Adilas Key Contributors:

Steve Berkenkotter - Main owner and business partner - original ideas, concepts, and training - sales, relationships, dreamer, visionary, custom code, coordinator, builder of the first industry specific skin, and the list goes on. Huge player in the adilas story and timeline. One of the original owners in Moring Star Automotive - where the system came from. There are three known Steve's in the system notes. Most of them are this Steve (99 out of 100 times). He won't admit it, but adilas was his brainchild.

David Berkenkotter - Steve's brother and business partner in Morning Star Automotive. David was a system user and helped us create the adilas quick search. He liked using that feature, the quick search, but it only existed on one page originally. He wanted us to put it on every page. That ended up being in the header. He was also one of the original partners in adilas. Power user in the system. Sadly, he passed away due to cancer.

Shari Olin - Commonly known as "Shari O.". She worked in the accounting department back in the Morning Star days. She has been somewhat of a mother hen to help all of us crazy chickens keep going. She helps with customer support, training, payroll, bill collection, and tons of backend office functions. Major power user. Just being silly, but she can have the mouth of a sailor but the heart of an angel. Part of the adilas admin team and a great friend.

Craig Leitner - Also part of the original Morning Star team. Craig was the automotive floorplan and bank guy. He is a power user in the system and does a lot of bank reconciliation and other tasks. He currently works with Steve and asks as the adilas controller (money flow guy).

Cory Warden - Originally an adilas rep and consultant. Cory become part of the team after being a rep for quite some time. She helps with customer care, client support, project management, and keeping the team on track. She also does all of the news and updates and other training material. Cory does tons of oversight type services for our clients. Power user and part of the admin team.

Sean Carlton - Sean was a manager at a Cannabis dispensary in Colorado that used adilas for years and years until they sold. Steve recruited Sean to help with sales, deployment, and training. Sean brings lots of usage experience. Often, he is one of the helpers if we need to send someone onsite to help with a deployment or training session. Power user.

Brandon Moore - I'm one of the guys that writes most of the developer's notebook entries. Originally, I was hired by Morning Star, the automotive dealership, to help with data entry, accounting, and website stuff. I ended up being one of the main adilas developers and architects. I build content, write code, help other developers and team members, and help with training. Helped start the project back in 2001 under the Morning Star name.

Chris Dunsey - One of the first adilas interns (developers). Helped with a number of projects. Ended up being somewhat of a consultant later on.

Shawn Curtis - Kinda a funny story. He was taking a developer's class at Bridgerland. He knew my brother Russell. He asked to join our developer class and became one of the first interns along with Chris Dunsey. Shawn ended up helping with payroll and other projects. Some of the photo galleries in the system came from Shawn's help. He also worked on the media/content (file upload) pieces. Later on, he did more payroll work and acted as a buddy to Brandon and did some consulting work. We worked together for years and years.

Russell Moore - Russell is my younger brother. Originally, he was added to the group because of his graphic skills. He ended up being a great backend developer and project manager. He has also acted as a trainer and mentor for Brandon along the way. Much of the current system came from projects and efforts that Russell was involved with. He has also been Brandon's AI tutor in recent years. Great help to the system. Huge contribution.

Chris Johnnie - He is an entrepreneur who teamed up with Russell to help create a company called "Adilas For Business" or "AFB". Eventually, both Russell and Chris sold their pieces back to adilas. They were honestly the first ones to really try to run as a white label of adilas. This was back in 2015 and 2016. Chris really helped to push the product to the next level along with Russell's help.

Danny Shuford - Longtime friend of Steve's. Danny helped with some website design, sales, and videos for adilas. He even got into creating custom PDF labels for clients. Light development work.

Marisa Shaw - She is Danny's daughter. Danny brought her to an adilas training event in Denver, CO. Marisa was the star student. She ended up helping with some graphics, flyers, marketing material, teaching, instruction, and planning. Power user. Very helpful.

Shannon Scoffield - Shannon is Brandon and Russell's sister. Her maiden name is Shannon Moore. Huge help and virtual assistant to Brandon. She has helped with training, project management, and content creation. Most of the major content sessions were or have been with Brandon and Shannon working together. When they, Brandon and Shannon, were traveling, Shannon was one of the primary adilas instructors. If she was teaching Brandon was taking notes. If Brandon was teaching, Shannon was taking notes. Power user.

Cheryl Moore - Cheryl is my mom. What an asset. She owns a small business and has owed a few different ones. When we were doing training sessions, she came to every one of them. She asked wonderful questions and was a great supporter. Sometime, I would use her as a test subject - can my mom do this? If yes, we are good. If not, we may need to keep tweaking it. Thanks mom!

Wayne Moore - Wayne is my dad. He was my hiking buddy and more than willing to talk about ideas and concepts on our walks and hikes. He helped out with video stuff and was a great coordinator for making other connections. He worked at Bridgerland (technical college) and helped us get setup with classrooms, computer labs, and other great connections. Huge cheerleader! There is another Wayne, Wayne Andersen, he is a backend developer, systems guy, and database guy.

Wayne Andersen - This Wayne lives in Portugal and helps with all of the backend security, server, and code testing. Major skills, writes code, helps push all of us to new technologies, partially retired but loves to play with tech stuff. If you search for Wayne and it deals with concepts and coordination stuff, that's my dad, Wayne Moore. If you search for Wayne and it sounds like a master backend guy, that's Wayne Andersen.

Alan Williams - One of the lead developer's at adilas.biz. Alan joined us in 2015 and quickly came up through the ranks. Trainer, CTO, team lead, master developer, prototyper, and system architect. Alan has helped with many projects and features over the years. He also helped Brandon with some of the prep work for the adilas lite (fracture) plans and project. Sometimes called "Dr. Alan" by the other developers. Example: This might be a project for Dr. Alan.

Bryan Dayton - Bryan has been one of the most versatile guys on our team. Originally, he joined a development class out of curiosity. He and Brandon live in the same town and know each other from church. Bryan has done more custom code or small system projects than almost any other developer. He also joined the team in 2015. He helps with sales, custom projects, pushing on projects that he thinks will yield a return. Lots of work on the adilas lite and fracture project. Very hard working and versatile.

Dustin Siegel - Developer who helped with numerous cannabis and cultivation type projects. He worked directly under Steve to help with that business vertical. Many of the original pages that Steve built were taken over and remade by Dustin.

Eric Tauer - Developer and custom code guy. Originally, Eric knew Steve and lived in Salida, CO. As a note, adilas is Salida spelled backwards. Eric has a background in database work and data warehousing. Eric has done tons of custom systems for clients. Often, Eric would pioneer certain features or logic, as custom code, and then we would bring those features into the main adilas application.

Garrett Kirschbaum - Adilas intern and then full developer back in 2015. Stressful time of building and expansion. He and others helped run the adilas shop with Brandon's help. Garrett was a great developer and helped us standardize a number of tools and features. He was the first developer to work on sub inventory, back in the day. He also did other projects and helped with some developer management stuff.

Charles or "Chuck" Swann - Charles was an instructor at Bridgerland for web development. He builds custom websites, does amazing mock-ups, prototypes, and is a CSS master (styling a website using code). Chuck worked with Russell to help with redesign work, projects, and vision. Chuck worked fulltime for a number of years and now works and coordinates work done by a small hand-picked design and development team. Anything that needs some design loving gets passed over the Chuck and his small team.

Steve McNew - Friend of Steve Berkenkotter's. This Steve helped prep some whitepaper documents to help with getting adilas standardized and some internal audit type stuff. Mostly white papers and putting things down on paper. He ended up getting hired by the local school district and wasn't able to finish the process, but he got it started. He asked some great questions, and we had some good conversations.

Abby Elkins - Abby is Brandon's daughter. Her maiden name was Abby Moore. Abby, when she was little (10-12 years old) helped with some of the original concept artwork for adilas. Later on, she helped with content for the presentation gallery and then the adilas lite plans (fracture). Currently, she is working graphic artwork for different adilas pages. She's now in her mid 20's and has some awesome art and content skills.

Aspen Moore - Aspen is Abby's younger sister and Brandon's daughter. Aspen helped Brandon with some planning and counseling (mental help). Aspen also did some general business consulting with her dad Brandon.

John Maestas - Developer, backend server guys, and designer. John came to us through Dustin. John was uses as a jack of all trades on the backend and frontend. He did numerous projects, documentation, payroll, and page redesign projects. John was also very help to Brandon in working on the notes and comments on the SWOT analysis document. Many other projects as well. Good vision of the future.

Kiva Berkenkotter - Steve's wife. She helped Steve with various projects and planning sessions. At one point, she was in charge of paying commissions and collecting monthly reoccurring payments. Huge supporter to Steve!

Heather Moore - Heather is Brandon's wife. What a trooper. Cheerleader, support, ideas, and consulting. Huge asset to Brandon (me). Thanks Heather!

Jonathan Wells - Designer and mock-up guy. He helped to map out the system and created a number of deep mock-ups for adilas lite (fracture) projects. Great job catching the vision and putting those pieces into a visual representation. We still refer to his work when talking about fracture (future project for adilas).

Jonathan Johnson - Business consultant from Epic Enterprises. Met with Brandon and Steve in end of 2019 into 2020. Really helped us see some needs and opportunities. Later, helped Brandon with some other consulting when trying to define the fracture plan.

Calvin Chipman - Windows software developer. Calvin also did a bunch of web-based work, database stuff, label printing, and API socket stuff. Calvin was the first developer to use the adilas API's to create a native mobile app for a client. He also built a number of special developer tools used by some of our team to speed things up. He's the tool guy!

Cody Apedaile - Bryan Dayton's cousin, Cody helped with a bunch of JavaScript code and changes. He also spent some time working on the UML diagram for the adilas database. We didn't get things finished, but he was working on a new build your own interface (custom to you) for adilas. We ran out of funding. We want to get back to that project at some point.

Dave Forbis - Dave was the official "high tech gofer". He did a bunch of things. Graphics, project management, brainstorming, planning, sales, and helped with managing developers for the adilas shop. He was another great student. He came to a number of training courses and brought so much to the courses. He was also a big support to Brandon during some rough times.

Josh - There are three Josh's. Josh Wheeler, Brandon's friend and developer. Josh Sagert, developer and adilas user (worked tons on the discount engine), and Josh White, Steve's friend from California. Josh White has brought us a number of bigger leads and bigger players, like franchises, and other higher-end clients. Anything recent is Josh White, from California. He helps with networking, sales, and dreaming of new things.

Suzi Distelberg - Sales, training, and deployment. She also worked with some custom projects and doing step-by-step user guides. She has helped with all kinds of projects and even gone onsite for setups and training. Great asset!

Kelly Whyman - Kelly is Dustin's wife. Kelly was single handedly the best independent sales rep that adilas had. She did training, consulting, and sponsored a number of custom projects. Kelly helped Steve and Brandon with reports, functionality, and other things. She got so good at things, state contracts snagged her up to work at state and multi-state level stuff.

Molly Hennessy - Molly was another independent sales rep and consultant. She had numerous clients and got into doing SOP's (standard operating procedures) and other high-end documentation and training. Molly was an entrepreneur and even started creating some of her own product and services. If you search adilas on google, some of the other results are from Molly. Super creative and a great consultant.

Hamid Karbasi - Developer - He has worked with Brandon doing small websites, training, and small tasks. He currently is a manager at a retail store and brings some managerial type skills to the table. Willing to talk about concepts and how they apply to retail and other environments. He is also lightly helping with some planning for fracture.

Gene Spaulding - Friend, entrepreneur, and businessman. Gene is an old college friend. We had a number of friends in common. He has been a small mentor to me over the years. Way back, before adilas, he helped me get my first business loan for a project that I was working on.

Sharik Peck - Friend, entrepreneur, public speaker, physical therapist, and businessman. Good influence and mentor in ways. Sharik and I used to exercise together back in the day. Many of fun walk, run, and weightlifting session. Learning some conference and training skills from him and his wife. They have done really well pushing their product lines and doing some marketing. Trying to get some ideas.

Bridgerland Technical College - Use to be Bridgerland Applied Technology College. Not a person, but a huge help. This is a local technical college in the Logan, UT, area. Brandon's dad, Wayne, worked there. Tons of assets. They provided classrooms, training options, computers, and even an small incubation spot (starter office space) for the adilas shop during the startup phase. Huge asset!

McCorvey's Pro Shop - Also known as Bowling World. Client that had multiple locations. The started out with around 30 and grew up to the 90+ location level, all using adilas. Long time client.

Emerald Fields - They were the first client that wanted their own fully dedicated box and server. They had multiple locations and requested some custom code, reports, and features.

Beaver Mountain Ski School - Client that we helped them track their ski school (snow sport) lessons. Students, instructors, classes, and schedules. Custom interface dealing with elements of time and flex grid.

Bear 100 - This was the first event or annual event client that we did. They used the system for about a week each year. They had 350+ runners and their families that would be on the site for multiple days straight. It was a 100 mile running race with 13 aid stations and a small social portal for the family and friends to watch their runners. This one was special as it had custom input options to upload CSV files to populate the database vs normal HTML form field entries. Records were sent in batches from remote places to adilas for storage and race progress.

High Valley Bike Shuttle - Online ecommerce and scheduling client. They also have a cafe and small retail store. Fun online scheduling and bulk flex grid projects.

Herbo - Mike Roundtree, owner of Herbo, was the first company to do a small white label of adilas. Mike has been a great asset to Steve and the two of them have worked on projects, plans, and dreams. Herbo also has a custom payment solution that they are trying to market and get rolling. Mike has been a great supporter for years. He is also a certified CPA and that credential helps us and him. We would like to get other CPA's on board as well. Thanks Mike!

Nxtlinq AI - AI assistant. These guys really pushed us to get an AI agent inside of adilas. Tons of development took place and lots of prep stuff. We wanted to do a 3-part plan for integrating AI. 1. Teach it how to navigate using the AI quick search (check - done), 2. Teach it all things adilas. and 3. Teach it how to be clear up at the consultant type level. We only got the first phase done. Lots of other plans and such, but we ran out of funding.

Grok AI - Steve loves using Grok. He has built a number of image generation options inside of adilas. He is also working with Grok to feed it data to help with analytics and AI insight. This is not finished yet, but we may end up using Grok as an AI assistant inside of adilas. We have simple and emerging connections available right now but need to really polish things up before going live with the AI assistant options.

ChatGPT AI - We have started using ChatGPT to help with code, explanations, explore resources, planning, and help with training and flow for people and other AI bots. Currently, Brandon, Steve, Bryan, Alan, Josh, Russell, Chuck, and Wayne are using AI in either ChatGPT chat sessions or some other form of AI. We have some using Copilot, Gemini, Claude, etc. AI is actually helping in many ways. ChatGPT is a big one for use. Anyways, they are earning their place in the adilas key contributors list.

There are so many more that I can't list. Developers, users, power users, reps, consultants, trainers, clients, accountants, friends, family, and even critics. They have all helped out the idea farming process and progression. Good stuff! We couldn't have done this alone. It takes a community to do what we are doing.

Emails, paying bills, reviewing notes from over the weekend. Planning for a meeting with Steve. Reread some great poems that have a great message. Click this link to see the poems (on a different entry from a couple of years ago). Pushing up videos to a new folder inside of google drive.

Translating from post-it notes on 1/11/26

- Sunday morning - I was shaving, getting ready for church. I had a flood of ideas come into my head.

- We go for it on 4th down (football analogy)

- Reinforce the team - goal 1

- Goal 2 - We make sure that keeps working (meaning goal 1)

- Morning meeting at 9:30 am (get some communication stuff going on)

- Let people (our team) run... minimal on the micromanagement

- We focus on people... there will always be more projects and features

- CSS on forms for classic looking forms in the snow owl theme

- Look and feel to snow owl - help fix internal and existing pages look good

- Training - could be internal training, AI training, or external training

- Presentation Gallery - Keep pushing on that project

- Images for the adilas lite plan and the investment opportunities

- Abby - Talk to Steve about getting her involved

- Work with the design team - Chuck, Piper, Sarah

- Move key videos to Google Drive vs on the content server. It just can't serve them up quick enough.

- On the AI Agent - Use what we have - Set it up so that it tells people "I'm good at nav" - Polish the 350 existing prompts and tools.

- Suzi - Step-by-steps - small documents with information and instructions. She is really good at that.

- Sean and Cory - General Training

- Prepare for 100+ new accounts - What would that take?

- Open things up!!!

- If needed, we have others who can help - Dustin, Eric, and John. There are others as well.

- Shannon - She has been such a great helper to me

- Let Alan lead out - Help him succeed. He can do so much more than code.

- Get out of the way

- Leverage debt - put all of the adilas shop or adilas lite stuff into adilas as real payables - bring it out of hiding - true costs and costing

- Co-owner Advocate - possible new title, if needed

- Mini bank accounts for each person and/or department - help the team feel safe, supported, and funded

- Be in someone's corner - believe in them

- Overcoming fear - Satan wants us to run and hide

- Simple 1-pagers (one-pagers) - at a glance

Meeting with the SymLiv folks (Taylor and John). This was the first time that Steve had met these guys. Light intros. They have lots of asks from their clients... can you connect to x, y, z, etc.? They are looking for resort level communities and helping to control access and flow in those resort level communities. We talked about doing a full white label option or options. This was kinda fun, but they were talking about white labels of white labels (multi layering of white label products). We were talking about pricing, wholesale options, and how to proceed. Kind of an intro meeting of sorts for Steve and John.

Meeting with Taylor James, John Spuhler, and Tim Greenfield from SymLiv. They deal with different gated communities. They were looking at adilas to help them take care of the other internal processes within those gated communities. Things like simple cabin rentals, small retail shops, booking venues, owners or guests putting things on a tab and paying later, other simple ecommerce, POS (point of sale stuff), CRM (customer relationship management stuff), and scheduling options. Good little demo. They wanted to connect with Steve to get some other info and some pricing. I was somewhat pitching them the white label idea and option.

After the meeting, I called and chatted with Steve for 10 or so minutes to give him a recap. I sent the guys his contact info. He will watch for the email and we'll go from there. He was also reporting on other things that are going on with different clients and projects.

On a Zoom session with Cory. Fixing some deposits for a client. Emails. Meeting with John Maestas (old adilas developer). We were talking about the state of the union type discussion. Basically, where are things at and who is doing what, inside of adilas. Just catching up a bit. After that, more emails and recording notes from 1/8/25 to 1/13/25.

Uploading payroll documents from John Maestas. These were some documents and notes that he had taken about the annual payroll updates and maintenance that we need to do inside of adilas for the next or new year. He took over this project the last few years. Worked on prepping the W-2's for the 2023 tax year.

Found an error on the calculate payroll page. Spent a little bit of time going over the JavaScript functions and fixing some of the local math helpers. As a funny or not so funny side note, there was a bug that has been in there for a couple of months. No one reported it, but one of the local math functions was not working.

Code review for Will on a change to the ecommerce header.

Getting back into the yearend payroll project. Reviewing some older documents from John Maestas who did some of the yearend stuff last year. Ended up grabbing new 2023 forms and then rebuilding them to what we need. Worked through the W-2 and started on the 1099-Misc. Work session.

Working with Shannon. Reviewing some of our work from last week. Then jumping into the next section. Copied over the jellyfish overview from an internal questionnaire from a couple of years ago. Spent the rest of the time working on the SWOT analysis. John and I roughed out some stuff back in July. Shannon and I were going in and harnessing some of that work. Trying to make that document more usable. See attached for some uploaded pieces that we are working on.

Meeting with Shannon. She is planning on helping me two days a week going through Ship B stuff for fracture and adilas lite. Our goal is to start going through the outline (high-level look at the upcoming projects) and detailing things out. That is exciting.

We also went over a book called "Who Moved My Cheese" by Dr. Spencer Johnson. This was an assignment that I gave her. See attached for some of our notes. We had a good discussion and chatted for a bit.

We also put a few new elements of time on the calendar for the next couple of weeks. Good stuff.

Code review for Eric on his EMV/Chip and swipe/manual entry for credit card transactions. Made a few small changes. Called and talked with Eric. I got a call from John and we chatted and touched base on some projects. Spent some time recording notes from the past couple of days. It's been one thing, right into the next thing.

Filling out job reference stuff for John for zip Recruiters. He sent me a couple of emails with links. I just clicked on the links and filled out the forms. After that, just checking elements of time and doing other emails.

Emails and getting ready for the day.

Zoom meeting with Russell. See my notes below.

After meeting with Russell, I was on a phone call with John for about 30 minutes. Talking about what is going on with Adilas and Adilas Lite. Going over possible work options. He is going to reach out to Steve and Cory and we'll go from there.

Some of my notes from meeting with Russell:

- Working with Russell on his tool and homemade framework project. He has learned a lot by building it. He can then take that information and know how and apply it to his other projects. Interesting learning method.

- We talked about project bloat - and how using outside libraries and themes are faster, but it tends to bloat the project (you get more than you want or need - code wise).

- Instruction heavy vs automated

- A framework sets a standard. You can then start expecting certain things. Almost like a miniature set of rules and expectations.

- Starter kits vs the end all, be all - You have to start somewhere. Things will keep morphing over time.

- Tools tend to be built as a box (sort of rigid). Often, people and companies want to add on to the box (customize or add custom code or custom work flow). You then have to ask yourself, does your (my) code fit in the box? Yes/No - then trying to match up tools with company structure and needs. Russell was drawing a standard code set and then a non-standard code set. Imagine one being like a box and the other looking like a blob or a flower with different peddles. We were talking about what fits in the box and what has to be custom. We had some good conversations about that. What is the core? What are the plugins? What is custom? What is allowed? What tools or tooling is being used? Etc.

- API's and API sockets - Allowing outside parties to virtually play at the wall - The backend code could be whatever. The frontend is more structured, meaning the API interface needs to be open to outside traffic (permissioned and approved) and a standard that could be used over and over again. Basically, how it is presented back to the user or developer, needs to be well documented and as standard as possible. The true backend has more flexibility. The backend creates the content that is given back. It also interprets the inbound requests.

- The system and it's architecture and code are all based on trade-offs. You then have to accept those trade-offs. Speed, flexibility, rigidity, rules, scale, custom, standard, hardcoded, dynamic, etc. You have to look and balance the trade-offs.

- If you are doing the full API socket thing, you could actually do a headless CMS (content management system). Basically, if you are going the API route for quick and dirty stuff, it (the new application) doesn't have to look like or follow the same rules (thus becoming headless). You separate the content from the layout or view of that content. Imagine a WordPress type app that is built better and interacts with our internal pieces. We talked about the flexibility of the API. It would be so cool if you could mix and match API calls (quickness) and the whole power of the adilas backend. Inbound and outbound requests could return simple JSON. Lots of potential here. For fracture and adilas lite, we want to run the whole thing off of API socket calls. Our own internal headless CMS, in a way.

- Doing everything on your own (one man show or lone wolf) requires you to know too many topics and subjects. Jack of many trades, master of none. You can gain a lot by allowing for specialists and teams. Correctly done, they can make some amazing things happen.

- Setting up rules and then enforcing those rules. Firm, fair, consistent.

- When pushing API content back, sometimes it is helpful if you can add in helpful stuff to help out the users - For example: Pagination values and page links. Ideally, it is all done through settings, requests, and options. Only return what they want, but make it available if needed. Try to think - what would help the user and/or developer on the other side of the API request?

- Building out basic functions that could be plug and play (self-documenting, self-validating, etc.)

- Russell is trying to build an auto generating REST API for his stuff. The auto generating portion is based on the database (data dictionary). Virtually a set of interpreted rules, assignments, and instruction.

- There is a database level and a service level. Each needs to be built separately. In our terms, we are trying to do DAO's (data or database access objects) and services (things that do something including connecting to the DAO's).

- Build the super complex stuff once, and then use it many.

- We talked about the analogy of a set of railroad tracks. If you build out the known railroad tracks and have proven the methods, you can use it over and over again. Railroad tracks are great for that. If you have to keep building out new ones, and you don't get to use them over and over again, why make railroad tracks, make a simple road instead.

- Figuring out your own testing strategy

- Helping the users use things correctly based on validation and/or information or feedback to the users. Basically, force them down the path and don't give them too much wiggle room (helps the devs manage things). Sometimes too many choices cause more problems.

- Usability and error handling and error messages (good communication back to the client or end-user or even back to the developers).

- From Russell - When your code structure or architecture is bad, your testing will scream at you. If you have a good structure or architecture, your tests should be easy or easier.

- The value of training

- If the servers are down, you don't build tests, you just fix. If you have the time, you build the tests and get the whole thing done.

- Having a good system helps you go faster.

- Dealing with testing, you are going to test anyways, may as well write it in a test. This enables you to be able to go back and rerun those tests. If you have good tests, it should help you in finding those error and bugs faster. Progress moves at the speed of trust. If it's your mess (code), you know how to clean it up and fix it, you also know what it affects (touches or reaches out to - dependencies). What about the other guy (someone who comes in and works on your code)? How do you pass on the notes and instructions? You really have to think about looking out for the other guys/gals that will be coming along later.

Emails, phone call with John, touching base, looking at my schedule, etc. Recording notes from a meeting with Russell. See elements of time # 10439 in the shop.

Going over my notes. Talking with John earlier and we were talking about mobile first design and responsive web app. That has to be a required or a requirement for fracture and adilas lite. We want every page to be able to do both mobile and desktop. I added a post-it note to my board and took a new picture. See attached.

Reaching out to a client to setup a meeting and time to chat about requested changes.

Talking with John about the adilas cafe and doing some mock-ups on that interface. We went over some of the older stuff from Jonathan Wells, see entry from back in 9/5/19 for more info. We went over some new mock-ups from John (see attached). After that, we spent the rest of the time going over the SWOT analysis. Today we were finishing up the threats section. See attached for some progress stuff. It is still rough and unfinished, but we are making great progress.

We also got into talking about budgets, making sure that we go mobile first for fracture (adilas lite), and we setup some other times to meet. We are excited to have the first pass done on the SWOT analysis (see attached).

Emails and texts back and forth to John about the adilas cafe. Working with a document for Danny and YouTube training videos. I then met with Danny and we went over options for some of the videos and training assets that we both have and/or need. Danny and I were talking about things, and he was saying that he knows a company that doesn't even release the next changes until the training is ready, done, and up for viewing. See attached for a screencap of what we were talking about.

Here a couple of the links that I sent to Danny:

- Entries in the developer's notebook talking about YouTube videos - lots of good resources. Once it comes up, do a browser search for the term "YouTube" to help pinpoint some of the options.

- Entry in the developer's notebook talking about a thing called education mode.

As a side note, on 8/14/23, I added this little link to a video on the education mode.

SWOT analysis stuff with John. Working on the threats section. What are we going to do to fix some of these things? Wayne jumped on and reported on possible move to Spain (nothing adilas related, just chatting about life). Wayne was talking about cyberchef tools and security options. We talked about some advanced cyber stuff. High level mash-ups and dashboards. We also talked about professional level certifications. One of things that we get faced with, as developers, is stagnation of skills. We need to keep building on our skills and skillsets. Talking about serving others. John and I jumped back into the SWOT analysis and going the threats. Distractions, time to market, lack of funding, lack of structure, etc. Lots of great conversations.

Meeting with John to go over the SWOT analysis. Lots of talk about consistency and product feedback. Working on the opportunities section. Great conversations. At some point, I'd like to copy and paste some of those notes to make them more visible.

Working with John. Helping him debug the cart to work with his discount engine. Light review of adilas financials.

Lunch meeting with Jonathan Johnson from Epic Enterprises. Jonathan is a business consultant here locally in the Cache Valley, Utah area. Great little meeting and he was asking some great questions and feelers to check out parts and pieces of my plan for ship B, fracture, or adilas lite. We talked about pieces of the business plan and how to plan things out and proceed.

- One of the main topics was dealing with talent and getting excellent talent to help run the business.

- Went over our rough plan and talked through steps of the plan. See elements of time # 10179 for more details.

1. Company Structure - Adilas Jelly Fish Model
2. Product Development - Adilas Value Add-On Core Model
3. Education & Training - Internal and External - Adilas University
4. Community & Outside 3rd Party Solutions - Adilas Marketplace
5. Social & Efficiency Options - Adilas Cafe & Community
6. Deeper Product Development - Adilas Lite - Fracture Project
7. Budgets, Finances, Marketing, & Sales - Other Business Plans

- Lots of talk about division, departments, and managing the entity and the projects. Defining those roles and what is needed. Once that is finished, we will put or assign/invite the who (people and talent) to the what.

- We talked a lot about inviting and enticing the talent. Not all of the talent will be hourly or employee level people. Some of the talent or high-end knowledge workers contribute in different ways. That was a small paradigm shift for me, thinking wise. More of projects and contributions vs hours and physical output.

- What needs to be done for the product development pieces - plans, marketing, sales, and roll outs.

- Talking about building out a pitch deck to help pitch the project and product (the whole package).

- 5 main personality types - There are five major roles that need to be fulfilled in a company. Instead of just roles, ideally, you actually have people in place who can carry each of these roles and own it. Otherwise, you just have a smaller number wearing multiple hats. The five people are: An organizer, a doer, a creative type, a consultant, and a salesman. The goal is to align talents with tasks. I grabbed this bullet point from entry # 5295 - another meeting with Jonathan Johnson (early on, back in 2019).

- Talking about the root words in authority (author or create), accountability (count or manage), and responsibility (respond or react). Who does what and how that all plays into the mix.

- See attached for a napkin with some notes on it - Here is what Jonathan wanted me to do - 4 steps he wants me to work on... 1. Define the division and structure of the company, 2. Invite the talent to fill the roles defined, 3. Product development MVP, and 4. Build the pitch deck. All of these need to be at least good enough. Shooting for an MVP level on all of them.

Meeting with Wayne over the GoToMeeting session. Wayne and I were going over the main login information and process. We looked at the auto login for the ecommerce site as well. Just gathering ideas. We talked about the adilas cafe options. Wayne is getting close to having some of that code done at a super entry level. He is going to work with John to get a small skin and good-looking interface put on it. Lastly, Wayne and I chatted about his brother and some possible involvement from there.

Meeting with John. Working on the SWOT analysis stuff. We were still working through some of the opportunities. At some point, I'd like to copy and paste some of that info into the developer's notebook. Some great stuff. Along with our meeting, we decided to shoot for a new group meeting on June 18th from 5-6 pm. This would be a team meeting for ship B and progress on where we are at.

As a note, I was thinking about the developer's notebook and other web based journals and blogs. I use it all the time. I'd really like to offer something like that for all of our customers. Maybe a possible addition and option for fracture or adilas lite.

Zoom session with Kelly and Cory and Steve. We were looking at a cross corp data issue. Light clean-up on some backend database stuff for both Kelly and Cory. Jumped back on with Kelly, Cory, and John to look at a sales tax calculation issue. It was dealing with how the shopping cart figured out taxes based on customer types (including and excluding calculations). After the meeting, Cory and I chatted about other projects on the to do list.

Small side note, it was amazing watching Kelly navigate around with multiple tabs, quick search options, exports, pulling reports, and bouncing from page to page to get the data. We need to remember how hard some of these pages and functions get pushed on when we build out fracture. We need something that is stable enough to hold up the power users.

Meeting with John and doing some brainstorming on the opportunities on the SWOT analysis. Lots of small side conversations. See attached for the new notes. They are towards the bottom of the page.

Great session with John to go over the SWOT analysis. We finished up the weaknesses section and had some great conversations. We recorded a number of things that we can work on. Nothing is so broken that we can't fix it, and we acknowledged that we still have some work to do. Good stuff.

Code review with John on the 3rd party solutions page. The visual looked great. We ended up comparing old and new code side by side. I was reading things from one screen and John was checking it on the other screen. That 3rd party solutions page is close to 10,000 lines long. It looks great and much better flow than before. Good session.

Zoom meeting with Cory and Steve Palmer from FlyHi and Euflora. We were talking about the FlyHi integration. They are finding that delivery is not as cool as they thought it would be. Super tight margins. It works better where there are fewer places to buy your products. Steve was talking about issues with their new software that the company is making them use. They don't have enough API socket endpoints. That was interesting.

After Steve Palmer left, just Cory and I stayed on for a few minutes going over projects. Quick phone call with John. I then started trying some stuff with the HTML sanitizing and HTML formatting of the stored database records (for a product export).

Meeting with Cory and going over projects. I showed her my progress on the additional vehicle assignments for customers. We went over flow, settings, databases, and direction. She wanted me to push up the daily/weekly sales report code that I worked on last week. She was out of town and wanted to be back before we pushed it up. Ended up merging that into master and pushing it up to a few servers for testing.

She had a few other projects that she wanted to get going as well. She gave me a small list including reaching out to a client on a web inventory question, meeting with Bryan to sign-off on some code, and looking over some code changes that John was making on the 3rd party solutions page.

As a side note, sometimes it gets really tricky the more parties you get involved. We have to worry about ourselves (adilas or the software side of things), a possible 3rd party or outside institution, and the users and how they are working and interacting with the different parties. That can get really tricky and sometimes it is hard to know where the fault and/or breakdown is happening.

Emails and checking some online payments that were made from adilas clients to us. There were some questions. After that, I met with John to work more on the SWOT analysis. Great session. We finished up on some of the strengths and rolled over and started working on the weaknesses. We had some good conversations, even about some sensitive and difficult topics.

After hours meeting with Wayne, Alan, John, Bryan, and I. Wayne pretty much drove and I took notes. It went for three hours. We have the first two hours recorded (see attached). The last hour, we thought that we were done and it kept going with ideas and more clarification stuff. It may be a lot to read, but I've got 5 pages of notes, all dealing with fracture and where we are heading with adilas lite. Some of these topics are deep, backend, and server and database related. Good meeting.

I have no problem saying this... I was definitely not the smartest person in the room. I've been doing this kind of stuff for over 20+ years and I was impressed. That makes me excited.

Once again, if you want to review the notes, there are a bunch of good things in there for our upcoming fracture or adilas lite project.

These are a few of my takeaways:

- We need to communicate and get some standards setup. This could be what we call things, what code to use and how it looks and acts, and other style guide level stuff.

- Our plan is to build the whole new parts and pieces into an open API socket connection level application. We could then use API sockets as well as let outside developers use the same API sockets. We talked a lot about this. This is where we want to head. The new adilas lite platform will be mostly run on API sockets.

- Rules and assignments - the concept of building the rules and then assigning who plays with those rules was a big part of the discussion. Follow a story-based design for logic, testing, etc. Make all of this data driven.

- Think generic - what is available - what do you want or need? Make everything configurable. Multiple levels of configuration. See notes.

- We will be building a very robust data dictionary and then using that in the rules, validation routines, etc. This is basically a database that shows columns, names, values, rules, defaults, and other information about those columns and/or fields. This is huge and will help us use a more data driven approach vs hardcoding all of the rules, values, and validation per column. We will have a generic set and then let each corp, location, and user tweak a copy, if they want to get that deep. If not, we will use the main master data dictionary list information. Only change and copy what is needed.

- Events and turning everything into small bite sized pieces. Very minimalistic approach. Make as much of this application asynchronous (nonlinear) as possible.

- Let's do the aggregates (data warehousing stuff) right off the bat and get those values in place and being used. We are very good at transactional data and data storage. Let's really make an effort to break into the aggregated or business intelligence (BI) levels. That is a huge goal of ours.

Emails and research. Meeting with John. Quick update on servers. It sounds like Wayne and John are working on a small mini project for the adilas cafe model. After that, John and I spent time working on the SWOT analysis. We were going over our strengths and weaknesses and making notes on each entry. We pretty much spent the whole time going over that. The current authoring file is on the Adobe Cloud. Lots of little comments, links, and researching out stats and what not.

Quick phone call with John. We jumped on the GoToMeeting. Sean was on there and asked about the group meeting about the pivot that we had last night. We reported to him. I then helped John get passed a small payroll issue that he was having on his local box. I did some checking on an employee/co-owner draw and gathered some history info. Quick phone call with Shari O. to chat about the meeting. She will pass me over the recording when it gets uploaded. I then sent out an email to all of the guys/gals with the notes from last night's meeting.

John and I had a great session working on a S.W.O.T. (swot) analysis - that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You basically have a brainstorming session and list out different things under each category. We made some pretty good lists. Many of the same things could be viewed as both strengths and weaknesses. There was quite a bit of crossover between the different categories and topics.

John was working Adobe XD while I was listing things out. We had small conversations about each section. It was really fun. I took a small screenshot (not even a fraction of it). The document still needs some refining and work, but a great start.

Right at the end, we had the thought to do a SWOT analysis for smaller sub sections. Our first attempt was dealing with general adilas and the new fracture or adilas lite product that we are going to create. We could do a SWOT analysis for the main adilas (ship A), fracture (ship B or adilas lite), adilas university, adilas marketplace, our development team, etc. It might be nice to break things down a bit.

All kinds of little things. Emails and reviewing the adilas docs. John had been in there making some changes. Sent an email out about the pivot group meeting tonight to go over ship A and ship B stuff.

Small notes for me - There is a huge value in education alone. If you combine education, training, and maintenance, you have a huge piece of the puzzle. Those pieces will help support the whole. I added in a few research links to our Google doc for master plan research.

Touching base with John on the plan and progress there. We did some planning and brainstorming. We talked about paper and pencil/pen and what other tools are available. John was showing me some flow chart drawing apps like draw.io (diagrams). We talked a lot about the words light or lite and what that means. We talked about different levels like in skiing and snowboarding. You have true beginners, greens, blues, blacks, double blacks, and orange (freestyle or terrain parks). Basically, beginner, intermediate, advanced, and super advanced (custom).

 Our first major plan is to help funnel down some of the existing entries from the developer's notebook into smaller categories and such. As a fun side note, dealing with plans and docs, John has already done some of this type of stuff and work for some of his school projects. We may tap into that as some resources.

As a request, John wants me to start digitizing things earlier. I tend to use pen and paper and then digitize things after the fact. It may depend on what is happening and what the things are. sometimes my pen and paper model is super fast and effective. John and I spent the rest of the session going over ideas for business plans and what that will take. We talked about doing a S.W.O.T. analysis tomorrow. That stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (swot).

We talked about who may play what roles, going forward. We really want to build things that will be stable. That includes clustering, mirrors, back-ups, and enterprise level capabilities. We also need it to be sustainable, who will support it, build it, sell it, etc. (statement and a question). We need to build those pieces into the mix. Building the dream together.

Phone calls, texts, and reaching out to some of my contacts. I'd like to reach out to Sharik Peck, Aaron Hill, Jonathan Johnson, Mike Hall, and Josh Wheeler - to start with. Maybe others later on.

Brainstorming on quick and small ecommerce packages. And then help them get it all setup and going. Kinda a free trial basis for a couple of months. Work some magic to do some quick sprints if needed (custom or general code work to help them out).

I also sent a big text to Steve to tell him yes, I'm planning on running with ship B (adilas lite). I told him last week that I would officially let him know on Monday what my decision was. Well, this was it. I'm in!

Random Monday morning. Phone call with John, going over ideas and game plan. Phone call with Cory to get a new project. I'm going to be fixing the AFB timeclock app. Checked in on the GoToMeeting session. Chatted with both John and Sean on the GoToMeeting session. I then got on a phone call with my sister. She has a number of small items that she would like to sell online through ecommerce.

- People over things

- People need help - for example, my sister and her little business. It's almost too small for anybody else to care about.

- Barter system - My sister is a master at that - "Come shopping at my house" - she has all kinds of arts and crafts that she makes, builds, and sews. Super creative. Along those same lines, maybe we could say something like "Come shopping at my software application". We could barter, trade, buy, sell, or whatever. Almost our own little adilas marketplace (of sorts). We have a lot to offer and goods and services could be bought and sold with more than just normal money. Fun idea.

New transition today. I popped onto the morning meeting because that is what I normally did. I let the guys know that I wasn't going to be doing that any more. Sean was on the meeting and we chatted for a bit. By way of an update, he is doing great working with the dynamic adilas label builder. He is also willing to do some checking out of what our competitors are doing and providing me some competitive research. Nothing too huge.

John joined the meeting, and we were looking at some mock-ups. We would like to allow our users to interact with options to setup their own space, look and feel, etc. We would also like to do some early prototyping. Get it out and in their hands. Even things like settings for click vs hoover and other simple choices that affect their space (what they do and use - their space, their flow). We already have a bunch that we have paid for and haven't been able to use it yet. We have a ton of R&D stuff that Jonathan Wells did in Adobe XD for fracture, adilas cafe, and a new shopping cart.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Dramatize it, push up XD docs from Chuck on the content server. We have done tons of really good R&D. Let's use that. This is how we are going to get fracture up and going and off the ground.

John and I talked about trying to centralize all of the data and assets. I have a bunch of it. We have pushed up a bunch to the adilas content server. We also still have quite a few assets and raw authoring files with the guys/gals who made them - Jonathan Wells, Chuck, Russell, Marisa, etc.

As part of our discussion, John was showing me some of the projects that he worked on for school. He's got business design docs, pitches, proposals, flow charts, etc. I'd like to tap into some of those planning and system scope documents. Not necessarily for his project, but more for what we could do for our projects. Once again, show them don't tell them. That is huge and reoccurring theme. Show them, don't tell them.

Here are some other notes from our meeting:

- We could make some awesome customizable dashboards

- Realtime data on what is going on (tables, graphs, charts, and quick aggregates), help them see everything without overwhelming them. Full visibility.

- "Show them" and then do it over and over again.

- Talking about dream salaries between John and I. Where would you like to be, salary wise?

- Keep idea farming - that's what we do

- Shari O. joined the meeting. She loves to do some gaming. I'd love for her to come up with some ideas on how to turn adilas and the daily work into a game of sorts (the game of business). Shari O. said that she could do some light research and maybe come up with some ideas. As we were talking, she said that she changes games based on moods. That's good information. We may want to come up with something similar - what mood are you in? Ok, let's play that way. This is just a dream right now. I'd like to see where it goes.

- Keep gathering things together. Eventually, we will make our own world.

- More ideas for the application and/or system - education mode, game mode, nuts and bolts mode (just get it done - speed mode).

- More talks with Shari O. about Facebook groups, other social groups, having meetings, setting up schedules, and giving people power to run what they want to do. Make the whole thing a team effort.

My mind was going nuts all day. Literally a whirlwind. I didn't write down the start and end time on this one. But from about 12 noon until 11 pm ish I was brainstorming, thinking, recording notes, talking to people, phone calls, texts, etc. It was super fun. Once again, these notes don't have any specific order, they were just what I recorded on small little post-it notes. I should have used a bigger notebook... :)

- We need a matrix and the ability to monitor every choice and setting. Full data driven and choice driven billing for our clients. This needs to be baked into the beginning design for fracture and where we are heading.

- What about possible open-source code and/or having our clients pay for their own accounts? That would take some of the hardware and server pressure off of us. Just a thought. Along with this, we could set it up to use any domain name, any site/server or hosting company. Whatever. Keep it super open, if we want it to be.

- As far as hosting and packages, we could have our own options as well. Things like simple home use, shared servers, semi dedicated servers, full dedicated servers, clusters, etc. Make some options and then make them available.

- List out your services that you offer and/or have available.

- Packages and bundles - tiny, small, medium, large, extra large (xl), double X (xxl) or whatever. Maybe set some limits for the different sizes or limits withing a certain range (keep it kinda flexible). Allow for variable billing.

- Stripe seems to have some awesome automated merchant processing features. It may be fun to plug into this. We could also use something like Datacap and then have access to even more merchant processing options. Just thinking along these lines. This could be for our clients as well as for us, as a company. Currently, we are using USAePay for our internal merchant processing stuff. I'd like to expand and really open that avenue up a bit.

- You (meaning me) may need to fully jump off. Earlier today I was giving Steve an analogy of jumping off of a moving train. The best place is either on or off, not somewhere in the middle. If I'm going to jump, do it and get clear. You don't want to be too close to that moving train. Once again, just an analogy.

-  Some of this stuff is for me, but was part of the brainstorming session. Anyways, I'm going to list it anyways.

- I know some bankers. I'd like to meet up with them and just pick their brains. Thinking of Mike Hall, Brent Wallis, Kevin Moser.

- I could use some of my percentage ownership of adilas as collateral, if I needed to get a loan.

- I have a buddy that helped me out, back in the day with my Learn To Freeride (LTF) project. His name is Gene Spaulding. He currently does a lot of stuff with nursing homes, memory care, and retirement homes. Good resource. Maybe even checking with him if he needs a product to help manage all of his beds (rooms for his clients - elderly folks). Regardless, he's an awesome resource.

- I know a guy by the name of Jud Eades who is an entrepreneur, a friend, and a total stud. He does all kinds of fun stuff. I could see if he has ideas and/or is interested in helping me build a reoccurring revenue based product.

- I know lots of other business people who have ideas and different know how. I would love to tap into their minds. Just being silly, but started thinking about too many people and decided to stop (for now).

- Use eye candy to show what we have done

- Talk with my wife Heather

- I have a full business plan that I did for the LTF project (older personal project dealing with teaching snowboard freestyle tricks and moves - early to mid 2000's). Look at the LTF binder, just to get some ideas.

- Recruit help. Think about all kinds of avenues, people, places, things, etc. Be creative!

- Include the Lord

- Sufficient - That goes a long ways

- Apply It! - Whatever you learn, keep applying it. That seems to be one of the secrets.

- We (adilas) hired a business consultant a few years back. Get back with him and review of what you learned from Jonathan Johnson and Epic Enterprises Consulting.

- Check in with Aspen, my daughter and see if she wants to help. She has a great gift for organizing and such. I could use the help.

- Talk with my mom and dad. I would like to ask my father for a father's blessing as well. That would help me out.

- Planning things out and then funding that development.

- Strategic funding based on needs and plans.

- Willing to listen and record notes. I love sharing what I have learned. Writing things down helps my memory. The old saying - The faintest scratch is better than the sharpest mind.

- I'm willing to let others play a role and add to or even take away as needed.

- Freedom from the adilas grind - that's worth a lot.

- I may be able to do more and help more by not being tied down.

- Make a list of pros and cons

- Include some prayers (lots of them) and some fasting - ask hard questions of God and of yourself

- A couple of books came to mind - Who Moved My Cheese, The Go Giver, How To Win Friends And Influence People, Rocket Fuel, etc. Read those books.

- Be willing to help and give. I enjoy that.

- Follow a dream

- There is a level of excitement that I'm feeling. This is kinda fun!

- I have a book called "Differentiate or Die" - I'd like to read that. It was given to me years ago and it has been in my office but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

- Get some training

- Work on some funding

- Be a cheerleader

- Help fix the existing foundation. Make this part of the plan.

- Be open... to... whatever...

- Bridgerland - It's a local technical college here in my town. There are lots of options there. I know a number of people, they have training resources, and they have even asked for a demo (multiple times) of our products. I'd like to explore some options there including offering to help them build something that they could resell and/or pitch to other technical colleges. Almost a white label type option.

- I had a dream the other night about including other businesses in our planning and roll out. Keep exploring those ideas and avenues.

- Leverage your percentage of ownership.

- Ask... What do you need? How can we help? What do you want? Where is your pain?

- Go back and do it again. Trystorming and being willing to circle back again.

- Talking with Heather, my wife, and going over what I was making, what I could make, and how to keep a good balance. I'm not going to lie, there are parts of it that are just plain scary.

- We may need to get back to doing a family budget. We used to do that a long time ago. It's been pretty smooth sailing and we haven't done that in quite some time. We may need to circle back around.

- I'm kinda scared to dip into savings. Super grateful that we have some.

- During the day, we talked (Heather and I) about existing expenses, promises, and upcoming expenses dealing with raising a family (vehicles, wisdom teeth, other doctor bills, etc.). We listed a few things out.

- From Heather - We don't want to relive LTF! - Understood and I agree. Lots of lessons learned. If someone has time, some time in the future, I'd love to tell them about that project and product. Huge building blocks of my career, part of my life, and part of the journey. It wasn't all bad... :)

- Look at the risk/benefit trade offs

- From Heather - She'll let me do this - new venture - if we don't take out a personal loan and don't clear out our savings.

- We have been super blessed.

- We can't see the future. We don't know what is coming.

- Keep adding to savings as part of the plan.

- Light fun with numbers. We started adilas in 2008 from a project that started in 2001. The first adilas deposit was for $100. As of 5/31/23, adilas has made over $7 million and growing. That's kinda fun.

- The current goal is the business plan. That may end up being more than just one document. It may be better to say plans (plural).

- Need to call our accountant and check on taxes (for me personally)

- We have a number of projects planned for around the house that will still need to be completed this summer (paint back porch, cut down the dead tree, etc.). Heather wants to make sure that I don't get too busy and that I can still help out and do the planned projects around the house.

- From my daughter Amber - We were on the back porch talking - Here are some random thoughts that I wrote down from our conversation. From Amber - Do what makes you happy! Question - wouldn't having more be more stressful (meaning another whole adilas product)? I told Amber that I was trying to work myself out of a job. She had a few questions about that. Foreign concept to her. We talked about - if you are enjoying the job, it's not work. Good fun!

- More notes from Amber - You could always find another job. For example, snowboarding or whatever. Something that you enjoy! Maybe something part time or something like that. You could teach an art class, spend more time with your hobbies, actually get a job where you have a window (you work in a cave), get out and get outside, something. She was having fun giving me advice.

- AI (artificial intelligence) - this may replace certain jobs. Creativity and interpersonal skills - you can't replace that (currently).

- I like helping people - do something along those lines.

- Aber was being super kind - She said - You should draw stuff. I love the t-shirts, cards, your life jacket (kayaking PFD), and other things that you have drawn. Go have fun! You could totally use your drawing talents.

- Next I talked to Aspen for a bit - she was very logical and had some great questions. For example: I wrote down - Do you feel comfortable dropping all of your responsibility on other people? Who is going to do what you were doing? What about family timing (meaning with our family and who is doing what - in general)? What about retirement? Who is going to help with marketing? Etc. Very logical questions. It was great.

- I told her that I was playing a small game, similar to the old fable called "stone soup". Bring what you've got, throw it in the pot, we are making stone soup. She thought that "a community effort" was a better way to say it than calling it stone soup. She is probably right.

- A few more questions and comments from Aspen - If you have a passion about something, we'll trust you. Prove yourself! Different question, how will this look for taxes?

- Both grandmas and grandpas (Heather and I's parents) are a great resource. I'd like to let them know what we are doing.

- Talking to my son Tanner about what was going on - He said, it sounds like Legos (little building blocks).

- This is totally random, but also came from Tanner - We were talking about trying to skip things that we didn't like or couldn't do. Just being silly. All of the sudden, Tanner tells this story about one of his friends. His friend is in a wheelchair and has some disabilities. Tanner was really sore from doing something and said, I think that I'll skip leg day today (dealing with weight lifting and going to the gym). His little friend chimed in and said, I skip leg day everyday. Tanner and his friend had a good laugh at that. Anyways, it was super funny and broke the tension around the dinner table. Good stuff!

- Talk with Steve about some ideas

- Aspen recommended that I talk with Kelly (adilas power user)

- Called and spoke with my mom and dad over the phone. I then went over to their house and spent an hour with them talking about things. Great little visit. They recommended that I do some fasting and praying. My dad will be willing to give me a father's blessing this coming Sunday. Pay your tithing, server the Lord, and pray for help.

- My dad gave me a scripture to look up: 1 Nephi 4:6 - Led by the spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.

- I told my mom and dad about a dream that I had on Monday night about including other business owners in this software re-write and that is exactly what my parents recommended for me to do. I thought that was very interesting and awesome!

Working with Aspen to go over our plan for making the plan. Light review and discussing expectations and where we are going. Started in on adding some research links to part of our plan. Pushed up the new stuff to the google doc that John and I had started.

Here is a light version of where we are heading... (just barely starting - for the record, it looks nicer in the google doc)

Master Adilas Plan or Adilas Master Plan

1. Company Structure - Adilas Jelly Fish Model
2. Product Development - Adilas Value Add-On Core Model
3. Education & Training - Adilas University
4. Community & Outside 3rd Party Solutions - Adilas Marketplace
5. Social & Efficiency Options - Adilas Cafe & Community
6. Deeper Product Development - Adilas Lite - Fracture Project
7. Budgets, Finances, Marketing, & Sales - Other Business Plans

New note added on 8/14/23 - For a pretty good breakdown of these projects - just at a high level, see this element of time 10377 and it's photo gallery.

________________

Table of Contents. To-do

All time id's are inside of adilas

2283 - Main Index

2284 - Jellyfish Model

- Research on the Jellyfish model - link

2285 - Value Add-On Core Model

- Research - link

2286 - Adilas University

- Research - link

2287 - Adilas Marketplace

- Research - link

2288 - Adilas Cafe & Community

- Research - link

2289 - Fracture - Future Project

- Research - link

- Adobe XD mock-ups with options

2290 - Budgets & Finances

2291 - Marketing & Sales

- Adobe XD mock-ups with options

- World Building Concepts and Concepts of the Data Assembly Line - Pitching the concepts

- Research on world building, research on data assembly line

- Presentation Gallery - great start for an outline of what adilas does

2292 - Other Timelines, Plans & Projects

Meeting with John and doing some planning. We were going over themes, ins and outs of how to make a new theme in our existing code, folders, paths, settings, and page level controllers. We talked about some of the new code and R&D that Jonathan Wells did. We are looking for feedback. We may end up offering options and pushing the choices over to the users. Tons of toggle on/off switches for the different features.

People don't want to scroll and they want a minimal number of clicks to make something happen. We talked about getting the information (all kinds) into the database. Minimal on the hardcoded pieces. The whole thing becomes data driven.

I was drawing and talking about different things. We would love to create a master plan. John and I started a small google doc to gather some the of the master plan info so we both could access it.

Shari O. jumped in and had some payroll questions. We did some quick research, pulled some records, and helped her make some changes. We got it all figured out.

Sean and I talking about dreams and plans. Where do we want it to go? I love those kinds of talks and conversations.

John and I were talking about budgets and hours. He is concerned. Shari O. joined and John and Shari O. were talking about layouts and interface stuff. We have a client that is requesting some custom navigation. They want to shortcut things by one click or put buttons and/or links where they want them to show up. This is more of a "controlling space" meaning what you work with and where things are located. Custom space - think of your desk or bedroom, you put certain things in strategic places in order to be efficient or effective.

Shari O. was asking questions about some of the new payroll settings for a client. We went in and looked, and it looked like the client was in there changing things around. Some of the changes that Shari O. had made were gone. We fixed it and will get ahold of the client and do some training.

Great internal training event. John was running the show today. We had Brandon, John, Danny, Eric, Alan, Dustin, and Bryan on the meeting with us. We were going over the adilas docs (online style guide and code snippets), light review, going over conventions, components, and other style guide stuff. John was encouraging the developers to use the docs and play around with things. As a side note, John has also started some adilas server docs (major backend stuff) as well.

Lots of good discussions. Topics ranged from docker stuff, older code, bootstrap versions, and sign-off guides for development and frontend GUI stuff (GUI is for graphical user interfaces or UI/UX user interfaces and user experiences). We had some good practice sessions and John had prepped some code with some flags where he wanted us to work and change things.

It was great for all of the guys to be on the meeting. I did snap a screenshot of some of the webcams (see attached). We talked about using data 0 as the starting point or standard for a number of things. Especially if we wanted to duplicate and/or use the same things over and over again. The conversation then led over to talking about the future and where we are heading. We spent some time talking about the new framework and being able to swap out dependencies and what not.

One of the last things for the normal training session was a discussion about requests for future training and crossover training. Here is the quick list, not in any specific order.

Future Training Session Ideas
- Cfscript
- Javascript/JQuery
- Back End (Models, Services, DAOs)
- API's - Internal API sockets and external API sockets
- Ajax
- Testing
- Custom CSS & Print CSS

After everybody else left, John and I did a small review of the training session. We were chatting about options and feedback. John and I may start with some CSS and theme stuff (planning for the future). See attached for 3 different videos that we did from the training session. Great event.

Sean and I going over labels and the adilas label builder. One of the topics that came up, once John popped on was dealing with raw assets and IP (intellectual property). We really want to work on gathering the info, assets, logos, drawings, original art work, text, copy, etc. all in one place. That would be awesome!

John and I then talked about some of the challenges of using pre-built themes and then being able to print things out nicely. There is different code to show things on the web and it changes when you try to print it. Anyways, just going over ideas and options. As we make changes, it requires some of our users and clients to redo their SOP's (standard operating procedures). These are their instructions and what not. If you start changing things, then all of the sudden, the instructions don't match what is being seen and/or displayed on the screen. It causes confusion and a disconnect.

We also spent some time talking about requirements that are pressed upon us and how sometimes we feel like the little red hen (story of a red hen who offers yummy bread to her friends, but no one wants to help plant the seeds, harvest it, grind it, and then bake it). Along the lines listed above, dealing with showing and printing web pages and mobile ready applications. Sometimes we build things for normal desktop applications and then people want to use them on mobile apps or mobile devices. It can be challenging.

The last conversation of the meeting was dealing with lite versions or light versions. Basically, talking about the concept of adilas lite or a scaled down version or versions. Good stuff!

Small work session between John and I. We started out by pulling up a local code branch and doing a visual review of the changes. We were working on the add/edit location page. We then moved into talking about making plans (frontend, backend, and overarching architecture stuff) and carving out timeslots for finalizing those plans. We planned 2 days a week for 2 hours a piece, all through the month of June. Putting some placeholders into the mix.

Another topic of conversation was about IP (intellectual property) and gathering things up. This includes raw code, raw graphics, and other assets and resources. Currently, I have a bunch of this stuff on my local computer but nobody else can get to it and it's not super organized. Anyways, that will be a future project as we move forward.

I promised John that I would check on what it would take to be able to gift a percentage of ownership for some of the bigger framework projects that we have coming up. I'd like to help incentivize our guys/gals to help us work on those pieces.

We talked about themes (existing and possible themes) as well as coming up with our own themes and custom CSS (cascading style sheets and full application layouts). Along those lines, we also need to plan in progression and deprecation of those visual assets and themes. Our product needs to keep changing in order to keep up.

John really loves feedback, and he was asking if we could, on purpose, include some others on our feedback models, internal needs, external needs, and wants of our users and our clients. All of that would be some great information and great feedback. We don't mind changing things, we just need a plan in order to know where we are headed and what the priorities are at this point.

This is more for me, but I was listening to an audiobook - Dale Carnegie - "How to Win Friends and Influence People", and it was talking about avoiding the acute angels or tight spots (with people, projects, and such). You want to keep your options open (like an obtuse angel) vs creating a squeeze or super tight spot (acute angles). Not that you never get into those spots, but you don't try to force anybody into those tight spots. As John and I were talking, that thought came back to me about trying to avoid the acute (tight) angles or tight spots. I'd like to build so that there is room to turn, maneuver, and adjust as needed. Once again, this is more for me than for anyone else.

Sean and John were on the meeting. We were going over ideas for a car window decal or sticker - advertising adilas as a business software solution for operations and accounting. We spent some time pulling together assets, logos, and chatting about what it should say and look like. Both Sean and I were giving John some feedback. I'll reach out to Russell and see if I can get any of the older assets, logos, and originals.

Review the itinerary for the professional development training session. This is going to cover the adilas docs, CSS training, bootstrap training, and code sign-off stuff. John and I met and chatted about the plan and itinerary a bit. After that, we got into talking about responsive data tables. Eventually, we would like to do a full rewrite of the system and make the whole things fully mobile responsive and mobile ready.

We also talked about some great professors that John had at school and some of their teaching styles. Also, getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of our guys/gals (our internal developers). Talking about more modern ways of thinking and coding. John is really looking for some feedback from this internal training session and professional development session. Good stuff!

Eric popped in and we went over gift cards. He had made some small changes. We merged and tested some the pieces. I also talked to Eric about some needs coming down the pipeline for aggregates and deeper business intelligence (BI) levels. Eric was requesting deeper access to real database and SQL prompts on the test server. We talked about scheduled events, creating a manual trigger, and ways of getting at server logs and database logs. We talked about possible workarounds and getting things done.

After Eric left, John and I looked at his GUI page for testing results for page re-works. Small code review session and merged in and pushed up the code to data 0. John went in and did some live testing. This is a new tool to track code review, page sign-off, and who tested what on the new pages. It's a graphical tool to show progress on code/page sign-off. Looks good.

Long meeting today. Started out talking to Wayne and Shari O. about emails, internal emails, external emails (outbound to different clients), and possible options. Wayne repointed the IP addresses yesterday back to the original way we had the email system setup. It was kinda wacky for a couple of days. Anyways, we put it back to what it was. We still need to look deeper into this, but it should be stable for now.

Steve was asking about the bus to motorcycle project - datasource or world building project. Wayne was reporting that some of his new code is trying to deal with this issue or these issues. We talked about the current state and where things are going. Briefly touched base on combo primary keys and removing major dependencies on existing standalone primary keys (database connection and relationship stuff). Along with the datasource topic (which database to talk to as a single time) the conversation also included our ever growing need to do cross corp stuff. We didn't talk about it, but some of this is very similar to the adilas cafe talks and discussions that we have had.

If we get majorly into cross corp stuff, and each corp has its own database or sandbox, we may end up doing cross corp stuff through API socket connections. That sounded like a good idea. We'll have to look at it, as we may do unions, API sockets, or other temp database tricks to show and/or report combined data.

We flipped over to the new framework that Wayne is working on. He did a small demo for us on what he is working on. These are just a few of my notes. See attached for a 1:39 - one hour and 39 minute video of of some of meeting.

- Our switch to a new framework is not just a time saver. It goes way deeper than that.

- Lots of conversation about supporting different frameworks, themes, and versions of code.

- The whole new framework is setup as an MVC framework or MVC model - model, view, controller

- We need to keep moving forward in order to stay valid

- Layouts and views

- Everything is event driven

- We have both raw input (info and data directly from a user or customer) and we also have cleaned up and formatted data (okayed, approved, combed, retrieved, or sanitized data).

- These are just some keywords and concepts - handlers, events, models, interceptors, layouts, views, classes, methods, etc.

- One of the goals is to get rid of all of the repetitive, ticky-tacky maintenance code. This is stuff like params, validation, permission checks, making sure that certain values have been set, etc. Basically, the prep work before the real meat of the page begins. Some of our pages may be hundreds of lines of code deep before we actually get to the meat of the page. The framework would help us simplify and standardize some of the prep work stuff.

- If we build this way, it could open up options for multiple layouts and/or views (what it looks like). Keeping a separation between the business logic and the view or presentation of that data.

- Events, watchers, and triggers that help us run clean-up and other processes and routines. Key everything off of certain events.

- Getters and setters - smaller mini functions for each class, object, and property within that class. All built-in and/or available. We really wanted to do this for the fracture project (future project for adilas).

- Options for self-documentation

- Debugging, tracer options, logging, and security stuff already built-in

- Lots of talk about the benefits of using a framework.

- Mementos and smaller sub sets of data, that may be pre-formatted and/or setup how we need it - saving time in conversions and retrieving available data.

- Defining things and then using them over and over again in other pages.

- This is huge, but the framework already has a ton of built-in documentation and samples. That takes a lot of work and preparation. Also, it is able to self-generate basic documentation based on how we code it (based off of keywords, hints, notes, and rules).

- If we build off a new framework, we could use either Adobe ColdFusion (current model) or we could use Lucee - open source CFML engine. The framework can flip flop pretty easily between the different backend engines. It's basically a config option.

- We do lots of things over and over again. Make that more simple, standardized, and compartmentalized.

- They offer a standard set of options and configurations. We can use that and/or pick and choose or customize whatever we want.

- Light talks about the pros and cons of an ORM model (object-relational mapping - mixing of objects and relational databases)

- Shooting for a more modern approach - use of code, technology, and a layered approach

- Wayne really wants to come up with a process of how to convert our current pages and code into the ColdBox framework. Think of a set of instructions (virtual recipe) and then allow other developers to help convert the pages. Basically, a road map to follow.

- Our customers really need and want us to be more stable and reliable, as a company, and as a software system. This includes how we develop code, release and deploy code, and manage systems and servers. In a nutshell, they want us to grow up, as a company and have a bit more of a standard structure and presence.

- We are heading more and more towards clustering, enterprise level stuff. We need to build towards that.

- As a side note, Wayne says we have way too many includes (files that get included and/or strung together to make the whole).

- One of our major focuses on switching the backend architecture is customer reliability.

- Wayne sees a need for radical changes to simplify, stabilize, and build things out for the future. It has to be sustainable and sustainability. Light talks about evolution vs revolution or changes over time vs drastic changes all at once. Things are smoother if software can evolve vs just being harshly changed. However, sometime things need to majorly change, hopefully for the better. There are some pros and cons to both approaches.

- Building new has a motivation factor to it - true story - what keeps us going?

- This is a chance to rebuild it like we want it - build to the dream

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We switched subjects and were the guys were talking about hosting companies and how that scene is changing in the datacenters that we are using. We have seen a lack or lowing of the customer service levels. We may end up checking out some other hosting companies.

John and Cory were talking about other projects and timelines. They were also talking about uptime, downtime, and databases. We talked about coming up with new SOP (standard operating procedures) for pushing up code, code rollbacks, and deployment of new features. That got into talks about manual and automated database updates, scripts, auto processes.

That topic lead to a discussion on roles and responsibilities and who does what. There is a need to define some of the roles a little bit deeper and make it clearer who does what and in what order. More SOP stuff for the backend processes and procedures. There also needs to be good communication between the developers and the system admin persons. We have to keep up those communication channels. That is really important. Nobody can read minds.

Towards the end, John and Cory were going over projects and coordinating dates/times for testing, review, look and feel changes, and testing. Good stuff.

Eric jumped on and we looked at gift card logic. Apparently, a little bit of code changed. We were pretty tight a couple of days ago and then got a note yesterday that a client found an error (only if selling two or more gift cards on a single invoice). We were checking things out and retracing some of the steps and logic. Lots of good back and forth - dialogue. Eric was able to get the same error on his local box so he will take a look at it. After that, John and I were going over some layout stuff.

Sean and I talking about a big demo that he and the team did yesterday. The other company is doing a huge mashup, with all kinds of different system all mixed together. That is super common, these days. Inventory tracking in one system, ecommerce in another, loyalty points in another, financials in another, etc., etc., you get the idea. We are trying to do all of that from one system. We like that.

We switched over and added in a sandbox merchant processing option to one of the demo sites for Sean. He had requested that. Steve joined and they, he and Sean, were talking about finding the sweet spot and how to help companies (that want to be helped). He and Sean were talking about SG&A costs and where that is headed.

After that, the topic switched again. This time it went over to social media, training, pod casts, videos, and piece work. We talked about training manuals, SOP's (standard operating procedures), and the progression of things. At some point, we would love to help show people the game of business and then let them play it (the game of business). More talk about pod casts, social media posts, and steps to success.

Spending time to help and support our clients. That is big for us. We talked about finding companies that want more and more of their wants and needs. They are willing to put some money and funding into the system. We love that! There was talk about getting referrals from our current clients.

As a side note, we are seeing a number of clients and/or potential clients doing their own stuff on spreadsheets. That is a great tool but at some point, will breakdown. It is one of the tools that we use, but not the end all. We also talked about how eventually, everybody needs some custom stuff. We just need to figure out how to get in front of the right people.

Once the other guys left, just John and I were left on the meeting. We spent some time going over code and new page views.

On the server meeting with Wayne, John, Cory, and myself. Sean and Eric popped in for a bit as well. We were talking about email servers, merging in code, and making plans for pushing up new pages. Eric joined and Wayne merged in his code for the global item catalog - enterprise stuff. Once that happened, I pulled the branch down on my local box and was clicking around to see if there were any errors. Looked good.

Small code merge for Dustin. Then working with Wayne on his ColdBox framework stuff. We talked about users, payees, vendors, multiple corps, and memory and session management stuff. Small Q&A with Wayne and John about the framework, plans, and how we will handle certain pieces of the puzzle. Light plans for the future (wish list stuff). After that, John and I spent a little bit of time talking about internal education and training for our developers.

Phone call with Shari O. touching base on budgets, tech support questions, and a new project for a client. The client has reached out to both Shari O. and Cory - trying to double dip and push their project through.

Phone call with a guy who is an investor about options to buy a percentage of adilas. Briefly talked numbers and such. Fixing a small black box code page (custom code) for a client. Emails, text messages, and a quick phone call with John to talk about a server.

Great morning meeting. Eric and Sean started out and were touching base and coordinating on a big demo and a big feature release. They were planning release times, testing times, and fall back plans if needed. I thought that it was really good. They were also talking about different servers and plans per server, based on the demo and the extra functionality. For the demo, they may script it and use an outline (direct links) and/or screenshots of the two different pieces, in case we don't get everything all merged together before the demo.

Sean and I switched gears and were talking about SG&A costs and using expense/receipts (E/R's) vs PO's and capitalized inventory. Sean kept waking up last night and wrote down a number of ideas on a Word document (see attached). We went over the Word doc and drew pictures, made notes, and talked about options. It was just Sean and I, but we beat it up pretty good. See attached for some of the notes.

Here are a few of the notes, beyond what Sean had pitched (once again, see attached).

- E/R's is where it all starts. Maybe just keep it there vs going clear out to PO and capitalized inventory levels.

- E/R's already have a normal date and a due date. The difference between the two is already a built in date range - how long to track the life cycle of each E/R.

- In Sean's notes, he was talking about to the exact minute, second, etc. We will be sticking with a daily value to keep it more simple. Most likely, it will be scheduled at a certain time so that we get consistent results, it can handle weekends, holidays, and becomes a built-in procedure.

- I liked his idea of flagging each SG&A vendor with a special flag. That will help us treat expenses from that vendor in a different way.

- If we run it through the E/R side of things, it will be very minimal effort and input from the user. Most of it will be done and distributed behind the scenes.

- Inventory still in place, keeps get hanger costs. Once it sales, that hanger cost stops and it gets recorded. Otherwise, it is sort of in a state of flux.

- If we get to the tightest level that we are thinking, it will add value for owners and managers to see what it costs over time to keep bigger on hand inventories. Being able to see past what is on the shelf and what that costs. Pros and cons to different inventory stocking models.

- If we hang (add hanger costs) to an E/R, we could reference (key word reference) the PO, invoice, item, sub item (sub inventory), etc. It doesn't add any weight to the current flow, it would just be a reference to those other pieces and/or items.

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After Sean left, John and I were talking about some server stuff. I mentioned to John about getting him a higher percentage of adilas (as a co-owner) than what he currently has. He's playing an important role and doing server stuff, backend code, as well as frontend design stuff. I think that he is doing a good job. We will just keep refining things and playing well with others.

We ended up talking about servers, moving hardware to a new section within the Hostek environment. We also talked about internal developer training that is coming up, subjects, topics, and ideas. We really want the developers to virtually own or have ownership of and for their projects.

John and I touching base on a big code launch and the responsibilities of each developer to see it through. We've had a few of the guys basically dump it on us and say, get it up and running and feel free to debug it if necessary. We don't like that. No one would like that. Anyways, we spent 45 minutes talking about best practices and how to help our guys follow those best practices.

Sometimes we have a limited launch window as some of our clients are 24/7 system users. That makes it tough. Our best window seems to be between 12 am and 4 am. We talked about the need for documentation to help others on the path. There is also a need for a slightly more rigid corporate structure. We are pretty loosie-goosy.

Another thing that we would like is to automate some of the database updates. We also need to beef up some of the communication channels and figure out and address any of the communication breakdowns. As we were talking, we decided that partial is sometimes better than nothing. We'll keep working at it.

Server meeting with Wayne, John, and Cory. We started out by talking about code that just sits on the shelf. We've got to get things finished up and pushed forward. We have to make some global changes and then make sure everybody knows about it. One of our goals is standardizing things across the board. We were also planning which branches are going live and who is on call for changes that are needed.

We have a big product upgrade coming out over the next couple of days. The big push is getting the enterprise level item catalog live on all servers. Making plans and assignments.

Wayne, John, and Shari O. had a meeting with Hostek. Good progress there. They were reporting about all kinds of stuff. We talked about disaster recovery stuff, plans, schedules, and contacts. It sounds like Hostek is going to try to work directly with our server admin team.

We talked about new email servers, flip flopping branches around on the testing server, and figuring out plans for all of those pieces. We then spent some time talking about changes to the look and feel. Getting approvals and other people to test and sign-off on things. Trying to coordinate efforts.

Eric joined the meeting to help us plan some stuff. As a side note, it is really hard to plan for every possible scenario. At some point, we need to move away from the classic theme (old look and feel). It is starting to cause issues because we still support it, but no new development is being done on that code set. It is also intermixing with other pages that are just on the new more modern snow owl theme (newer look and feel). It's causing more maintenance and larger pages due to keeping up with multiple sets of code (virtual supported versions).

At some point, we would like to automate some of the database updates to get rid of any dependencies when deploying new code and new functionality. John had some questions and we chatted for a bit after the main meeting.

Meeting with Wayne, Cory, Steve, and Shari O. over a Zoom meeting. Talking about Wayne wanting to retire by the end of the year. He was reporting on his research and plans with the ColdBox framework from Ortus Solutions. I took a bunch of notes...

- Our development process – it's too difficult and hard to test

- Be able to make a plan, set some goals, requirements, and then be able to hand that off to a developer

- Unit testing

- Our product is super complicated

- Spaghetti code

- Included files – they are all over the place

- Knowing where to put things – tops, headers, body files, footers, etc.

- Spend a bunch of time developing and then spend more time trying to get the code actually launched.

- Our development process takes a long time and causes frustration to our team and our clients

- Back to included files

- Different processes – ways of using the page

- Element is undefined in xyz scope – session, variables, FORM, URL, application, arguments

- Things get lost

- Paths – all kinds - ../, ../../, other paths – that creates problems in different pages that are included in different pages

- Wayne talking about global variables and global listings

- Setting up a standard framework and setting up standard practices

- Even though our code is older, it has really gone a long way

- Because of the way that it is coded, it makes it harder for progression and ways to hand it off

- Steve wants to sell the cool-aid (our current product)

- Triage – what needs our attention first? Life threating things first.

- Steve was talking about some of the developers being lazy – kinda getting frustrated

- Wayne is trying to solve some of those problems and/or issues – he wants to show us some concrete evidence and ways to solve things.

- Some of our developers are up against the wall and doing the best that they can.

- Wayne would like to make our code as simple as possible – guide or a recipe type level

- Cory – to rewrite the entire adilas application – that would take years and years and thousands and thousands of dollars (millions – plural).

- Cory – What about clients who want changes to their current system?

- Steve – How does object-oriented programming play into this? MVC – model, view, controllers – classes, sub classes, view models, controllers

- Wayne really thinks that he could crank out some major changes in a hard month - at least a good indicator or model

- Tons of little maintenance stuff is already baked into the framework

- In our current code, we have so much validation, permissions, and sub logic work – 75% of the whole thing is error handling and validation.

- Cory – If Wayne leaves, what is the reliance on him and the framework? Wayne thinks that it will be even easier and work better – even for the long haul.

- Wayne – Open-source projects and making the framework better – he has contributed already to the main code branch and has had some of his code accepted.

- Steve – Can we do this little by little? Wayne – Sort of – It would be better to get it all done so that we are operating in a different environment.

- Steve – What about docker? Wayne – We would use docker for the main ColdFusion stuff for the servers – Not tied to the current ColdBox framework.

- Steve asking about the datasource project (bus to individual motorcycle). – Wayne was saying how we could do some work to eliminate the reliance on the primary key – Turn everything into combo keys vs the single primary key id. All of the tables could be intermixed with combo keys.

- Steve – We may need to abandon some of the old ways of doing things

- Wayne – Even our database structure needs to be updated and changed. It is built in the older style. Technology changes over time, speed, computing power, etc.

- Steve – We need to be careful where we go, because changes do happen – all the time. Skate to where the puck should be.

- More than one way to skin the cat – If it doesn't work, we could go a different direction.

- Wayne wanted to get a fully working prototype done and finished up before he showed us what was available.

- Wayne is starting on the payee level login as his first few pieces and pages. He wants to get it all ready and documented before we just jump. Wayne is still learning as well.

- Cory is glad that we are talking about this – She would love to see our developers be more efficient and get stuff done.

- Wayne – He feels this is something that has to happen. We need this as part of our solution. Looking forward, we almost don't have a choice.

- Steve – Wayne, you are part of the ownership of this company – Let's make it good for everyone. He was encouraging Wayne to keep going and even setting up the next meeting to show us more.

- Cory asked how Wayne found this framework stuff. Wayne explained how he found things.

- Wayne did a small little dog and pony show on some of his code. Showing rules, routines, variables, and lists.

- Steve and Cory – They both think that Wayne should keep going and bill as he does his work. We also want to make sure that John is up to speed.

- This is a personal investment on Wayne's part – building the future of adilas.

- Wayne has been using Toggl time tracking to keep track of his hours.

- Just for fun – Wayne wants to get it done well enough that we want to write him a check… :)

- Documentation on how you do things – Ortus books and live samples

- Hoping to save money, keep our clients happy, and have a stable product.

- Cory – you have to change to grow. Things that don't grow die.

When I joined the meeting, John and Steve were talking about hours, work, documentation, and projects. After that, Steve and I jumped in and talked about SG&A costs. I showed him some of what I launched and how it works. We recorded two different sessions. Only the first one saved correctly. See attached.

Shari O. and John were chatting about a meeting with Hostek that they had with the main admin server team. Sounded like some good stuff was discussed.

John and I were talking about a future internal training event. Talking about examples, hands-on training, frontend code and CSS training, as well as some other house cleaning subjects and topics for the developers. Spent the rest of the time doing emails and recording notes.

Started out the meeting and John and Cory were talking about the adilas docs and making sure that the adilas style guides and dev checklists were all up to date. That's easier said than done. Things keep evolving and changing. We talked about code review, requirements, sign-off procedures, and merging and pushing up code. Lots of moving pieces. There is a huge need for continuing education and keeping our skills sharp.

Cory and I got into discussion about being able to globally copy users, permissions, and settings from corp to corp (universe or world to world transfers - enterprise level stuff). We can bridge a single user between corporations right now, but all of their permissions and settings have to be setup per corp. We could totally automate that. It just needs to become the goal or a project.

John left and Cory and I started looking over code and reports. We talked about options of bypassing certain prebuilt stop-gaps. Many times, we built in certain stop-gaps to help with flow and dipping into sub routines and sub logic (conditional and nested logic). The last topic of the day was talking pros and cons of showing (show/hide) locations on different inventory exports. That could break things into a one-to-many relationship, depending on how they want to see it, especially for multiple items over multiple locations. Anyways, we went over some options there. Cory took some notes and we may revisit this topic later on. Mostly her notes were dealing with grouping, stacking, or defining output columns - various options.

Shari O. and I talking about a bunch of different options. She was saying that she likes to give out virtual "hall passes" to our clients and our developers. They can kinda do whatever they want. However, if there becomes a problem, she can take it back and/or revote the virtual hall pass. I thought that it was kinda funny.

John jumped in and we talked about business and general DevOps (mix between software development and IT backend server stuff). We have a good team but it is a little wild and footloose. John would like to see more structure, responsibility, and defined roles. It can be very frustrating at times. I've seen this as well. Sometimes, I just don't know how to fix it or (the real question is) is that the biggest problem (getting pulled on to other fires)? We talked about competitive wages, challenges of multi-tasking, transitions between projects, wearing tons of different hats (roles), and other remote team issues.

We spent time talking about servers, challenges, and struggles of managing a remote team with a number of different skill levels. Switching to code, we were talking about the differences between building new vs converting the older into the new. We talked about scalability, clustering, and normalizing systems across teams, servers, and management styles. The conversation got into talking about knowledge and scope. Who knows just a little bit, who knows a lot, and who see and deals with the whole picture. There is a huge difference. At some point, we'd love to get rid of some of the older dependencies that have been built in. Progression of things.

There is a huge need for documentation and helping the next guy down the road. Looking out for each other. We flipped over to budgets and salary discussions at the end of the session. We talked pros and cons of hourly vs salary-based pay or systems. Anyways, just going over some goals and what not.

Wayne, John, Cory, and I on the server meeting. Talking about tech support at our hosting company. Wayne gave John some more permissions in the hosting environment. Wayne is working on a side project in ColdBox and testing out a new ColdFusion specific framework. We talked about doing upgrades and upgrading from some of our older code. Ideally, we are moving more to an MVC framework (model, view, controller) with tons of new options. Currently, we are mixing code with some older libraries and dependencies. Our goal is going to be making fully independent pages and pieces.

Constant process of upgrading our stuff. Conversation about upgrading and what technologies we are using. Are we upgrading with older tech or with the newer more modern tech. We are trying to plan for our future clients. Wayne and John were going over options for switching databases. After that, Cory and John were going over data layouts and small requests. They spent some time talking about different projects. Cory and I did some checking on some custom reports and additional requests for more data and more settings.

Both John and Sean were on the morning meeting. It was pretty quiet for the first little bit. Then Cory joined and had a few tasks that needed to be completed. Alan joined and they were working on some branch stuff and making sure things were merged into the correct branches. We have some server that are tracking different branches. Most of the meeting was Sean and Alan working on some changes. Alan will get all of that merged into the master branch.

Looking at code with Bryan for rentals. He is making great progress. Small tweaks to the layout and the logic. He is going to get with John for a little help. We should be ready for code review in the next couple of days.

I joined the morning meeting and Wayne, John, and Sean were on the meeting. Apparently, there was a hack attempt on the data 3 server. Wayne was watching things and putting up blockades. We talked about sanitizing certain variables and keeping things tight (checking for certain mal or bad values). Both Wayne and John were on it.

Wayne was helping me make a few changes to my local computer. Eric popped in and had some questions on vendor stuff. Steve called and I chatted with him on the phone for a bit. Mike wants to meet and talk about SG&A costs and how to virtually load and sell some of those costs as inventory items (moving capitalized expenses into inventory). Anyways, we chatted briefly about that and then jumped on a different meeting.

Small data fix for Kelly on data 34. Had to fix some sub inventory attributes for a PO that had been voided but had sub inventory on it. We did some back and forth via text message and we got it all figured out.

After that Cory had me look at a custom PO label that needed to be fixed/tweaked for a client. The barcode was missing a small piece and thus not scanning the number that we wanted for the sub inventory package. The number was right, it was just missing the "~" for the sub package or sub id number. For example: Say it was sub id ~34, the barcode was only scanning as 34. On the phone with Cory, made the small fix, and pushed up new code. Also sent the update to John and Steve to push into master. My local box is still kinda broken.

We started out in the server meeting talking about an outage we had last week at the hosting level (upstream of us). We talked about what to do about an outage and getting and SOP (standard operating procedure) or process in place for what to do on a disaster recovery type level. Cory was checking on different projects.

Wayne is looking into ColdBox as a ColdFusion framework. We talked quite a bit about his findings and progress. After that, we were figuring out what is next for the data 5 testing server. We've had a few projects that get almost all the way done and then sort of get lost in the sign-off and testing phases. It could be data, time, scenarios, settings, or just not watching it all the way through. That code isn't gone, it's just sort of stalled out or in limbo land. Cory and John were making plans to do some testing on a project.

They were looking at a server and why it is running slow. We need more info from the client as to what they are doing (process or procedures). We really need to know what corp, what page, what time of day, and what process they are doing. Just saying that the server was slow doesn't help us out very much. Once we finished this up, Cory bailed out and left just Wayne and John and I on the meeting to work on my local development environment (docker images, git stuff, and database code).

Both Wayne and John were watching my screen and trying to help me figure out what was going on. We repulled down code, rebuilt images, and did whatever updates we could think about. Tons of command line stuff. I'm not very good at that (hardcore IT and tech stuff). They were very kind to help me for hours and hours. As we worked, we were having some side conversations about different things. Here are some of my notes.

- Aspects, events, announcing (broadcasting states and status), listening for events and announcements, virtual queues, and event handlers.

- We talked about resource collections, private resource collections, and virtual session management options.

- Standards and consistencies across platforms and development environments

- Different modules for security, validation, etc.

- Form validators and bulk issue finding

- The power of mixing rules and assignments

- Virtual flash memory and managing containers for memory objects (just in time memory allocations and storage).

- Thinking in both layers and levels - for almost everything

- Writing less code using a framework

- If we went with a new framework, we would need both training and deeper education.

- We talked about having both commercial products as well as open source products. Mixing the two types together. Some people will buy the commercial product and then contribute to the open source product. Or the other way around - open source to commercial.

- Packages, extensions, modules - making complex decisions

- Looking at clustering options - comparing Lucee and Adobe ColdFusion - including options for clustering and licensing requirements. Adobe ColdFusion is really nice, but you can lose your shorts on the clustering options and prices. It can get painful in the pocketbook (costs).

- If we make some changes, we would have to change our pricing models. If a client or customer wants more dynamic resources, they have to pay for it. The price would based off of usage vs just a fixed or static price.

- We talked about paying for support - both what we offer and what we are requesting from other vendors and web hosts.

- Talking about ways to give back to open source models and projects - help with bug fixes, donations, and keep pushing their product forward. We spent a little bit of time talking about other ways to help businesses and products that we like and want to support. Just conversations at this point but rolling a few things around.

Wayne had to leave (dinner time where he was at) and just John and I kept going. Wayne checked back in a few time but to no avail. We couldn't get my local environment fully back up. Wayne is going to do some testing on his side and we'll hit it again tomorrow. While we were waiting for things to download and install, John and I were talking about computers and different specs. I may need to upgrade my local computer. It's kinda small for what I use it for (spec wise and hardware wise - RAM, motherboard, chips/cores, hard drive, and processor speed).

Sean and Michael were meeting and talking about gift cards, demos, and sales. I was cascading updates and settings to other servers. John jumped in and helped me with the Herbo server and with my local docker image stuff. The Herbo server just needed to be restarted (Adobe ColdFusion services). We kept running into problems with the docker image stuff. Some of it would run great and other parts would fail or not work correctly. Wayne jumped in and helped me out as well. No major success before the server meeting started (the next meeting).

Working on the advanced part/item search layout settings and defaults. Spent time wrapping the show/hide settings with conditional logic for the different reports, exports, and columns (headings and data output). I had to pull down a new local SSL certificate in order to do some testing. I ran into some docker (container and virtual image or virtual server setup). I got with John and we rebuilt some of the docker image stuff. We ran into more problems with my local box. That kinda stopped me for the day. Did a few other tasks but decided to hit it tomorrow.

John and Sean were checking in. Steve called in from his phone and had some questions about SG&A costs (sales, general and administrative costs). He is working with Mike on some cool ideas. Basically, they are trying to fold in certain expenses into the mixture. Instead of just strait expenses (say a light bill or something like that), you have to capitalize your expenses into the inventory and then show those expenses over time as things are sold and/or held in inventory. In super general terms, you can't just hang an expense on the P&L (financials) and call it cost of goods sold without doing capitalization and utilization (tie the bigger thing into small measurable pieces). This is only true on/in certain business verticals. Sometimes the other, more simple practice is allowed. If a real accountant was reading this entry, they would be rolling their eyes. I'm just talking my language.

Anyways, we were talking about some possible solutions, ideas, and ways to track those smaller aged variable costs per item or per package. Each item or portion within a package may get a different variable, aged, and cost portion/ratio assigned to it. The whole thing gets pretty deep and complicated. That's where we shine. one-to-many-to-many-to-many (or whatever) relationships. Bring it on.

Talks about capitalized inventory levels, smart reports, daily backend processes (auto and/or manual), certain date ranges, lifespans, terms, flags, tags, and automation. Details, histories, drill-downs, reporting, exports, etc. The whole nine yards. We were talking about how certain inventory (that is aging and/or being stored) may be assigned a higher SG&A cost due to how long we hold it before it gets moved and/or sold. Lots of talk about processes that would allow us to load an item with cost, sell it for that new loaded cost, then repeat. We could do this real-time, forward facing (predicting and assumptions), or running a day behind based on what really happened. Lots of possible options. Anyways, we ended up simplifying it and saying load, sell, load, sell, repeat.

This led us to conversations about having a hopper (holding container), loading the hopper, figuring out when and how each new expense should be disseminated or resolved (dates and aging and ratios per day stuff). Steve wants us to start thinking about it and running scenarios through our minds. We'll re-meet up and have a powwow. I recommended that he and Mike play with the financial flow calculator to play with some ideas. We have two different versions of that tool, one if free and public facing (a little older) and one is internal that has an updated look and feel and few other things. Anyways a great tool for teaching, learning, and running scenarios through it.

Shari O. joined the meeting. She and guys were talking about a live event and things that were needed. She had some suggestions on some pages and verbiage changes for some new pages. I'm super grateful for all of the feedback and suggestions, ideas, and requests we get. No way could we figure this whole thing out on our own. We need a village or a community.

Working with John and pushing up some files temporarily for some live testing on one of the servers. We were having issues with the auto deploy only on certain servers. Texts to both Wayne and Eric on different subjects and follow-up. Recording notes in the system for 4/11/23.

John and I were going over some new requirements for developers. John wants to create a frontend checklist for the developers. I recommended that he check out our web/API documentation section within adilas. We could use his frontend stuff, tied to what we already have. Just an idea.

Cory joined for a bit and was going over some look and feel stuff with John. Small tweaks that are needed on a newer page. After that John and I were looking at a page for code sign-off. We also talked about setting up a date and time to do some internal adilas developer training. We'd like to get them in there using the adilas docs (style guide and code samples). Along with this new training, we'd like to help get them more accountable and following standard procedures. Without going into it super deep, John wants to build in some internal testing, development, and frontend requirements checkboxes that we could fill out and show who did what with dates and times. Basically, a virtual sign-off for different parts of the code, pages, and features.

Shari O. had a question about the adilas phones stuff. We looked at the page and there was some code that tried to show a sub or outside website that was not in a secured SSL (https) site. We made some tweaks and pushed up the code. Kind of a temporary quick fix.

Wayne, John, Cory, Shari O., and I were on the meeting. They were talking about a client and their servers needs. They (our client) may be closing some of their locations down but want to keep other ones active. Light back and forth on whether or not any server specs needed to be changed on that server. There was also a conversation about the need for more tech support. Both on our side and on the server side (the hosting company). Often we don't need help, but when we do, it is kind of painful.

Cory had a list and was checking on different projects. Good dialog and good back and forth. Wayne may be moving on and working less in the next few months. He is wanting to be more of a part time or fully retired. We need to get plans in place to figure out who is going to be taking over that role and what documentation and knowledge needs to be transferred over. We talked briefly about Dustin maybe wanting to help with servers and also looking at existing knowledge levels. Do we want to bring up one of our own guys and/or hire it out to someone else with more knowledge? Great questions.

Wayne was talking about options for virtually building a new ship. This has been a discussion and topic for years. Do we keep building and tweaking what we have or do we rewrite things and try to go all new (code, architecture, design, etc.). There are pros and cons to both approaches. Due to current budgets, we have to stay with fixing what we have vs building all new. That can be painful as well and takes a lot of time. Wayne was talking about doing a sample project and seeing what kind of time it might take to move the existing adilas structure over or under a new standard framework. There are a number of unknowns, but worth looking into.

Towards the end, John and Cory were talking about look and feel stuff. Also, Wayne and John will continue to work on some outlines and plans for the system architecture stuff. Making progress on most fonts. We'll take it!

Meeting with John. He was going to help me with my docker images and local development environment. Right before the meeting I was able to make a little bit more progress. It was stalled out and I had rebooted my computer a number of times. John and chatted for a bit and touched base on a few different things. He passed me some docker commands through chat that I saved for later reference. He and Wayne are working on some server documentation and system architecture documents. As I was doing the rebuild, it was taking forever so John bailed out and just said to reach out if I had any problems or questions. I was grateful for his help.

Working on a data clean-up project for a client. Deep in the logic (loops and conditional statements). John contacted me and we jumped on the GoToMeeting session. He and I ended up talking about sanitation of data, testing servers, and turning off all outside API sockets and 3rd party solutions. I showed him how to clean-up and turn off a few outside dependencies for the new testing server.

Hostek went down a couple of days ago. Wayne was reporting on what was going on. We talked about communication and disaster recovery processes. Who does what and what are steps and responsibilities. We need to more tech support from our hosting companies. We have like 40 servers there at Hostek. Most times they do great. However, if things go wrong and/or bad, we don't get any preferential treatment. We kinda need that.

Anyways, Wayne was doing his own trouble shooting processes and found a few problems. We have a growing need for more documentation for our processes and procedures. We also need to keep some of them super secure. That makes for an interesting mix. There is also a ongoing need for more communications and keeping everybody in the loop that needs to be there.

At some point, we would like to reclaim some of the WordPress stuff on our main site. Sometimes WordPress is a high level target, with tons of plug-ins, themes, and required sequential updates. Once again, we need to get documentation for all of these pieces. The next subject was a statement that everybody needs to give us documentation and architecture layouts. Some people don't like that, don't think like that, and it's worse then torture for them. We have to figure things out and figure out who is going to do what. Everybody has talents, virtues, strengths, and weaknesses. It is tough to require the exact same things from everyone. It will end up being a moving balance.

As a side note, we may end up needing to help certain people do some of those things like documentation, training, and certain communication skills or tasks. There may be a need for a new role to help the devs and get the info out of their heads and into a consumable format. Eventually we have to get documentation on all internal and external dependencies. There is a big difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Sometimes we are pushing so hard, it's hard to slow down and virtually clean-up or sweep the floor.

We talked about having a checklist for our developers. We have an old one that Alan and I worked on years ago, but that's all that we have at this point. Some of the developers just can't do the documentation (and sadly, some of them we don't want them to do it). It seems like the next steps are helping to collect and organize the information and documentation. We have some holes that need to be filled. John was commenting that we need to add this into the budgets and project costs. We need to charge more than just the developer's time. Once again, we may be going too fast or running too hard. We are missing a part of the puzzle.

Next, we went into talking about Adobe ColdFusion uptime on hosted platforms. Wayne was reporting to Cory about a survey that he was reading and what it was saying. Cory wanted the guys (Wayne and John) to call and talk with Hostek to see if we could some things changes (service levels and response times). We need to make sure that we have the access and tools that we need. Some of our clients are 24/7 everyday, even holidays.

The new dedicated testing server was the next major topic. We switched over to talking about the data 5 server, capturing documentation, and walking through the project with both Wayne and John. They are working on both training and documentation and so it is taking a bit longer. Making good progress. John has a project that is done that needs to be tested by some outside parties. He and Wayne are setting up and managing the project queue. Cory is helping to coordinate the actual projects and the testing.

Spent some time talking about look and feel and talking about a new version of the internal shopping cart. We know that there is a need there, we are just not sure how deep to jump. We may end up doing things in a couple of rounds. Round one, just look and feel. Round two new settings to toggle on/off certain fields, sections, columns, and features. There may be another round that gets into a smart cart level (deep cart engine logic). In a nutshell, we want to remove things and make it smarter and easier.

We are looking for feedback. Talking about timing on projects, testing, and pushing things all the way until they are live and in production (and fully documented). Shari O. popped in and was asking about insurance and levels of support from Hostek. Sometimes, the lack of support can be a deal breaker. We've seen this even in sales of our system. It's a part of the puzzle that gets overlooked sometimes.

WordPress was down and this caused our main website to be down. I contacted Chuck via text, then a phone call. Sent emails to Wayne with some instructions and suggestions from Chuck. Trying to get things figured out. Luckily, you could bypass the main website and do a direct login by changing the URL (web path) to the login page.

Jumped on the GoToMeeting session and was having audio problems. Cory had some questions about the adilas label builder and getting images pulled in. Kelly needs some sub inventory reports. Some of that gets pretty dynamic and pretty deep. After that, John and I talked about our WordPress site and getting our stuff off of an outside content management software package, WordPress. We couldn't get ahold of either Wayne or Chuck to get help. We need to get some documentation from both or have John help with that documentation. Our eventual goal is working towards standardizing and using best practices for all of our developers. Constant processing of pivoting, updating, and changing to fit and fill our needs.

Chuck was able to meet with me and I jumped back on the GoToMeeting session. John jumped back on as well. We were trying to fix the WordPress stuff for our site. Chuck was helping John try to navigate to a certain file folder and make some changes. We kept running into issues. Cory jumped on and we made a quick fix for her on a cross corp invoice to PO transaction (special cross corp page). Once we finished that up, back on with John going over plans and what not.

Cory jumped on and had some questions about the adilas label builder. I got her pointed in the right direction. Both Sean and John checked in as well. Other than that, it was a pretty quiet morning. I did emails and started to record some notes from the past few days.

We started out the server meeting and Cory wanted to check on the data 34 server. It was reported that it was running slow. Wayne logged in and looked around. They ordered some more RAM for the database server. Pretty cool to see how quickly they can jump on things.

Next, we started talking about a client and their balance sheet. I mentioned to Cory that we have on our wish list a report that would show known issues (bad dates, things done out of order, or other possible problems that we could detect and/or figure out). That would be so cool. As a side note, the page already exists, it just hasn't been built out yet. Definitely on our wish list for fracture. This could help all of us out and make things more transparent and visible.

Both Wayne and John are working on documenting things on the server level. It's far from done, but they showed up a 3 page document (just the start) of the outline or outline of the server layered architecture design document. Pretty cool. Starting to see that being worked on. I'm excited to see what they come up with.

The next major conversation was dealing with adilas phones, phone trees, and other forms of digital communication. We had some open discussion about do we want to keep it, who is going to support it, who is going to maintain it, and so forth. This piece is kinda flapping in the wind. We also talked about, if we want to, allocating both time and money and getting that code and/or process fully inhouse. Right now, it is a virtual 3rd party entity, even though we technically own it. The prior owner/developer is the only one who really knows what is going on inside there. We talked about different technologies that we could and would use if we brought it fully under our control or under our roof.

The reason that the adilas phones stuff got brought up was because of this document that they are building out for the system architecture and layered plans. Hopefully, we'll uncover other issues and/or dependencies that we need to look at and evaluate (spend/don't spend, maintain/don't maintain, market, pitch, let it die, etc.). We kept getting off on tangents. Cory did a great job keeping the discussion going in a good direction. Once setup, we will provide an open VPN (virtual private network) for our developers to be able to remote into the testing box to push code and make changes.

After that, we got into talking about the testing server and what our plans are for that. We have a client's data that we want to move off of a production server and put in the Amazon cold storage or Amazon Glacier. As we were talking about the testing server, Shari O. was sending questions and comments through the chat feature on the GoToMeeting account. We are making progress there and making headway.

We got into talking about insurance, coverage, errors and omissions, and general cyber security, and data breaches. We have a 3rd party integration that is pushing on us and wanting all kinds of certifications and proof of insurance coverage. Everybody but John and I had to leave to jump on other meetings or calls.

After that, John and I spent some time doing a code review on his recipe/build rework stuff. We talked about a new possible user-level setting for using the time-pickers vs an open entry time field. John likes the time-pickers. I had to take them out the other day due to a few clients complaining. That sounds like a perfect option for a user-level setting. We also went over new options for showing progress bars and helping the users know which step they are on and what is still needed to complete a certain task and/or process.

As a final comment for the meeting, John said - "The ROI (return on investment) for the testing server will be internal peace of mind." I liked that.

Not just our clients, but many clients have huge inventory problems. We are trying to help them out. Shari O. had me work on a new clean-up script to clean up unused items per vendor. Yesterday, we did a clean-up script per setup or inbound PO. Today, we are getting tighter and doing things by vendor, as a whole. I had to make a few changes for the new process. This is not a standard tool that we want to release (special or custom bulk clean-up tool). After that, I touched base with John, Sean, and Michael.

Meeting with John on a code review for his recipe/build pages that he has been working on. He had 5 new pages that he had altered the look and feel (turned into more modern snow owl theme designs). I gave him 2 more pages to work on. We should have those new changes up by the end of the week.

Touching base with Sean. John jumped on and was updating the printable expense/receipts to show verified payments. I merged in some code for Dustin and then started working through emails. John jumped off to work with Wayne on server documentation stuff. I spent the rest of the time recording notes from yesterday (3/21/23).

Cory and Eric were talking about enterprise level stuff and the new item catalog that they are working on. We then switched over and were talking about a 3rd party API socket connection that has been in place for a couple of years. They had some questions and want us to do some research. We feel like they should pay for it (new maintenance and new development). We looked around in our code repository a bit to see if we could find any changes that happened on our side of the fence.

Wayne joined the meeting and reported on some mandatory Adobe ColdFusion updates (patches) that had to be applied to all production server (security risk stuff). We talked about getting server documentation and helping to transfer that server and backend knowledge to the other developers or whomever might be taking over, once Wayne retires. Wayne has been making some notes and doing some screen recording or screen capture videos.

We then rolled into a discussion on a dedicated testing server. I'll cover more of that in a minute. At the end of the meeting, John was reporting on progress on CSS and look and feel changes. He is working on printable deposits and printable expense/receipts. He is also making some small tweaks to the layouts and where certain dollar figure data is located. Good stuff. Cory and John were talking about plans on the discount engine and making plans.

Going back to the dedicated testing server - We went over a proposal to get a real testing server up and going. We currently have a number of testing bottlenecks. We talked about reverse merging in master code to the working branches, to help keep them up to date. We have had problems when a project takes weeks or months and it has not been kept up with the master code branch. When we go to merge it, sometimes there are huge differences, conflicts, and some of the underlying application structure has changed. That merge process then takes a while to sort out and make sure that everything gets fully tested and verified again. Anyways, it is an issue that we deal with.

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We then had a small discussion about pros and cons for getting or having a dedicated testing server. This was all recorded on a google doc, but I'll paste it here for searchability. Here are some of our notes from today:

Group discussion notes

Cory - We’ve tried this before - what would be different this time?

John - No FTP access to the testing server - there are pros and cons to that

Wayne - We need to test one branch at a time

John - He would like to see it (use of the testing server) go in a line (testing schedule or queue) - I’m next, you’re after me, etc.

Wayne - If we need to, we wipe it clean and then start over again. That’s the process and the beauty of it. We test on it, beat it up, and then wipe it clean for the next round.

John - We can get a full copy of a client’s database and then kick the crap out of it. When done, we just flush it. We never mess with live data. We just make a copy and then test and push against that. Much better look (at live data - copied) then our own fake development data.

Wayne - We need a way to turn off outside 3rd party API’s - either mocking it (pretending) or muting it (silent send outs).

Cory - Sometimes we have big issues with Metrc and other outside parties and doing testing that flows into outside 3rd party API sockets and feeds.

Cory - Currently we are using the Herbo server for some testing. We have been having problems with that. What is going on?

Wayne was commenting on the Herbo server - We are mixing branches, there is still FTP access, it is pointed to a non-master branch, and we have certain things that we can’t change for demos or other needs. Basically, we are using a live server, we have live clients on it, and we are trying to test on it. Too many mix and blend variables... Hard to manage.

Wayne - Would like to see some project scheduling - project A on this day, project B on this day, etc. Keep it tight (ish).

Cory - Con of having just Wayne and John having access to the testing servers. The scenario is, if we find an error, we can fix it right away (whoever the developer or testers are) but then we have to contact either John or Wayne to help that new code get pushed up and deployed. That becomes another bottleneck.

Wayne - We could change the timeframe or auto deploy time cycle to make it faster.

Cory - What about data 5? That is an option, but we would have to make a full copy of the database and all of the corp specific files (images, PDF’s, csv files, etc.). We could then order a new hard drive or put those files somewhere on the current hard drive that we could get back to if needed.

John - Talking about paying bills (meaning our clients)… If a client doesn’t pay, we should be able to just shut them off.

Cory - Question - How much does it cost to put things in cold storage? How much does it cost to bring it back up live?

John and Cory - Talking about costs. John was saying that we need to build in this cost ($400-$600 per month) as an operating cost. We are a software company. We kind of need this. Just like being a foundation company and not having access to a cement truck. It creates a problem.

There are ways to lower the cost, if needed. We could lower CPU’s, RAM, etc. We could also spin things up/down as needed.

Wayne - Rough cost to spin up a server is 2+ hours (somewhere in that neighborhood)

Cory - Really liked the video idea of Wayne recording what he does as future training things and visual assets. Good idea. We just need to be careful of who gets those… This is the whole backend access zone stuff. We just need to keep it tight.

John - He has some server docs and would like to get that put into a private repo that only has access to Wayne, Brandon, and John. Small group.

Cory - Figuring out a way to force some of these clients to pay for cold storage and reanimation or redeployment of the servers. It comes down to if you don’t pay your bills, we get full control of what happens. We need to do what we said that we will do. Forcing the hand by making them pay for the backup data.

John - We just need to have our plans and procedures in place. We need something to stand on.

Brandon - We could do some cold storage on the same servers. Either with a different drive or a partitioned area where we could store things. As a group, we were talking about other possible storage options within the same box. We could make copies of ColdFusion files, client files, and SQL data dumps. Put them all out of reach but on the same server. Then if needed, we could restore things as needed.

John and Cory - If we need to reanimate or redeploy - here are the params and timelines and costs - Part of the plan. Some of these values may change in the future as well.

John - If the crap hits the fan… He doesn’t want to be in the spray zone of that fan. We need to protect ourselves.

Sean, Shari O., Michael, John, and I were on the morning meeting. We all checked in and said what we were working on. After that, we all either left or went on mute and worked in the background. Shari O. had to take a tech support call and Sean was waiting to chat with her once she was finished. John had some flex grid tie-in questions. I was doing some research on MVP's and past data that we had recorded for what we wanted in some of our MVP (minimal viable product) stuff.

Here is a short MVP list that I'm thinking about - for the record, we already have some of this, we just need to refine it and make it watertight:

- Special accounts and in-store credit - We already have loyalty points, and round 1 for gift cards. Eventually, we would like to do in-store credit, vendor credits, punch cards, and other ones. The next biggest need is for the in-store credit stuff (in my opinion).

- Round 2 on gift cards - We've been gathering ideas and wants and needs

- Coupons and promotion codes - clear out and through ecommerce and internal shopping carts

- Take Calvin's adilas label builder to the next level - we've already done some planning and prep work there

- Standardize the merchant processing options - We have like 9 different integrations. Here's my next goal, pick one, make sure it flows from start to finish and is super simple. I want to do normal sales, pre-auths, captures, tips, refunds, voids, and reoccurring payments, etc. We have to be able to do manual key (like ecommerce mode), swipe, chip/EMV, and tap to pay hardware integrations. I want to do and offer all of the merchant processing functions. I was thinking that we could do a big push and try to get all hooked up with Datacap and then let them handle all of the different hardware pieces and different merchant gateways. That's my thoughts right now.

- Revamp the internal shopping cart, my cart favorite buttons, and general look and feel. I would love to head towards the fracture project - we have a bunch of R&D on where we want to go with that.

There are tons of other things on my list, but that is my quick MVP list for right now.

Steve and Sean were talking about deployment and how we need to be onsite, at times, to help the people get going. Sometimes there really isn't a good time, we just have to do it and let other things flow around us. Sean is making some plans to go help a company with a new setup and deployment down in Texas. Steve was encouraging him to grab it by the horns and go for it. That's how we used to do it, back in the day.

Steve had some questions about searching Microsoft Excel for field lengths. We looked it up and found that you can use the function =LEN(D12) where D12 is the cell address. That will give you the character count or string length. That is very similar to how we do things in other languages. Anyways, just a little tidbit.

John and I started talking about the need for a testing server. Steve and Sean took off and it was just John and I on the meeting. Some of our developers have been asking for a dedicated testing server. We kinda have one, but it still contains some older live customer data. That company got purchased by another company and isn't actively using the server, but it has things that we need to leave alone and not touch/destroy. We used to have a dedicated testing server, but we weren't actively using it and decided to shut it down. We have a need sometimes and then it chills out and we won't need it for a month or two.

The two of us did a good long session and came up with some pros and cons, budgets, and advantages of getting a new dedicated testing server. John started a Google doc and we put some info on it. Here were a few things that we came up with (these may change in the future - just a quick copy of what we were working on):

Pros

- No clients on that box - able to beat it up and even kill it without affecting anybody
- Be able to swap out the database - at will - really test with real client data without causing problems with their data
- Mock things up without worrying about cleaning it up
- Be able to point any code branch to that server so that it could interact with the data
- Code stability and testing
- Eventually move over to Lucee (as the backend server-side scripting language) - This could save us $20K per year - if we could cut out the Adobe ColdFusion licensing ($100/month per server). This is a recurring monthly fee.

Cons

- Cost per month or cost per year
- Another server to maintain
- We have to get with Wayne or John to get things planned and changed around, plus all of the current changes on live testing on servers while clients are still actively using those same boxes.
- Admin team only sees the costs not the benefits of getting a good testing environment - in John’s words, “They are not out in the weeds banging around. We need this.”
- We have a number of huge projects that haven't fully gone live yet, due to some little hitch or merge or overwriting code. Thousands of dollars of development that we can't use or sell yet.

Maybe use data 5 - Currently about $400/month - $200 CF and $200 DB

Budget of 5K per year

What does it cost in other resources and labor - Wayne, John, other devs?

Timing (when to do things - during business hours or after hours), loads (time of day and tasks and amount of data), and planning (looking ahead and when do we do this or that)

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John and I will fill in more details later. After the meeting ended, I wrote a few other things down that were going through my mind during the meeting. Here a few other notes:

- Taking the time to listen. Sometimes that is really hard. Often, we are going a million miles an hour and are almost being too efficient. If we slow down a bit, we could gain some valuable insight and information. Our normal is push, push, push. That is good sometimes, but not for every case. Slow down and take the time to listen - at home, at work, and with others.

- We had a need for some specific training this morning, but no one knew where to find it or if we even have it. I know we have it, because I did it years ago, but it has sat un cataloged and undocumented. We really need to go in and go through our older videos and do some cataloging and documentation of what we've got. Even if we want to do some new training, it would be great to see what we already have, even if it for nothing more than training the trainers. There is good content, drawings, explanations, demos, questions, and solutions. Eventually, this all needs to be a part of the adilas university site and media catalog. This hasn't been cataloged yet, but here is the Adilas.biz YouTube channel with hundreds of videos, that need to be cataloged.

Sean and I were talking about parent attributes, ecommerce settings, and making things easier. We then talked about gift cards and quick setup options. Trying to round out corners and speed things up. John jumped in and we talked about some new print style or print CSS stuff. We talked about moving dollar amounts over to the right on printable pages (PO's, invoices, deposits, and expense/receipts). John and I then looked at the chooser page (new code) and made a small tweak to the page. John just barely redid the page to update the look and feel. He also took two chooser pages and combined them together as a single page. Good stuff.

As a side note, I saw an email from Steve about being onsite to help a client and help them with deployment and setup for a couple of days. We gain a lot by being there, on site with the client, seeing workflow, personalities, staff, and general flavor of the company. It's fun, great, helpful, but it does take time and resources. We may have to do more of this to really get things going.

Cory and John were going over a review of a dashboard mock-up and layout that John was working on. After that, we talked about getting documentation for the main adilas servers. We have like 40 of them. Currently, a lot of the real nuts and bolts are in Wayne's head. We need to get that information out of his head and into a more tangible state (both paper and digital). If we ever needed to get a new server admin guy/gal, we would need this information. John has a bunch of it, but not all of it. Wayne has told us that he is getting close to retiring (at some point).

Along those same lines, there is so much to know and coordinate to really make everything work smoothly. John was talking about doing a software architecture drawing and doing some systems design work. We have been building this thing for over 20 years, it sure would be nice to build out something to show the visual architecture, flowcharts, and database model. We have it all, we just don't have the visuals or 10,000 foot level models. Think of all of the natural and possible connections and relationships. That could be a pretty hefty project, to document all of that. Anyways, we talked about some projects to get that information out of the minds of a few and into our hands to distribute as needed (paper, visual, and digital models).

I won't go into all of it, but we went over ideas for setting up those visual models and then keeping those things updated. There will be some ongoing maintenance that will be required. Who is going to do what? Who does do what (right now)? etc. Figuring out ways to transferer knowledge and be able to store and search that knowledge. John has some server docs where we could record things. Wayne joined the meeting and we briefly covered some of these same topics over again with him.

The next major topic was dealing with how we build and deploy custom code. Basically, we went over the progression of the black box  and black box code from the ecommerce site and side of the fence into the secured environment. Wayne had some questions and was trying to follow some of the logic for different black box code sections. He would love to help us standardize things and make it more uniform. We have lots of comments in our code, but we are really lacking in real documentation on almost all levels. In a way, that's a form of technical debt. We will keep circling back around and pick up the pieces as we are able. Ideally, we will figure out and document the best practices. We will then really try to stick by those practices. Another big part of this is making sure that all of our guys/gals follow those best practices.

The conversation progressed and we started talking about moving our older code out of linear processes and more into services and functions. Once this happens (on all levels) we would not be as bound to our linear flow and would be able to jump around more, as needed. We have already been making this move and Alan has been refactoring and building out all kinds of services. This is just a pitch to make it more global and system-wide.

Next, we got into some bug tracking and error logs. We have seen a number of errors in the logs but no one has reported those errors, especially out in ecommerce. We have a feeling that it is automated traffic, outside hackers, and/or bot traffic. It seems like instead of following existing patterns and page flow, the automated traffic is skipping steps and thus introducing certain flow errors that we can't duplicate by doing normal processes. Anyways, we spent some time looking at the error logs.

Cory was asking about why we care about those other errors. Wayne was explaining that certain errors, especially if we get a bunch of them, then to crowd out other more important errors (they get buried in the midst of all of the non-important errors). Currently, our goal is to fix what we can along the way. This lead to more discussion on documentation and being able to show people what our way is and why we do it that way.

Some of our projects are being delayed due to waiting patterns and/or approvals. We have things ready and planned but are either lacking approval, budgeted funds, or something else if waiting in the wings that needs to come first and/or before some other step (virtual fires and priorities). Cory really wants us to try to focus on getting the system architecture stuff documented and creating those visual models. Internally, we will book some of this time as server training time.

Eventually, we will need to do documentation and training on backend stuff as well as frontend stuff. Wayne and John are going to start doing some of the backend architecture stuff here in the next few weeks and months. We will keep chipping away at things.

Pretty quiet meeting this morning. Just Steve, John, and I were on the meeting. I was showing them the progress on the duplicate recipe functionality. That lead into a discussion on new look and feel stuff. John reported on some new pages and facelift stuff that he was working on. Going over a number of different pages and making some decisions on flow, priorities, and next steps. Steve and John were talking about changes that are needed and direction. Some of that was on the main choose more interfaces pages, page title, verbiage, etc.

Steve had to take off, so John and I switched over and did some code review. We were looking at the advanced deposit search and the advanced expense/receipt search pages. We went over both pages, looking good. After the code review, John and I flipped over to adilas and went over some light plans and financials. Great back and forth with questions and answers. Good session.

Both a pro and a con - there are so many custom integrations that we have done, nobody knows all of them. Sean and spent 45 minutes going over credit card gateway problems, issues, and options. This could be how credit cards get entered into the system (manual keyed, swiped, or chip reader and other hardware options) or how each gateway acts or reacts (different variables, paths, and requirements).

I'm going to request some documentation from Eric, Alan, and Bryan. They have all worked on different merchant processing integrations within adilas. We need to help and gather some of that documentation up for tech support and our sales team. That is much needed information. Otherwise, we are somewhat blind as each integration is so different.

Dustin jumped on the meeting, and I helped him get pointed in the right direction on a required file for doing QR codes. Cory had an icon app email issue and we looked into it for a bit. There seems to be a duplicate number in the email settings. We also chatted with John about the chooser and choose more interfaces. John and Cory were going over changes to the chooser. Lots of different opinions - some like numbered, others like alphabetical, and some want to be able to search.

Once again, nobody knows all of the pieces. That creates a mystery of sorts. Also, it is hard to pick things up (projects) after the fact. Without the knowledge of what was going on and what was requested, some of the pieces, by themselves, don't make much sense. It's all part of a bigger puzzle.

Talking about data uploads and combing data and other prep work for clients. Steve and Sean have some data uploads that need to be done here in the next few days/weeks. Looking over the chooser pages that John is working on (new look and feel stuff).

We started out by John and Cory going over pages, options, and new look and feel changes. Talking about show/hide search criteria, scrolling, or creating new flow and/or better layouts. Making some good progress and John is making a number of updates.

KPI - key performance indicators - We have a client that is wanting us to build a custom dashboard page that KPI pieces as part of the dashboard. We may end up going in on the development costs with the client to help them get what we/they want.

Wayne joined the meeting and we were going over a number of lists and different projects. Wayne, John, and I met a few times while Cory was gone, so this was the first time that all of us were back together in a couple of weeks. Touching base on various projects. Looking over a few issues and small bugs. Shari O., Cory, Wayne, John, and I were on the meeting for a while. Things seem to be going well, in general. We are making progress in a number of areas.

Light talks between Cory and John on the discount engine and planning to roll things out. We are getting better and better at planning things and hopefully doing them (acting on the plans).

Steve and Sean talking about gift cards, quick deployments, referrals, and other client retention stuff. John and I were going over flow and new pages. We got into a discussion about getting valued client feedback and making sure that we are hitting all of the requirements. John was saying that part of his job, as a frontend designer, was to get and decipher user and client feedback. He also said that he would like to talk with and get feedback from stakeholders (adilas co-owners) and others. That is awesome. He was also talking about "requirements engineering" and how that feedback is a vital part of the whole puzzle.

Note for me - as we go forward, maybe let the guys/gals define their own roles and jobs. That might be a good start and then refine things from there. Part of our plan going forward deals with defining roles and tasks better. This may fit right in and takes all of the pressure off of just one person. Just a thought.

John and I were talking about ways to get good feedback on new changes, pages, flow, etc. We also talked a little bit about the adilas cafe and community and how that may be part of our efforts for getting better communication channels. Good stuff.

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

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

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

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

After the other guys left, just John and I were left on the meeting. We spent some time going over laptop and memory specs. We then did a quick page review for the receipt history page. John is working through a number of pages and giving them a more modern look and feel.

Steve and Sean were talking about how quickly you could setup a company and just sell and redeem gift cards. We may end up pushing this a little bit further. This could be a quick way to get our foot in the door with a company. We did some playing inside of the demo site and even made a few buttons, setup some quick settings and defaults, and ran a few things through the process.

As a note, we have a number of other quick standalone features that our clients can use that don't require a ton of other pieces. Things like the customer queue (even generic placeholders), timeclocks and timecards, quick calendar events, project tracking, ecommerce, etc. As you get into more and more things, the complexity level does go up, but some of those things could almost be sold or marketed as standalone products or pieces. Of course, they are all there (included), they are just smaller pieces of the whole that may be used independently or with minimal training or other setup.

Steve was asking about a possible option for showing buttons (my cart favorite buttons) with choices (like options on a menu - what options or side do you want with that?). We spent a little bit of time talking about how the buttons could include choices or whatever. At some point, we would like to do some buttons that tie right into time and scheduling as well (time buttons). The button is nothing special. The big advantage there is that it can hold the rules and assignments or special selections or settings. Basically, backend code and/or choices or presets get assigned to each button. That's what makes the button so useful.

After Steve left, to jump on a call with Mike, Sean was asking about quick setup options for things that we do all of the time. I mentioned that we could easily setup prep scripts or special code to help do certain things and/or configuration steps. Say you have a process that would require you to do a certain number of steps (say 10 or 50 or whatever). If you created a quick prep script, you could click one button and then have the system do all of those steps (5, 10, 50, 100 steps) all in the background. Especially if it is the same thing over and over again. It could really speed some things up. This would be a great addition for our fracture project, going forward. Quick settings, quick setups, quick default, and industry specific prep scripts. That would be really cool.

At the end of the meeting, John and I spent some time looking over a page to help split an expense/receipt between locations. This is something like an insurance bill or a bill that needs to be split by percentages between locations. John is working on taking older pages and updating the look and feel. It's looking good. He has permission to merge that page into the master code branch.

Multi-hour server meeting. Wayne, John, and I were on the meeting. Our first topic was email servers and options. I pitched 4 options. Wayne came up with a fifth option. Here they are - in general:

1. Stay with Newtek on the same server and try to update code to help make it more stable. Currently on a shared server for email functionality.
2. Stay with Newtek and just upgrade the shared ColdFusion server to a newer version. Basically, request a plan change and switch boxes (upgrade servers).
3. Switch over to Hostek and use their email services either as a shared server or a VPS for SmarterMail.
4. Full custom and we setup the server, the services, and the API socket connections. There are a number of unknowns here.
5. Switch over to Google workspace and use that as our email server. This was Wayne's idea. We chatted about ideas, options, pricing and what not. He is going to run some experiments using one of our other domain names that we have to do some testing.

After we got done talking about possible email options, we started talking about the datasource project and options that we have there. This discussion took quite a bit of time and felt like we weren't making much progress until towards the end of the discussion. We were talking about tough situations like payees and users being bridged between corporations. We went over the need for GUID's or globally unique id numbers. We also talked about tables like customers and part categories where we use the auto generated id as the main primary field. We also talked about other tables where we allow duplicates based on a multiple column primary key. For example: Say deposits or PO's. We let the system create an auto id number that we don't use (auto number for the transactional ids) but then we do a special corp id and main deposit number or corp id and main PO number as the sub combos. Ideally, we'd like to make all of the tables so that they could have that multiple column primary key or key indexes to help keep the data separated.

Lots and lots of talk about tables, options, and details. Toward the end, I think that all of us had a better idea of what we are up against and how to tackle the project. That is awesome. Our next plan is to have Wayne play with some things and see what it would take to update and merge a couple of tables. Basically, we are going to start running some scenarios and testing experiments. We talked quite a bit about UID's (unique identifiers) and even converting them into numeric values to help with indexing, sorting, and such. Most of it came down to adding in an additional layer to the database where needed. It's not needed everywhere, just in certain places and that was good to see. Progress.

As a goal, it would be super cool to get the full database all mapped out and fully documented. Things like data definitions, primary keys, foreign keys, key indexes, combo fields, etc. As a fun side note, if we flip over to a unique id type system, the main work will be on the insert code (putting things into the database). Then making sure that each select, or view query uses that unique id (a real UID or a combo/multi column primary key) in the joins and where clause filters. Once again, good progress on the datasource project. It may end up being a combo of both new datasource names and better unique identifiers to allow us to mix and bled tables, datasources, and data as needed.

Next, we switched over to session variables and session management options. We talked about setting up global session variables, centralized place to manage that, and moving things into more of a session object with methods, classes, and functions. Get it all in one place vs having it in-line code on multiple different pages. All part of standardizing things and maturing code wise.

Wayne reported that he and Eric got the local docker image running on Eric's Mac with no problems. We talked about some image, media/content, and local paths that need some help and loving. Then at the end of the meeting, after Wayne had left, John and I went over a number of new pages that need to be updated with a more modern look and feel. Long, but a good meeting today.

Both Sean and John checked in. John and I were going over Calvin's bulk server FTP tool. John has it setup and may need some help configuring things. I went in and was working on emails and then I spent some time looking into a small clock in/out bug. Pretty quiet morning.

Work session and code review with John. We looked over the verify expense/receipt page, verify deposits, and deposit line items pages. We also talked about using custom colors and then went over some of the next pages that will need some loving and help. Good session. Merged and pushed up a few branches of code.

There were a few of us on the morning meeting. My internet kept dropping in and out. As we started the meeting, Sean and Steve were talking about 3rd party solutions and some of their needs. We are seeing a need and demand for better documentation of the adilas API sockets. We have them, we use them internally, and outside parties use them. We just need to keep giving that section some loving to really make it shine.

Steve asked me about my meeting with my dad and his friend Harry. I mentioned to them that they wanted to see rentals and reservations, as one of the first things that they wanted to know how to do. We can do it, but that too needs a little bit of work and automation. I will keep working with Bryan to keep fine tuning the elements of time and the rentals, reservations, and availability layers that we are working on.

After that, Steve asked a few code questions. He reported that he has been in conversation with some older independent adilas reps. They contacted him and may come join us, internally on our team. That would be cool!

John was showing the guys a demo of the new pages that he has been working on for new look and feel stuff. We talked about hiding some of the text in the forms and making it look simpler. As we were talking, we were telling John that some of those processes are very repetitive and once they learn it, they want to go as fast as possible. As a older side note, when we were working with Jonathan Wells, he had the idea of the education mode where you could turn on/off extra helper verbiage or helpers (handrails of sorts). Great idea.

It is amazing how fast GUI's or UI (graphical user interfaces) change. In a way, we and everyone else is competing with the big dogs as far as expectations and demands. That makes it tough. Along those lines, it would be really cool to gather more info on how our clients are using our system and what they like and don't like. We have tons of data, just no really way to process it and make an analysis of it. That would take a whole other person to really get in there and dig through settings, usage, traffic, choices, wants, needs, etc. That would be really cool but feels like one of those projects that is still out there a ways.

The last topic of the day was another plug for the datasource project and getting everyone on their own database (bus to motorcycle project). It has my vote as well.

Meeting with John. We did a code review and merged in 3 different branches. They were things for the void prep, add/edit main expense/receipts, and expense/receipt line items pages. Lots of local testing and light code changes. We also spent some time looking over the chooser page and talking about CSS and styles. John is making a great effort on the look and feel stuff.

It was just Steve and I on the morning meeting for the first 20 or so minutes. We were talking about getting people started and getting things going and helping them to get up and running. Here are a few other random notes from our meeting.

- At some point, we would like to circle back around and get back to the vendor logs or payee/vendor logs project. Basically, this would be similar to the customer logs but for both vendors and employees (users). Steve started this project but it got put on the shelf as other things came up. We need to circle back around, when possible.

- On the chooser page, what if we allowed every possible page. That could be really cool. This is where a user gets to choose what they want to use for their default homepage.

- Steve was asking about settings and how we wanted to organize things. I told him that we have at least four known levels for settings that we know of, right now. They are: corp-wide settings (at the world or corporation level), group level settings (any of the 12 main player groups or sections that we have a homepage for that section), page level settings (currently using the slide out drawer on the right of the snow owl themed pages to show page level settings), and user settings or personal settings. At some future point, we may want to build out a master settings page that showed where everything is and/or is located. We have things spread all around right now. This may be a project for fracture - future project.

- The whole thing of adilas seems to be a pyramid or stacked layered application. There are tons of different levels that build on top of each other.

- The magic seems to come from progress and ideas. We do something, someone else sees it, adds to it, requests something, we build it out and/or add to it, and it starts all over again. Like a giant snowball or idea farm.

- One of the huge foundations seems to be settings and permissions. We are also seeing that these two key foundational pieces tend to split, fracture, or break into subs. Almost an infinite level of control and customization. Very interesting.

- Sean and John popped in and gave us some updates and reports. Dustin and Kelly also joined for a little bit. Their general vibe or message was - that people need help (generally) and if we can help, we are able to slide into place. It could be data entry, tools, functionality, systems, normalizing data, sales tax, inventory management and controls, financials, etc.

- My observation from today's meeting - it seems like all of the team is playing well together and helping to get things done. No way, one person could get all of this stuff done and handled, as it is going along and happening. I'm super grateful!

- John was showing us an update on the chooser page to help users select, view, and setup their default homepages. He is making good progress there. More good changes coming in the look and feel department. Good stuff!

John and Steve were on the meeting going over the chooser page and graphic options. We kept going back to ways of limiting things down by selections and/or settings. We have a lot and sometimes it gets hard to sort through things. Sean was asking about email stuff and what we need to do there. That is still somewhat of a mystery with some unknowns. We went back to talking with John about the look and feel changes that are here and/or coming down the pipeline. There is no way to get it all done at once. We will have to allow for different rounds and being willing to circle back around again and again. All part of the process and that's ok.

We talked about being able to search and filter different options. John is going to be working on adding things to the adilas docs. Dustin reached out and had me push some code for him. Quick phone call (mini server meeting) with Wayne. He was not in the office and was out doing stuff with his family. We'll reconnect next week and push more on the email stuff.

Sean checked in and said that the business cards were done and ready. John and I tried talking over the GoToMeeting but my Internet connection was bad. We ended up on a phone call. Going over plans, design, layouts, and next steps. I found a small bug and started working on it. Looking into a request to add a status filter to the advanced time search page for time sub flags and tags.

Recording notes from earlier in the week as well as from last Thursday. See these elements of time in the shop for more information. Quick phone call with John going over design questions. Quick merge and push code for Bryan on some date-picker changes.

Wayne, Cory, John, and I jumped on the server meeting. We were reporting on updates and what has happened since last week. Cory had some questions about being able to move corporations around. That lead to a discussion about future goals of being able to move to a fully clustered environment. Talking about plans and where we are headed. We also went over a few of the prep steps that we need to do in order to get there. Light talks about the datasource project. That is part of an overarching world building project that we are working on and chipping away at. It keeps coming up. We really want to push it forward, as we are able.

Wayne was explaining clustering to Cory. I was mostly just listening to them talk back and forth. We did talk about maybe doing a small prototype or demo project to do a proof of concept. Next, we talked about building up a data dictionary. At some point we want to document the whole database, tables, relationships, primary keys, foreign keys, data types, and other data definitions. As a fund side note, inside of the adilas shop corporation's site, we have a number of documents that Brandon has worked on over the years - the beginning of the data definitions and data dictionary stuff. To find those, do an advanced media/content search and add the keyword "database" to the file name or path field to get the results. Some of the original work was done back in 2014 and then added onto later on.

As we were talking about data dictionaries and definitions, we talked about getting everything in one spot where all of us could see it and contribute to the document. We have it stored inside of adilas, but it isn't really setup for quick contributions like a google doc or something like that.

Lastly, both Wayne and John got into some deep talks about Java memory stuff. John and Cory were also talking about look and feel pages and upcoming projects as we ended the meeting.

Steve and Danny were talking when I joined the meeting. Steve had some questions about adding in extras out in ecommerce to append the extra choices to the product description. The other guys gave their updates and reports. John and I then did some work on splits, expense/receipts (E/R's), REI's (reimbursements), and other payables. Light training. Also spent some time catching up on emails.

Working with John on snow owl them page display switches and settings. We did 8 pages together. Then I jumped in and started working on a number of other pages that needed the switch.

Two different sessions. One with John and the other with Bryan. John and I got some files ready for pushing up his new snow owl page view settings (modern or classic). Even though this setting has the name classic in it, it is still in the main snow owl theme. More of a mix but basically, new or modern views or somewhat legacy files with an older classic look and feel. Merged in the branch after fixing a few page conflicts.

Bryan re-joined and we merged in over 300+ files for date-picker and the 4-digit year stuff that we have been working on. That's thousands of pages in the last few weeks from Bryan to standardize things over the entire backend site. Almost done - good work!

The whole last part of the meeting was spent going over a plan for new flex withholding fields for employers (at the corporation or world level). We have a need for a new one (new withholding field), but it is only needed under certain circumstances. We thought that it might be nice if we could add in some flex fields and allow each employer (corporation or world) to setup their own custom fields and values as needed. That's just how we think.

Anyways, Bryan and I spent almost an hour drawing, talking about flow, ideas, and coming up with a rough plan. Bryan is going to take that info and make it into a better and more tighter type plan before doing any coding or application logic changes. He and I will get back together and look over the payroll plans and proposals. Bryan has a bunch of screenshots and notes on his end as well. In a nutshell, we were thinking about 1-5 new custom withholding settings and fields where the employers (corps or worlds) could set them up, use them, name them, and even provide some other custom settings, names, or values (rules for calculating).

John, Shari O., Cory and I were on the meeting, at least at first. The three of them were chatting about mobile responsive webpages and options and costs. We know what we want, and our clients know what they want, but there is a huge cost barrier to really do it correctly. We have an internal website/system with thousands of pages, and each one is different. That's a challenge and would cost multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if you had the best team in the world, it would still cost up in that neighborhood. Big project.

Cory and I jumped in and did a small quote session and were going over requests and new projects. One of the new projects really wants to have us speed up access and reporting for sub inventory stuff. We would love to do that and are willing to share a cost with the client. Cory and I chatted about options and things that would help us get the data quicker and more standardly for certain reports. We also went over a number of other projects and upcoming feature enhancements.

Small bug fix on the department homepage and being able to edit existing departments for payroll usage. John and I then switched over and worked on the new snow owl theme settings for snow owl - modern and snow owl - classic default page views. We prepped a number of files and pushed up the new code. This is new session stuff that needs to be pushed up before the new code that uses it (dependencies based on valid logins). We also ran some database updates to add new database columns and values.

We started out the server meeting. Those who were on the meeting started out by reviewing the last meeting (morning sales meeting). We then jumped in and started going over server-based topics. The first main server topic was email stuff. We are going to be using or trying to use the adilas content server to send it out vs the adilas university site. The old adilas university site is on a shared environment and is an older server. We are going to see if we can get more up time and new features by using one of our fully dedicated servers.

Next we spent some time talking about data 0 and maybe updating or upping the CPU count and RAM memory. We talked about Hostek and the customer support that we are, were, and hope to get. At times, we really need more support. Currently, it hasn't been as good as it used to be. Sometimes we get slammed and need help. We don't need it all of the time, but when we need it, the support is critical. It all deals with server up time and keeping our clients happy.

Touching base on other projects. Wayne is going to be reaching out to Eric and Dustin to see if they need any help. Cory and Wayne got into some technical compliance stuff like SOC 2 reports and other compliance stuff. Lots of talk about risk mitigation and managing risk. While we were talking about risk management, we got into a conversation about accessibility issues and making content available for persons with disabilities. That got pretty deep but this seems to be a section of the web that is expanding, and requirements are being made more for mainstream sites vs just specialty sites. Lots of special tags and flags for screen readers and such. We also talked about the cost of making a fully accessible site. The costs are huge, especially for little guys. Anyways, it seems like there is some legal cases and such that are pushing this agenda further. We may need to keep an eye on it.

We spent some time looking at some of our other servers and database stuff. We then switched subjects and Cory and John were talking about projects and new CSS look and feel stuff. We would like to get more user feedback. We are doing the best that we can. We are constantly improving our code every day. Talking about new settings and dealing with look and feel and personal preferences. We would like to get good feedback and keep trying to connect the backend code with the frontend user interface (UI).

We looked at the calendar and did some scheduling for some of our new projects and rollouts. Right at the end, Cory was reporting to us on a couple of small bugs. We'll have to circle back around. We ran out of time.

Morning sales meeting. Somewhat disconnected and a little bit rough. Nobody was really leading the meeting. Everybody reported in and some small demos of what people were working on were done. I was working on my own little project in the background. I added in a daily notes option for Beaver Mountain while I was listening.

At the end of the meeting, John was explaining some of the new default page view settings that we are working on. It didn't really go over that good. I think that it was because different people were doing their own stuff and projects and only heard part of the report. We got it all figured out in the end, but there was some confusion, contention, and some light friction for a bit.

Back working with John again on the new personal settings for showing default page views for the main snow owl theme. Looking at code and going over our tick list. After that, we switched over to some server stuff. John and I were looking at CPU's and RAM memory for the data 0 server.

John and I working on new personal settings for a default page view for snow owl theme modern or snow owl them classic. Basically, a new setting for old school/new school on the look and feel for the snow owl theme. Good work session. As a fun side note, John started a to do list up in Google docs and he and I were filling things in and batting things back and forth. Pretty productive flow.

Cory and John were talking about GUI interfaces and UI/UX client experiences. That seems to be where everything is heading. John had a great idea of adding in a new setting to allow our clients to keep progressing and seeing our more modern changes or virtually flip back to what it is right now (a mix between classic and the snow owl theme). Great idea. We chatted about pros and cons for some time. Good stuff!

We are going to be calling the new setting - default page view for snow owl theme or default page view for short. The choices will be snow owl - modern or snow owl - classic. We talked about getting user feedback, outside opinions, and customer/client critiques. These new settings will be at a user level. The main theme is higher, at the corporation or world level. The new display or default page view settings will be a lower or user level, so that each person or user can set their own preferences.

We switched gears and Cory and I spent some time going over projects and updates. We looked into some code on PO's and how they relate to parent item costs and cost updates. We talked about new corp-wide settings for allowing cost changes or locking things down, on the PO level for tracking cost changes. After the meeting, I spent a little bit of time testing some of the GoToMeeting video settings and flow. They recently changed some things around.

Morning sales meeting. The guys were going over the new business cards and asking for feedback. We got into a discussion about the user interface and how intuitive or non-intuitive it is. Danny was talking about possible small videos and things to help people get started. We also talked about doing some client feature stories and showcasing real clients and how they use the system. Danny had some fun ideas with small videos and what not.

Michael piped up and said that he has some film and video editing skills. We didn't know that. that is awesome and he and Danny may be working together to get more adilas content up on YouTube and other social media platforms. That's exciting!

All of the guys were giving their updates and what not. Shari O. and Sean were going over buttons and client settings for a small mexican restaurant. They are working on some menu items and how best to display and show things. We talked about a number of ideas and options. Towards the end of the meeting, John and I were looking at some look and feel things. Talking about page layouts and site-wide decisions for style guides.

Morning standup meeting. Guys and gals reporting in. Sean had a request to get sandbox merchant accounts setup for our demo sites. I told him that would not be a problem. Shari O. has been helping with onsite setup and training. As part of that, she had a few questions for the group. Shari O. asked about buttons and how to display things out in ecommerce. We talked about the need for stacking of buttons or stacking categories. We can do that internally through a tool and feature called my cart favorite buttons, but we don't have the same things exposed to the general public through ecommerce yet.

As we were talking about things, Steve was pitching us ideas about using parent attributes and being able to do some sub selections and choices out in ecommerce. We also talked about flipping the descriptions and adding small choices just to the descriptions. As a side note, if you have a checkbox (normal form control) and it is named the same as the other checkboxes, it can build a list for you without any special code. The key there is the value is different, but the actual form control is named the same. Small techy side note.

Switched over to working with John. He had some questions on how to do photos and media/content on his local machine. We talked about some other look and feel stuff as well. The discussion got into data tables and mobile responsive tables. What we want to do for our graphical homepages. This may be a topic for another time, but circling back around to talking about graphical homepages with charts, aggregates, sums, counts, graphs, and other dashboard type widgets and features. We really want to see what we could do there to help out. It all comes down to time and resources.

Once we started talking about layouts and custom CSS, that lead to a discussion about printable items, reports, and pages. We will need more time and more help to get all of that done in a consistent manner. We want it all to work and look nice. After that, we went over some other pages, branches, and code changes that John is working on. Making plans.

Wayne was reporting on certain errors out in the API socket land. It seems to be some kind of bot or computer-generated traffic. Just John, myself, and Wayne were on the meeting. We chatted briefly about crazy life happenings and scenarios. When it rains, it pours.

Light server talk about traffic, server speed on data 0, emails, domain names, local SSL certs, and Docker stuff. After that, John and I were looking into some edge case stuff dealing with reverse deposits and reverse expense/receipts. Basically, when a user makes a negative deposit or a negative expense/receipt. For example a refund on a payment or a fee on a deposit or whatever. Kinda edge case stuff. Anyways, John was requested to make some small layout and color changes for the bank register and to show those negative deposits and negative expenses in a different way.

John was also reporting that he found an existing setting that helps the data tables be web ready and mobile responsive data tables vs static data tables. Russell implemented that settings way back; we just didn't know about it.

Page layout stuff with John and Cory. Getting good feedback from our clients. The hard part is listening and then implementing changes. Cory and I then went over a number of projects. We have a request for a custom (bigger) image for printable invoices. New payroll settings with show/hide options and new custom alias names and other settings. We also talked about charging for training. We fail at that sometimes.

We got into default corp-wide settings and wishes for the future. It is amazing how quick our clients want things, but at the same time, and in the same breath, they want sub settings, micro control, and sub level permissions. It's a very interesting mix.Cory had a list and we went down the list and chatted about projects, updates, and other things that are coming down the pipeline. Cory had to leave and John and I flipped back over to look and feel and layout stuff.

John is reworking the bank pages, deposits, and other financial documents and pages. We talked about responsive web stuff and also flipping it over to printer friendly. We haven't had to worry about printing much, we just made web pages and people printed them if they wanted to. Things change with certain responsive websites. You have to almost treat pages as three separate layouts and designs. You have desktop (full web but on a bigger screen), mobile (phones or tablets), and then print. You have to address all three. That adds a challenge, especially with thousands of pages.

Towards the end of the meeting, John and I were talking about graphical homepages and some of our ideas and goals there. I told John that we had been dreaming about graphical homepages for years. We would love to add in a consistent look and feel, graphs, charts, and other eye candy stuff. Just really make it fun and pop. It feels like the time is coming. As a funny or silly side note, John and I were talking about how we have been virtually hiding for years, building, beefing things up, and doing tons of prep work. It's time to flip the switch and start showing what we can do. Hopefully all the prep will pay off and we can stay ahead of the curve (demand and scaling efforts).

A couple of different sessions. Small review session with Bryan on cross-corp invoice to PO processes. He is working on a sub barcode project. I spent some time checking out some of the adilas domains that we have pointed to the main adilas.biz website. I was supposed to get a list out to Wayne on my findings. I made an Excel spreadsheet and saved it in the Wayne folder on my local drive. I also met with John after lunch to go over some more quick layout discussions. We looked at things and made a decision. He is going to keep pushing it forward. We should have new pages (redo's and new look and feel facelifts coming online weekly). That is awesome!

John and I were looking into a possible bank transfer bug with Cory. We found it, but we are not sure that it is a bug. It may be that the user is using it to do something that it wasn't designed to do. That happens more than we know. We then did a critique and review of some of John's new look and feel pages. All in all, I'd say that it is looking good. We talked about how much scrolling is needed and maybe adding in a quick summary section to help get people to the meat of the page as quick as possible.

John is going to be pushing up a number of branches of code here later today. All of them are dealing with deposits, banks, and expense/receipts. After that, we rolled over and started talking about levels of mobile responsive design stuff. We want to get what we can this round, but we also know that we may have to circle back around and pick up that piece at a later date.

Brandon is going to be checking out the parked or other domain names that need to point to adilas.biz. We have like 30+ different domains that point to the main adilas.biz site. Wayne was on the meeting but feeling kinda sick. He will keep working on his tasks that are already assigned. At the end of the meeting, John and I were talking about controlling the printing to make that look good. Sometimes you think that you can just design something and it will work awesome for desktop, mobile, and print. Sadly, not always true. Depending, sometimes you have to design and have code in place for all three versions (desktop, mobile, and print).

Danny was reporting on a sales demo from yesterday. The company that he is talking with has some complex shipping and fulfillment requirements. We talked about, if we can catch the data, we can then calculate things and help them out with quotes and shipping costs. The guys were talking about using complex parent attributes and possible tie-ins for outside shipping API sockets and connections.

The guys had some questions about inventory planning pieces. We decided to get Alan to give us a demo of what he is working on for a client. No one really knows what it is other than Cory who is helping to quote things out and point Alan in the right direction. Anyways, he will be giving us a demo on Thursday morning for the morning sales meeting. It should include stuff on scheduling builds, reserving inventory, planning, and doing the actual builds.

Steve was reporting on some of his sales conversations and leads. He has been meeting with a number of different folks and just reporting on each of those contacts. One thing that he kept saying was that some of the potential clients feel like they are growing out of their current solutions. That is great for us.

The last two subject for the morning meeting were talking about 3rd party delivery services and options as well as internal look and feel changes for pages. John is doing a great job and he's been pushing up new files here in the past few days.

Eric and I working on the gift card project. We had it all ready back around Thanksgiving time but we've had a hard time getting it fully integrated. Lots of variables and things (application level changes) keep happening all around us. We are making progress.

Today, we ended up having to roll back some commits and try to get his code branch back up to date. Somehow it got all mixed up. While Eric was rebooting his computer, John and I talked about an error message and tracking down a bug in the bank transfer code. After Eric's machine was back up, we spent a bunch of time trying to reset his branch. Sort of a salvage type mission and session. Thank goodness for Bit Bucket and the code repository. We had to go through a number of sub commits and try to reconstruct the main gift card branch.

Helping Steve with some image paths for a 3rd party solution menu system. After that, John was showing us some new pages that he is working on and changing the look and feel. We looked at some custom Expo/Herbo code and layout stuff. At times, we are not sure what certain older pieces of code do and accomplish. Sometimes, just like in life, we have to fake it.

Steve chimed in with some accounting history to help John with some of our terminology. He was talking about the term "Posted" and what that used to mean. In a way, this older term was a way of locking things down and moving data along a virtual data assembly line - old school style. As a side note, it is amazing how much training and education it takes to help our users know what to do and how to do it. That seems to be a never-ending process.

The last topic of the meeting was looking at some of John's new mobile responsive code and page layouts. It is looking good. We are excited to see where it goes.

Quick sales meeting. We are finding gaps in older systems and seeing needs. We are going to try to fill in those gaps. We can do so much more, but there is a need there and we could get our foot in the door. We are looking for pain points and then help them improve and keep going. We can mix and blend and mix and match between our 12 main system players and 12 main business functions.

Steve and I spent some time looking into a complex data structure that he is trying to build out. This is for a 3rd party menu system. We also spent some time talking about being able to build out a small custom website for our clients. Some of them don't have anything and need some small contact us pages, about us, and sort of a homepage of sorts. We could just add those pieces to the ecommerce site and be good to go. Just some ideas and thoughts.

Steve is going to be playing with parent attributes and tiered pricing. He already has a small, hardcoded solution but wants to build it out a bit more and make it more dynamic for ecommerce transactions. Internally, we use a thing called a smart group that has rules and assignments but in ecommerce, we need to make it a little bit simpler because the users/customers don't have as much control or power.

John had some questions about some of the pages that he is reworking. He is working on look and feel and adding in responsive design and page layouts. After John left, Steve and I had a small chat about elements of time and where we are heading. Working on more time, event, and calendar based settings along with options for online customer facing booking and scheduling. Good stuff.

Work session with John. We were fixing some CSS and making changes out in the shop. We fixed the ecommerce view for what are called icon boxes (a view out in ecommerce - layout). The display needed more space and we had to move the price and add to cart buttons around. It got a little deep, due to the settings of what was going on. After that, we started into the Beaver Horizontal time view and trying to add tool tips to the layout and view. Because this page is custom and somewhat old, we had to go back to older styles of code. The new pages have that stuff built in, but the older pages couldn't pull it in, there were conflicts - libraries and other crisscrossing dependencies.

Cory and I were working on projects and project management stuff. Shari O. was reporting on the new payroll rules for the state of Colorado. We spent some time talking about the new payroll settings and how to help them handle things. We talked about both fixed values and dynamic values. These new payroll settings will end up being a new project for Bryan and John.

Next, we checked on some custom data for a client. We figured out a few things and sent them an email asking which way that wanted us to fix the data. After that, Shari O. and I got on and did a small session on graphics and editing PDF's. She may need some Adobe Creative Cloud tools to help her out. She it trying to modify existing welcome packets and what not.

Meeting with Shari O. and John. Going over payroll and new requirements. Whether or not we like it, on payroll and other things in the system, we have to virtually keep up with the Jones (stay up to date). We talked about some new settings for other withholdings 1-5 and helping to standardize those names and values. They are very flexible, but maybe too flexible.

If the company isn't careful, they could mix numbers for different things. These custom withholdings fields are for things like 401K, insurance, dental plans, meal plans, child support, Aflac, IRA's, etc. The problem is, if one person has child support and they put that value in flex withholding field 1, then they have to do child support always in field one, for other people in the same company. If not, image how crazy it would get if Betty (fake person) has field 1 for her 401K and the Tom (other fake person) has field 1 for child support. Individually, they would be totally fine, but any combined numbers get muddy and mixed.

We talked about the need for some other payroll settings (show/hide, aliases, global naming, etc.). We will create these new settings and then help our clients configure things so that they run how they want them to run. Basically, we'll help hold their hands through the setup process.

Fun show and tell with the guys and gals. I showed off the Beaver Mountain special events, how we are building in paperwork and release forms, subs of time, history and usage, and customer logs. Danny, Sean, Michael, Shari O., John, etc. were on the meeting and I was just explaining things and showing the guys where we are headed, drawing, asking questions, good back and forth, and just having fun. I'm not sure if they knew it or not, but they were my audience today.

Eric and I were pushing up files for wave one of the gift card project. John and Cory are going over the discount engine and talking about ways to do live testing with good data, without hurting anyone's live data. As a wish list, the developers would really like a way to get good clean data (basically a new database or new data) at will. Some of the data that they end up with gets muddy, due to testing, demos, and bug fixes. Sometimes they only complete a part of the process. It sure would be nice to be able to clean that data or database up with a click of a button. Basically, a restore to point x or y (whatever or even an ongoing good and clean data point).

After John and Cory got finished, Eric and pushed up some more code for wave one. The goal was to get some of the dependencies out of the way without leaning on them (using them). That way, when we push up the next wave, those other dependencies will allready be there in place.

Checking on a list of parked domain names. I reported back to the guys about how my Docker server install was going. No problems on my local development environment. We talked about other server level projects such as: inventory snapshots, email formatting, gift cards, dependencies, and sales tax aggregates. We keep making small little tweaks. We also checked on a number of other small projects.

Eric popped in and he and Wayne were talking about triggers and stored procedures. They were looking at the database entries and what not. As part of the meeting, they (Wayne and Eric) were physically looking deep in the database. Eric is going to circle back around and do some more checking on his side of things. They were reviewing the stored procedures.

It was kind of fun to watch them view and refresh some of the aggregate data on the fly. Cory was acting as the user (actually doing something inside of adilas), Eric was orchestrating what to do and look for, and Wayne was doing the backend calls and database SQL statements. It was fun to watch, as a fly on the wall.

Eric is going to run some debugging scripts on the data. They are looking for a cause and effect scenario. They were also looking at servers, monitoring processes, and running pages. From what it looks like, they will need to do some further data research and analysis. They are trying to get to the bottom of the data differences between the transactional records and the aggregated data.

As a note, if we can't get with Wayne, John is the backup database admin person. He has access to all of the different servers.

Shari O. joined the meeting and let us know about a new state withholding tax called "FAMLI" - pronounced family. Each of us on the meeting was giving an update on what we are doing. More need for mobile and doing ecommerce type transactions. We are also seeing more of need and want for online ecommerce appointments, scheduling, and online signup for special events. We spent some time talking about our current sales staff.

Some of the guys were talking about going to other peoples sites and checking out what they have for ecommerce and how their checkout and transactions take place. Kind of some research, in a way.

John was reporting on some new CSS and layout changes that he is working on. We are making progress there. Things are heading more and more towards mobile ready and mobile responsive development.

Quick sales standup meeting. Everybody was reporting in and what they were doing. The focus was on continuing to gather information. Maybe looking into multiple sales channels. Most of our clients could benefit if we could provide services or help them sell their stuff through multiple channels.

For us, we will continue to make calls, doing email campaigns, and online research. The guys were also talking about different angles and circling back around on different companies. Danny was saying that sometimes the easiest person to sell is a salesperson. Lots of groundwork. We even talked about teaming up with others to bring a bigger team or group effort.

They spent a bunch of time talking about SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) for internal production. We will be looking deeper into production and manufacturing companies. More gathering info and solving pain points. That's where we shine. Lots of talk about selling support, training, no contracts, and price points. Ideally, we want to help people do well and succeed.

John was reporting in on some new look and feel changes. We will be pushing up some news and updates that talk about a blanket number of changes. It would be too much to cover every change that is coming down the pipeline. The main goal is to help standardize the look and feel. Some of this will be done with page level settings per page - what to show/hide, verbiage, aliases, rules, etc. There is a progression of things! It just keep going!

John was reporting on some new updates on the department homepage. Eric, Cory, and I were looking at gift cards and scenarios with different settings. We had an internal email bug reported to us and we started looking into it. John was the lead and doing most of the debugging today. Bryan joined us as we were checking things out. Sort of a grouped effort. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the email stuff. We pushed up some new code and John will get with Wayne later today to finish things up. We did what we could for current time. It will need more attention later.

Working with John on bank transfers. Pushed up some files for Dustin. Then back on the code review stuff with John. Looking over the bank homepage changes. Pushed up the new pages for John. Yeah!

Steve and Sean were talking about sales stuff and where they are heading and going. Danny jumped in and they were all talking about personalities and outcomes. Fun conversations. Adilas is such a great tool, you can watch everything... we want to keep using that! That's what we want our clients to say. Giving our clients the knowledge to help make the decisions that they need to make.

The guys were talking about maybe hiring a new salesman and doing a 60-day trial period. Just trying to get some ideas. We also talked about education and the big need for structured learning within the system and about the system.

Switched to working with Wayne and John. Got a temp file from Wayne and a dump of his local database. As we were downloading and installing things, I was asking them where we stand and what are their goals? Wayne said - I think that our goal is clustered servers on both the database and code side of things. Small talks about load balancing and not overloading our servers. We also talked about back-ups and storing all external files and images in a different way (maybe the content server or something like that). Basically, getting rid of the local file storage so that the clustering would work better for the different servers and clusters.

Wayne would also like us to switch over to Lucee. That would cut the hosting costs on a monthly basis with a big overall savings year over year. We briefly touched base on the datasource or world building project (getting each corporation on its own database). The other goal that Wayne was talking about was tracking usage based on each corporation's load and data traffic usage (bandwidth and storage). Once we have those pieces in place, be able to bill accordingly.

After that, we switched back over to my local development environment. The way that they have it setup, both Wayne and John, the local environment closely simulates the live or production environments and servers. Trying to make things be more consistent for both test and live environments. Ideally, once we get it a little bit further, some of our automated tests will make sure that things are flowing and behaving consistently. That lead us to a whole other conversation about testing and having a whole test suite. Both unit tests and migration tests.

Lastly, Wayne was helping me install Sublime Text libraries and custom packages. We also went over creating new code snippets to help me code quicker. I had tons of those on my old box, and in my old editor, got to get it all setup again on the new laptop. 

Quick server meeting and then leading into a work session with Wayne, John, and I to get my local environment all setup and working smoothly. First off, we checked on a number of different branches. They (Wayne and John) flopped the data 0 box (quick reboot) and then we started working on my local machine. I was downloading Microsoft Office, working with Wayne on VPN's, FTP settings, Git stuff, installing Docker, and setup of my local environment. Huge work session. Lots of good back and forth while we were bringing Docker up, down, and testing settings. I took a few notes during the process. Multi-hour tech session.

From our meeting this morning - sales technique - is there anything that I haven't shown you that we are missing? Open it up and let them respond.

The guys were going over SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses) options based on batches. Steve is willing to help with some API integration stuff for certain 3rd party solutions. We also talked about the need for flex grid tie-ins and being able to use those as a pass through in the internal cart or shopping cart. We need to be able to pass customer, invoice, time, and part number (items) information through the cart flex grid options. This doesn't exist yet.

Danny was talking about stock/units and using VIN (serial number) look-up tools and outside services to help verify user inputs. John was reporting on some new changes for the bank homepage. Light talk on layout options and using tabs, cards, and responsive web layouts. Small date format bug fix. Talking more about the flex grid pass through in the cart.

The further we go, the more settings play into the mix. We tend to build generic tools and then reuse those tools over and over again. Custom stuff for individual companies may be required, but we will try to use settings and permissions where possible. Try to make everything as data driven as possible.

Meeting with Cory to go over projects. We talked about the pick ticket stuff with elements of time. Checking on different errors. Auto emails for PDF attachments for invoices. Going over new date-pickers. Reviewing other projects. Talking about transitional invoices and reserving inventory. Mini conversion and laying claims on certain inventory items. Deep production and manufacturing type stuff.

We also got into talks about backorders, cross-corp invoice to PO stuff, and some new sub barcode requirements and settings. After that, John and I spent some time and talked about Adobe XD files and documentation for certain projects. We also talked about some Docker (server) stuff.

Steve and I touching base on things. Meeting with Bryan. Merged in 10 new files for elements of time. The new code came from Chuck. John helped us push it up to data 0 for testing. Looking over Bryan's progress on his migration of the custom Beaver Mountain horizontal time view to a more generic and public accessible horizontal time view page. Bryan is also working on pulling across the add additional user/payee assignments page. Once again, custom code that only Beaver Mountain had access to and now we are reverse merging in that new code so that other clients could use that type of functionality.

Went over to Bryan's house to work. My computer was down. We went over new settings and ideas for time buttons and tying them into my cart favorites. We wrote down some ideas in Bryan's notebook.

From 2 pm to 3 pm - Bryan and I jumped on the server meeting (from his house). Cory, John, Bryan, and I were on the meeting. Wayne joined part way through. After the meeting, Bryan and I jumped back in and worked on refining the old custom code that we made for Beaver Mountain. More time button stuff and planning. Bryan has all of the notes. I was kind of just an extra today - no computer or anything.

Talking with John about data tables. We were going over reasons why we are using older versions vs keeping things automatically updated. Some of that is just timing, knowledge, and maintenance. Other topics included CDN's (content delivery network), jQuery, bootstrap, and other outside libraries. It sure would be nice to be able to redraw the data tables and remove rows if needed. The new ones can do that, but the old ones can't do that option. Back in the day, we didn't need that option.

Other things that we want to do with the data tables are things like: sub filter, sort, export, print, and pagination. We need documentation for some of these outside libraries and other dependencies. Our projects get more complicated due to different developers, time frames (when it was built), and even level of coding ability. We have quite the mix. All part of the game. John and I were talking about creating our own documentation for some of our code use and outside libraries - how do we use it. We will use the adilas docs for this.

We also talked about testing, training, and setting up standards. We would love to even offer some sort of formal training and certification. Sometimes we end up judging some of our developers that haven't had the correct training. Natural, but unfair. The other topics for the day were the cost of transitions and having to pay bills and other life expenses - inflation and needs.

Steve and some of the other guys were on a bigger demo this morning. It was just Danny, Sean, John, Michael, and I on the meeting. The guys were talking about demos and what they like to show and what they like to gloss over (speed of the demos and interest levels). Sean then showed some of the cultivation stuff that they are setting up for an upcoming demo.

It turned into a small sales meeting. Michael reported on what he was doing and up to. Sean and Danny were running the meeting. We went back and talked more about different bids, demos, and possible options. John showed us some of the dashboard stuff that he was working on for his school projects. We would love to grab some of that type of code and put some fun stuff into play inside of adilas. This deals with dashboards, quick counts, sums, totals, aggregates, charts, graphs, and other quick eye candy. We talked briefly about our desire to build out graphical homepages for each of the main players and sections. That would be really cool.

As we were talking about graphics, Danny, who is a pilot showed a screenshot of a modern navigation or heads-up panel from an airplane. The old way was tons of different gages, the new way is a real time visual with all of the main important stuff, right at your fingertips. That's what adilas needs, a head-up panel for your business.

Danny then showed us a small video that he was working on. It's just a quick website overview. He is just playing with ideas, timing, and concepts. Anyways, here's the link to the video.

Our next major subject was talking about display and modern design stuff. We went over tabs, horizontal nav systems, vertical nav systems, cards, titles, buttons, sliding drawers, show/hide and toggle options. Lots of visuals. That lead us into a discussion on my cart favorite buttons and how we could keep pushing on those custom buttons and improve their look and feel as well as add additional functionality to them. We talked about smaller cards with other required settings on the individual cards. We also talked about time buttons and how that could really help for scheduling. Great idea going forward for internal scheduling and fracture level controls for custom interfaces.

To expand on the button concept and/or my cart favorites. What if the custom buttons weren't just for the cart? We have similar things on the snow owl theme and the individual payee buttons that can be mapped to different pages, URL's, reports, or sections within the site. What if we took all of those things (cart buttons, quick look-ups, jump or hyperlinks (URL's), navigation, and other options and made the whole interface something that you could setup, on the fly and be specific per user. As a side note, we allow for buttons to be copied right now, if they are set to public vs private. If a public button (aka some sort of nav type button) could be copied, that could be really cool and could allow a lesser user (skill wise) to be able to get awesome functionality without having to know the whole backend processes. Just a thought.

This conversation took us over to the shopping cart, split cart, and different cart types and styles. We talked about all kinds of visual and setting based improvements that we could do over in the shopping cart land. We briefly rolled through the classic cart, the kush cart, and the short and sweet cart (different existing cart styles). John was talking about adding in settings to help with flow controls (step 1 of 3) or crumb trails (you are here - in this process or step), etc. Ways of visually showing our users where they are and what else if still coming and/or needed to complete a certain process or procedure. My biggest takeaway from the entire meeting was - "Show people, don't just tell them!".

Merging in a couple of branches for John and yearend payroll stuff. He still needs to run the updates, but we got the bit bucket merges done and in place.

Cory was talking about projects getting stalled out and how to help push them through the finish line. We were talking about this earlier but she just barely joined at 10 am. Light rehash of some of what we were talking about.

For the server meeting, we allowed Steve to talk to Wayne about emails and how things are going. Wayne was reporting on the gift cards and refactoring some of the cart logic. As soon as he is finished, he will get his code out to different parties to look at and do some testing. Cory and Wayne were doing some planning and scheduling of releases.

We then talked about passing certain branches of code back and forth and who is going to test, merge, and deploy certain things. We are trying to get better at working as a team. Some of the branches need to be strategically placed and tested on certain servers before going live. With that process, it opens up a whole new subset of needs for being able to merge, sync, and reliably deploy and execute code, branches, versions, etc. Currently, we are all pushing up code daily to a code repository using both Git and bit bucket. Wayne is the one who primarily changes which servers are pulling from which branches. Ideally, they all pull from the master branch, but we do tweak that every now and again, based on other projects, testing, requirements, etc. It's a pretty big job.

After that, the topic switched over to differences in display and page outputs. We talked about code differences, data differences, and even things like settings, permissions, and other custom code. It all plays into the mix. Light discussion on how to best help convey or communicate any errors or differences. All of those factors may or may not play in (code, data, settings, permissions, or custom stuff). It can get interesting.

All of the other guys jumped off (Wayne and John) to meet on a different Zoom session. Cory is doing a great job trying to keep up with billing and what not for custom work. At the end, Steve, Cory, and I got on a small work session and chased down a small bug in the dynamic PO labels. It ended up being a blank query for parent item attributes that wasn't populating in the correct spot. Small work session.

Some of the guys were chatting about some of the new happenings and progress with clients and/or demos. Lots of stuff going on all around us. Steve and Sean were talking about the value of a recipe/build type process. The recipes can hold the ingredients and the outputs and then be used over and over again.  Inside of both cultivation processes and production processes, they use the recipe/build processes.

Dealing with recipes - This also includes things for SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses - aka accounting for general costs by attributing them to a single unit and thus incorporating the true costs into an item). Basically, you take a normal expense like the electric bill or rent and build it into the individual cost of each unit by unitizing the expenses and virtually spreading a bigger general cost to smaller pieces. Sometimes that type of process (SG&A) is required for certain manufacturing and/or production type products. Basically, they (the IRS) don't allow you to expense off the whole expense (rent, insurance, waste, electric, etc.) as a bulk item. It has to be distributed to each smaller piece. If you do real SG&A, it helps assimilate those costs in smaller percentages and thus passing on a truer look at real costs of goods sold. That's the goal.

After the guys finished up on the recipe stuff, John reported on some of his payroll updates that he is doing. He is really helping to tighten things up on the yearend processes for payroll and withholdings. Good stuff. Next, we got into some discussions about projects that get stalled out, why, and how can we help that process (meaning get them all the way finished and into production). Sometimes we have to leave certain projects due to budgets, time, and other demands. Sadly, if you are bootstrapping things (running on a tight budget), you have to follow the dollar sometimes. Even if you really want to do something, you still have to live, eat, sleep, and keep the ship afloat.

We also talked about proactive and reactive maintenance. Once again, sometimes that depends on budgets, time, and other resources. If it's not broken, sometimes we have to leave it alone or deal with it until it either fully breaks or it really needs some help. All part of the game.

Cory, Steve, Sean, John, and I were on going over project management stuff. There was an error in the gram controller, but it was poorly passed to us from an outside party. We went over some ideas and ways to make our code more bombproof, even if we get back bad data from an outside call. Talks about error handling and responding to both good and bad data.

End of year payroll stuff with John. Going over numbers for new Oklahoma state tax withholdings. He would be looking at the documentation and I would read off the code and we would compare numbers (second set of eyes to validate the numbers). We then got into the deeper code where it pulls the values and does the look-ups, queries, and actual calculations. We went through a number of scenarios. It's looking good.

Work session with John and going over state payroll and tax withholdings for the state of Oklahoma. We had to add a new database column for some additional add-ins per state tax table record. Code review, number verification (two sets of eyes on new table values), and documentation (what are we doing and why). Good little session.

Going over custom labels and being able to configure those labels through dynamic settings. Steve's next settings page is going to be for the printable invoices. They started to talk about Metrc (state tracking system). Steve was also reporting on what Mike is doing and what he is pitching and throwing. Mike owns Herbo and eXpo, two different companies that are integrated with adilas as 3rd party solutions and even virtual white labels of the adilas platform. He is pitching adilas as a possible option under some different labels and umbrellas.

The guys got into a subject of adilas phones and what we could offer there. This is a phone tree type software package that adilas acquired a few years back. It has kind of just been sitting there, being used by a small number of clients but not really being pushed. They pulled it up and were looking around the adilas phones section and pages. Getting deeper into the phone tree stuff.

Danny was saying, software is only as good as the setup and the usage of that software. I would agree. We also were talking about some of the salespersons and what they could do and offer. There are some great skills out there.

We started talking about a new shopping cart and being able to switch back and forth between a possible new look and feel and the older more stable versions. Talking about adding more cart settings. Ideas about being able to flip over to toggle switches vs checkboxes. This is a more modern look and feel thing. What we would really like is nice interfaces that have the one-pager type feel where you can do all kinds of things from just one page. It still interacts with the server, session (memory stuff), and database queries, but there is a minimum or no full page refreshes. It all happens on one page (one-pager apps). This is a more modern way of doing web code.

Steve is excited to get John helping out with some new look and feel stuff and pages. I too am excited to get John going on some GUI (graphical user interfaces) and UI/UX stuff (user interfaces and user experience). Here we go, just need the funding and the green light.