects, having to redo code, the depth and complexity of things, looping in all the custom stuff, losing time in transition, fracturing into subs (every level), lack of skilled players, funding, knowing what is coming down the pipeline (future projects), so many needs, time it takes to get things done, depth of what is needed, etc. It gets pretty deep pretty quick. We talked about how things keep evolving and the challenges that go with that. We talked about emails, tech support, requests, requirements, pressure, etc. How do you make it so that you (as a person) are protected and that the full application doesn't get smashed and/or squished, with you underneath it? That might sound funny, but it feels like a real threat.

After our meeting ended, I think Bryan could tell that I was not doing very good and pretty stressed. Bryan came over and just listened and talked with me for over an hour. Mostly, he was just listening and letting me talk. It was good to get things off my chest and virtually just dump for a bit. It also helped to put some of the thoughts and feelings into words and at least attempt to express what I was feeling. The biggest overall theme was a accumulation of tons of little things that feels like an insurmountable barrier. I felt better after we chatted. We really do have a lot of great things going for us right now. Count blessing, not problems... :) That will help. I feel kinda beaten up, but still standing. We will hit it again tomorrow.

On the morning meeting with Steve. I was telling him how I had to unload yesterday and how Bryan was willing to listen. We went over a number of current projects and talked about the strategy for moving forward. Steve has been so good at helping us (the whole adilas team) see that we work as a team and it is ok to keep making small steps towards the end goal. I can't tell you how much his attitude helps all of us with the entire company. Still hard and crazy, but good stuff.

We talked about different developers and how they could help us push together and make progress. Certain guys, we may have them help us prep things vs doing the whole project from A to Z. We talked about how our relationships are going with some of the outside developers. We are really happy with the guys that are in there playing and trying to push things forward. We have some other guys that have some major skills, but they are harder to play with. For us, we are going to be focusing more on the guys and gals that want to play vs just the skill levels.

A comment made by Steve - "Our clients are adding pressure because they like what we have already done. They have confidence that we can add the new pieces and features and it would really help them. We are playing an active role vs a passive role in our clients business. They want to succeed and so they keep pushing on us to be faster, better, deeper, and easier. That adds pressure, but it is really people saying, we like what already exists and want more."

Eric popped in and we touch base about working tomorrow on the loyalty points. I then did some recording of notes and trying to express thoughts and feelings from the last couple of days. Towards the end of the session, I got back to the training event flyer and working on that project. Lots of moving pieces.

Working on the Denver training schedule and flyers. See attached for the latest version.

Promised to take my son and daughter on an outing before school starts tomorrow (Wednesday).

Calvin popped into the morning meeting. We are trying to talk and negotiate between costs and outputs. Some of the discussions had a light flavor between software vs web based. Both solutions are very viable but they do play differently.

Basic rates and such: For Calvin, we are going to be paying $100/month to help him get some reoccurring revenue for his multi FTP uploader tool and his MySQL editor tool. His current commercial rate is between $75 and $150. He is willing to do internal adilas work for $75. That may need to change in the future. We will leave that open.

We went over some short-term and long-term plans for building labels. It gets pretty complicated. We looked at some of the existing models and how they either play together and/or where they could go in the future. Lots of good conversations. We talked about pros, cons, Flash (animate cc), PDF, software, web, API, etc. We talked about fields, tables, mappings, custom sizes, verbage, and tons of other needs.

What angles could we attack this? What about a simple web-based interface where they could basically build the different labels. Name them, save them, and put in basics. We could then use that mock-up (that the users created) as the blueprint for actually setting up the label (a middle person who actually creates it). We could then use Calvin's backend tools to make and/or create the actual labels. Somewhere, we still need to interact with some heavy hitting backend code.

Idea... Go to the label homepage. They get to pick the label size (limited number), they pick where it comes from (source and/or host - 12 main players or web pages - limited number), they pick and build the label based off of data types and mappings (main interface). We allow them to set the mappings and also put in some sample data. We then allow them to save that (just the mock-up), and then we send that info out to the developer. Long story made short, Steve was talking about surfacing some of the building pieces and empowering users. Calvin said - Kinda like making a label order (key word is order - we still need to fill and/or make the order - actual product). That word, "order", was a big key that we got from our meeting. Make a label ordering system as a stepping stone in the process.

Budget wise, we are looking at another $10,000 on Calvin's side (backend code development) and another $10,000 on the user interface (label ordering side).

There are two main sides for labels. Consumer labels and commercial labels. We kinda need both.

Sometimes, Steve likes to break things so that you can come at it from different angles. If it is broken and/or up against the wall, sometimes you come up with other options and solutions.

Overall, a great meeting between Steve, Calvin, and myself.

//////////////////////////

Eric popped in around 10:30 am and we then started working on some planning for the loyalty points, rewards, gift cards, and special account tracking stuff. See attached for our latest database design and spreadsheet stuff. He is going to look through things, make a few tweaks, and then resubmit. We spent quite a bit of time talking about pros, cons, and even running fake data through the mock tables. Good two hour session.

Bryan and Molly jumped in and had a number of questions about both labels and mini conversions. Both of those topics are heating up and gaining more traction. As a side note, we are seeing more and more pressure from the outside state tracking entities. We are also seeing the need of for more cross-corp and/or internal mappings to help certain data fields (for example - sub inventory attributes) keep passing them along. Huge need for internal manufacturing, parent/child inventory, sub inventory, sub attributes, parent attributes, labels, and going clear out to mini conversions. All of this is fully connected and all of the pieces need to be there.

We are also seeing possible needs that will track the main quantity and main unit of measurement. We also need the mini conversion quantity and mini conversion quantity to be recorded. See the attached screen shot that shows both the main and the mini conversion values to both be recorded.

Bryan and I hopped on a Zoom session. We went over a number of different projects and did a small question and answer session. We looked at his cross-corp mapping and application flex grid stuff. We recommended a few display changes and even a red light, green light, type approach to showing whether or not things were mapped. We also talked about multi payment stuff for a white label company. They already have a custom payment option on a one-by-one basis. They are looking into creating a multi-payment option similar to what we do for applying payments to multiple invoices through the existing adilas site. We also talked about a growing need to track who is clicking what my cart favorite buttons. We have some users that want to see stats and reports on who is giving what deals and discounts. All good stuff.

I also pitched an idea to Bryan that if he sees a need, pitch it back to us and he could pick up some more internal work. The key is making the pitch back to us. I told him that Russell was very good at that and we said yes quite a few times. We just need to see the value and we'll most likely say yes. Making progress.

Created some graphics and pushed up some pages to allow people to start signing up for the Denver training event.

On the morning meeting with Steve and Dustin. We had to check in on data 1 and do a server reset. Steve and I chatted about plans for using the managed care offered by Newtek (the server guys) and/or doing our own thing and allowing some of our people to remote in and reset the servers. We also talked a little bit about splitting up databases and the pros and cons of doing such (world building project).

Tons of emails and going through things. I've been gone for a couple of days and there were hundreds and hundreds of emails to go through. Lots of junk, but a few that need some attention.

Wayne popped in and we talked about database transfers between servers and how to handle duplicate records. We came up with a plan and he will be moving forward with the plan.

Eric and I setup some dedicated times to work on loyalty points and special account tracking. We are planning on 2 hour blocks for the next two weeks, from 1-3 pm, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. That will be good to get some dedicated times to work on things.

------ different topic -----

These were some other questions that I wrote on a number of post-it notes... we are just trying to get organized and figure out a better plan for handling all of the pieces that are coming in.

- There are so many needs

- There are so many new requests (new things)

- There are quite a few bug requests (old things)

- Who does the work?

- How do we inform them?

- What is the plan?

- How can we duplicate ourselves?

- How do we create the funnel type approach.... things come in, we record them, we organize them, we distribute them, we work on them, we can check in, get reports and put things to bed

- If I add to my to do list... it never gets done

- Who can I use and what are my budgets?

- How do you prioritize request, projects, and bugs?

- Who gets assigned?

- What do we want to be?

- What are we becoming?

- Who are we wearing out?

- How do we mange that?

- What are our goals?

- We need some help

- See a need... fill a need - I kept coming back to this... this may be the next step.

- Help people manage themselves

- I feel like I'm climbing with a dresser on my back - so many pieces, we need to simplify.

- What teams (people assets) do we have? How are we going to use that?

- I'm running and hiding...

- We need some help

- Kinda like facing giants

- Get the Lord's help

- Get some good help

- See a need, and then fill that need... make a plan!

- Focus on one thing at a time - it is hard to switch and transition.

- We may have to keep people at bay while we do things.

- Schedule it out and stick to that if possible.

------- meeting with Steve -----

- Departments and who gets what

- We sometimes have multiple people looking and checking on the same things. That is not effective and/or efficient. Say an email that is sent to Steve and I, we both look at it and then both respond. This is just one example.

- How do things come in? Do they start with support or do they start with a call to a rep or something else? We might need to start catching things and then funneling them around.

- There is not a book on "SaaS" Software as a Service. We are kinda faking it as we go. That is for real. Basically a pioneering project.

- Maybe talk to Shannon and see if we could get here back. Maybe have her come back in as a different role. We could really use an internal project manager of sorts. Maybe a higher or overall approach.

- We may need to use elements of time and create our own support system and/or support tickets. That could be really quick, now that we have some things ready and done.

- We would love to have a sorted tick list... What are the top 10 maintenance pieces, top 10 bugs, top 10 new requests, top 10 upcoming projects. Then keep rotating through that.

- We love the concept of the data assembly line... What about our new needs... We have done of data, tons of servers, tons of requests, tons of needs... how are we going to track that process and take the actions that are needed.

- We might need places where we have ideas, projects, maintenance, bugs, etc.

- We often talk about the burning platform... it is amazing as we keep going, the burning platforms get fixed, and then there becomes another burning platform.

- Steve and I need a shield to help us filter some of the outside static and/or noise. Once it gets boiled down, we could get a list of things to do and work on.

- We feel bad about not being able to get emails, phone calls, and texts. We are just getting too many. We may need a person to help shield us a bit there.

- Steve and I have thousands and thousands of emails and thousands and thousands of text messages. It gets too much for one person to handle.

- We are in the business of data management, storage, processing, and such. We need to help categorize things and help filter the number of requests that come in.

- Filters... We need someone to help us catch things and then basically boil things down into a manageable list.

- We need to be able to allocate resources as we see fit. There are always limits on people, talent, time, money, etc. We need to manage our resources.

- We have some guys that are top notch... We are seeing Wayne, Alan, Eric, Bryan, Will, Dustin, etc. They are all shining and showing more and more potential. That is exciting.

- We also have Shari O., Shannon, Drea, etc. on the tech support and customer care side.

- We will be working on a running list and trying to be more effective.

- We really want to reach out and have the people run and excel where they have skills and talents.

- We are going to be reaching out to and contacting some of our people. We have a great team... if we use that team wisely, that will open up options.

- Kinda funny, we use to ask our clients, where is your pain? Let's start there. We'll we have the pain now, so, I guess we start there and work forward. Yee haw!

Working with Bryan. We have had a request for being able to switch email addresses and contact info on invoices and quotes. Right now, most invoices and quotes pull in the salesperson info. The original train of thought was helping to make the invoices and quotes a virtual business card. We have done a couple of custom ones, where we switched out the salesperson info with company and/or location specific info or even static contact info. We are seeing more needs for this to happen, being able to switch what is being shown and/or presented. In response to that, we could add a new corp-wide setting that allowed them to make a switch between salesperson contact info and company/location contact info. That is a good idea.

Next, we talked about a company that is currently maxing out the flex grid and the number of custom fields (they are already using 15 custom fields). We talked about expanding that and what that would take. We also briefly talked about the concept of real in-line extensions and also sub attributes with sub inventory. We also talked about tying in the PO line items to elements of time. If you go that route, you have tons more options on the elements of time and subs of time arena. We have lots of tools and options. Sometimes it becomes tricky figuring out which ones to use and how best to mix and blend to get what you need.

General stuff. Recording notes, paying bills, and doing email stuff. Tried to do some back account switching for some of our automated expenses, like server bills and hosting fees, but don't have the new credit card info for the new bank account. Put in a request for the new card info. Made a few phone calls. Just general stuff.

We came on this morning with a notice that one of the data servers had been compromised. Someone had hacked in and changed some file names and some background services. Basically, they, the hackers, change the files names so that the computer can't find what it is looking for. It doesn't mean that they take anything, it is almost just a calling card saying, hey, I've been in here... got ya. We have the server team working on things and will be resetting all access usernames and passwords.

Wayne popped in and we worked on some questions that he had with the sub inventory attributes and custom dates, numeric, and custom text values. That part of the system gets pretty deep. Good stuff.

Eric and I jumped on a meeting. We spent the afternoon working on the special account tracking stuff for things like loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, punch cards, etc. Our task today was to build the database structure. I was mostly building things, while Eric was watching and working on some of the next pieces. Once we get all of the pieces ready to play, Eric will be doing most of the wiring of the pages. We created branch elt-2 for the new code.

Steve popped in towards the end after Eric left. We worked on some of his pages and talked about 3rd party solutions and how to help integrate with more of them that offer great functionality and customized solutions. Good ideas. We'd also love to keep up good relations with both Russell Moore and Calvin Chipman. Both are great developers and could bring some fun tools and features to the party. We'll have to see how things play out.

Emails and tech support stuff. Writing updates on the compromised data server from this morning. Light follow-up.

Checking the server and sending around some emails to let people know that all was well.

Got some reports that the data 1 server was having issues. The two reports were that it was not finishing the invoicing process on any corp and that a person could not edit a user account. I logged in and took a look at what was going on, sure enough, the invoice process was stopping part way through. It took awhile, but we found that the problem was the invoice history table. That table was tied in to both the add and edit invoice processes. Because we had ordered a full server restore, it was replacing tables with older data from a back-up. We also had a couple of people still on the server trying to put in new data. Just the way the tables worked, it created a conflict and was giving us a duplicate record error.

The other problem was the main user table. Originally, it looked like it had been hit as part of the server hack. We later found out that it too was trying to sync old data and new data and just needed a little bit of loving. In the meantime, we posted a temporary login page and added notes to it throughout the day as we found out new pieces and made small break throughs. It was pretty stressful on our side of the fence. I know that some of the clients, on their side, were stressing it as well.

Throughout the day we 7 or 8 of us here at adilas helping out. We had Calvin helping me on the servers and checking database stuff. Wayne popped in and helped us reset a number of things and do some looking around to see if we could see any other harmful activity. Alan popped in and helped us with fixing the database problems towards the end of the day. None of them were very straight forward. Steve was helping to coordinate who was doing what and testing with fake data to make sure things were flowing through. Shari O. and Drea were doing emails, phone calls, and text messages. I was digging through log files, working with the other guys, and back and forth with the server team in Arizona. Very busy day and it took the whole team to figure out different parts of the puzzle. I'm super grateful for their help.

Only the one server was down, but that was pretty crazy. Lots of lessons learned and it was re-restored, released, and pretty heavily tested by around 6 pm. We added a link to the main login page on that server to show a link of what happened and some notes from throughout the day. One of the most stressful things was wondering if the problems were part of the hack job or just circumstances of mixing old and new data from the restore from back-ups.

On a positive note, I would say that the biggest lesson for the day was - enjoy the learning process. Sometimes that is fun and sometimes not, but the cool thing is, if you enjoy learning, it will always make you better. Pretty cool. Long day.

Emails, notes, and doing some clean-up from the day.

Small pow-wow on what happened with the server hack, light debriefing and recap, where we are going, and how to push usernames and passwords to other developers. Making a small plan to push out resources to the different developers.

Calvin came in and we were chatting about the upcoming adilas training in Denver as well as bulk texting (GMext program) and text alerting (more strategic but smaller text messages). Lots of needs and options coming down the pipeline. One of Calvin's comments was the cost in multi texts is in the texts. The cost in alerting is in the code and how to make those triggers and where to place those pieces of code.

We also spent some time talking about the adilas label builder and how that will all play out. Calvin and I were documenting steps and processes to get it all rolled out. We spent a lot of time talking about the order process (what do you want), how we can assign it, how we then request it, and how to actually process and print that label. We also lightly talked about how to communicate back and forth between the different servers. Lots of moving pieces and lots of data going back and forth.

The end goal is to get a custom label solution that is owned and used by adilas for the adilas clients. We want to keep building onto the overall solution and/or platform. Sometimes, we have to build stepping stones and then try to link them together to make up the bigger picture. Lots of mixing and blending of pieces and concepts. Another interesting piece of the puzzle is the question, how are things being used? Sometimes the feedback that we get and when we can see the usage patterns, that is like gold to a developer. If we let our users, they will help tell and show us where we need to go and how to get there. They, our users, are a huge resource.

Spent some time helping Dustin get his settings page dialed in. He is making one of his first, both add and edit, pages that uses the same page. Lots of his logic is modern div tags and JavaScript vs normal page modes and physical page refreshes. He was on it and will do fine.

Working with Eric on the special accounts project (sub of the balance sheet). This will be for things like rewards, loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, punch cards, etc. The task today was boiling things down into a small to do list. After that, I made a small clean-up function, wrote some new documentation, and started into the basic page layout and structure. Once that is done, Eric will take the project and start filling in code on the different pages and components.

Working on a custom templates and custom theme for a white label solution for ecommerce. We also spent some time going over some custom code requests. We have a client that got ahold of Bryan and gave him a whole list of wishes and wants. We worked on fixing one of them, the last half an hour of our session. It was dealing with auto filling balance sheet items from expense/receipts. Good session.

Going through a small to do list of items to get done before days end. Pushing up some passwords, recording notes, closing some branches, and pushing up some code for Bryan on a small fix that we did earlier today. Paying bills, emails, and other tech support stuff.