Bear 100 pages and making new pages more dynamic to help with future years and changes that are needed. Changing from hardcoded values to more dynamic variables. Cascading changes.

Emails and recording notes. Pretty quiet on the meeting today.

Working on code changes for the Bear 100 mile race. Took out an aid station, changed some aid station names, and had to rechange all of the aid station numbering. Doesn't sound very tough, but it was quite a bit of work. Going page by page and making the changes.

Tons of changes on the Bear 100 files. Updating dates and aid stations. Testing JavaScript to help with the photo and image uploader. Finished up the code and pushed it up live. I also spent a few minutes and touched base with Bryan on the client facing scheduling and where we are headed with that project. It should be online here in the next couple of days. Good stuff.

Talking with Sean and showing him some stuff with the Bear 100. Looking into Chuck's event code for the events page. Demo and showing Steve and Sean the new events stuff. Small brainstorming on sales ideas and trying to do more special events and such.

Chuck and I working on the printable time page. Going over JavaScript stuff, bootstrap 5, and new stuff. Talking about investments.

Pushing on the events page. Got it up and live and ready for the Bear 100 race.

Working on some new verbage to help with a news and update for the Bear 100. Click here to see the final news and update that Cory and Marisa made.

Took the adilas events banner into town and handed it off to some guys who were going to be putting it up at the pre-race meeting, the starting line, and the finish line.

Work session with Bryan. We were going over code for the online client facing scheduling stuff. Most of our session today was inside of the public facing shopping cart. Going over all kinds of scenarios and online booking stuff. We made a list of to do list items and planning for a public release next week. Things are moving right along.

Working on the backend of the Bear 100 radio admin pages. Going over the import CSV code and working on the main custom backend homepage for the Bear 100 radio admin folks. Also working on other backend pages that go along with their custom interface and special pages.

Bear 100 files. Updating the runner counts and working on the still out running pages. Emails out to the radio admin team. Working on the manual update for a single record. The actual race had already started and I was still working on some of the backend admin pages. Somewhat behind. I had all of the start and first few aid station stuff done, but cutting it kinda close. Finished up around 10 am ish.

We flipped a bunch of aid station numbers around this year. We also dropped a full aid station. I spent a bunch of time on Saturday morning tweaking the code and making sure that the public runner portal was showing the correct information. Going line by line and doing some super deep debugging. Eventually, after checking out the underlying code, I ended up changing where the finish line aid station buttons pointed in order to fix the problem. I had to make sure that the report pointing to the finish line was fully closed vs just the start of the last leg from Ranger Dip (aid 12) to the finish line (aid 13 or finish). It got pretty deep.

Checking stats, uploading photos and comments into the Bear 100 runner portal page.

I had to join late. Steve and Sean were talking about sales, live events, networking, and different angels. They were also talking about the use of videos and stacking the model. Imagine the base of a pyramid - how to set it up, then how to use it, and at the top (ish) what we have. Let them drill-down as deep as they want to go. All of this deals with client acquisition costs and what it takes to keep and maintain a customer or a client.

Next, we jumped into speaking about client facing scheduling and where that is going. We are making tons of progress there. After that, we talked about the Bear 100 mile race and seeking some ROI (return on investment) from some of those special or custom interfaces. We talked about seeing what is next and talking with the race direction. Trying to get ideas and keep making it better and better. All part of the process.

Cory and I were touching base and checking in on a number of different projects. Talking about working through failures. Lot of talks about permissions, settings, and sub permissions or sub functions within the bigger permission. It gets deep or could get deep. Some people don't care a lick. Others want to control things at the smallest granular levels. Interesting, how different people's agendas are.

We also got into settings and sub settings. More quotes on new and upcoming projects. Planning and figuring out next steps on existing projects. Small update from John on his discount engine code.

Code review with Bryan. We were surfacing the customer credit terms on the different invoice views (mini, printer friendly, PDF, edit line items, etc.). Big merge and testing process. Pushed it up live on data 0.

Small work session with Eric on gift cards. We were adding in code to help setup the quick search for gift cards.

I got a spreadsheet from the race director to edit and update a few finish times for the Bear 100. Manually updating records and documenting with notes.

Code review with Bryan on the client facing scheduling project. Going over new changes and working on some of the dynamic naming and hardcoded variables. We had to do some clean-up with git and bit bucket. Spent some time chasing layout bugs. Good work session.

Clean-up and comparing data from a spreadsheet to what we had on the live database system. Back and forth comparing all dates, times, and values. Ended up only changing 4 records. I was wishing that I had a better tool or that the race director had flagged the ones to look at. Lots of back and forth and comparing things.

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

This led us into a conversation about transitioning into graphical homepages with quick snapshots, quick numbers, counts, maxes, mins, averages, and other quick aggregate values. We would love to add this in for our fracture project or fracture concepts. Do this on every page. Alan did some small graphs on the main invoice homepage. We want this spread throughout the entire site. All of the key player groups - (customers, invoices, quotes, items, stock/units, elements of time, balance sheet items, deposits, expenses, PO's, vendors, users, etc.).

As part of the server meeting, Wayne was reporting on progress and status of his wife - health issues. We spent quite a bit of time looking over a number of requests that Cory had. I sent Wayne a zip file for all of the existing email stuff (code and assets). The email server is being more of a topic lately. We will need to do something there soon.

We also spent some time talking about the content server and the disk size of what we are storing for clients. It is getting quite large. We talked about the accumulative sized and storage costs over time. Looking into other options, costs, prices, and other servers to help handle the current and future content loads.

We got into database stuff and talking about sub inventory stuff. Tons of bulk tools are wanted and needed. Another topic that we got into was dealing with training and lack of training. This was dealing with existing features inside of adilas and/or different 3rd party plugins and libraries. This topic led us into talking about maintenance and doing the right thing. That's a constant battle. Another huge vote for maintenance and education. Two huge concepts that may end up being better than new features. Something to remember as we keep heading towards the fracture model and project (maintenance and training/education).

Chuck and I talking about automation and tech for the Bear 100. Making it cost effective and still high tech. Looking at mock-ups for the time homepage. See attached for a first round mock-up of the time homepage.

Small fix for the max characters for emails. Pushed up new code.

Switched to the client side or client facing scheduling project. Spent the whole afternoon merging in code, prepping things, and getting ready for a client demo. Lots of time working on the actual demo site to get new events, descriptions, and photos in place for the demo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plans for different types of online bookings:

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

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

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

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

Bryan and I were working on finishing up the email history stuff. Working on query errors and debugging. The error was dealing with payee id's (user stuff) and dummy records. We were checking code and dealing with referential integrity in certain places. Lots of relationship stuff.

Prep work for Drew at the High Valley Bike Shuttle. Talking with Eric about gift cards and logic. Looking into what it would take to get to the bulk edit parent item's core values. I ended up having to ask Sean. Fixing settings and prepping for ecommerce stuff for the bike shuttle.

On the GoToMeeting session with Bryan. Working on a small code update and code sign-off for the automated emails project. Merged and pushed up files.

Prep on the High Valley Bike Shuttle site. Working and doing some clean-up to help them get ready for ecommerce and online client facing scheduling.

Phone call with Drew and walking him through some of the client facing scheduling stuff. It went live on his site today. Exciting times. Sent a few emails out to folks with links to the High Valley Bike Shuttle online scheduling pages.

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

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

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

Creating DVD data back-ups of code and assets. Recording notes from this week.

Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2022 - Digital Conference - Las Vegas

See attached for my full notes from the conference. Here are a few of them (not all).

- The future of ColdFusion, from Adobe's eyes, is going to be about performance, scale, security, and productivity.

- Everything needs a metric

- Moving more and more things over to smaller microservices

- Making things multi-tenant (able to handle multiple corporations or businesses without displaying any of the other's data). We already do a ton of this... keep going and keep pushing it further. One of the key words that the presenter was using was "data isolation".

- SaaS models (software as a service) - low-friction and focusing on the service side of the approach

- Building relationships not just selling software

- Quick onboarding and time to value ratios

- Creating a layered model

- Building change into the model and into the plans - how quick can you move? Are you locking yourself into something?

- Beware of technical debt - older code - it has to be updated, maintained, and even removed at times (ok to get rid of things)

- See image (photo of a slide) for some take aways from Monolith to SaaS - Focus on SaaS building blocks first, make identity and isolation an early priority, support multiple tenants on day one, don't defer automated onboarding, instrument for metrics - even if you only start with a few, tenant-aware management and monitoring should not be an afterthought, exercise all the moving parts with each iteration, continually ask yourself if you are meeting your agility goals. Many of these are great ideas for our fracture project (upcoming adilas project).

- If you are using tokens - maybe think about JSON web tokens (JWT's).

- Educating the younger generation - creating a training pipeline - re-invent yourself/ourselves from an educational angle.

- Most good jokes have a setup and then punch line. The setup is the expectations and the punch line is the twist. If you set things up correctly, it allows you to pivot or twist if needed. Thought that was kinda fun.

- There are benefits of bad ideas... is it ok to bounce something off of the party based on that idea - sometimes you get more ideas building off of the bad ideas - they tend to be seeds for the next idea or thought.

- It's ok to throw things away - it's ok to go down the wrong path - being creative is not efficient.

- Sometimes you can flip things on its head (180 degree flip) - what would that look like?

- Having a great idea and then having an even better idea of not using the great idea. Treat it like a giant pyramid of ideas. The base has all of the ideas, as you go up, you need to get rid of things to get to the best ideas. If you don't throw anything away, you go from a pyramid (filtered) to a square tank with no priorities or set level of applicability.

- Who is the filter? What ideas pass the test? That makes a difference.

- Find a way to connect with people and bring joy - think of something like a comfort food - consistent - same thing every time - make it loveable

- Most software packages have a 10-year average lifespan - plan for that and plan for change to keep it going

- A full rewrite often ends up in a financial disaster. If you do decide to do a full rewrite, do it for a business model reason not for an emotional reason. Morph through evolution not full revolution (total change). See photos.

- Sometimes it is easier to write code than it is to read code - thus the tendency to want to rewrite things.

- Keep pushing out new things and use permissions and settings to show/hide and make the new features or tools conditional. Base everything off of the permissions and settings.

- Small changes to microservices. Little by little, make the new stuff.

- Use the same (older) database

- 1. Make a case for what you are doing or wanting to do. 2. Set a boundary for what you are going to do - be careful. 3. Next you need a plan or a strategy.

- Same habits, same mistakes! Alter the habits...

- Things are tending to lean towards machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Be aware of those major trends.

- The 7 mistakes that developers tend to make - See actual notes for more info - 1. Fear of failure, 2. Shiny object syndrome, 3. Overengineering, 4. Going viral (most things don't happen that way), 5. Building more features, 6. Building for yourself and other developers, and 7. Burning out. Tons more notes in the actual scans of my notes.

- It is common for us (as developers) to think that everyone wants a full features multi tool (swiss army knife) when in reality, our clients want a simple butter knife.

- We love to solve problems and we love to build and create things

- Don't be afraid of competition in the space that you are working in.

- Offloading and running things asynchronously. Does the action need to be done right this second? If not, queue it up, offload it, and run those processes asynchronously. If you are offloading, outside services don't need to know your app permissions, they just do tasks based on queues or data.

- The value of your team over time - that is huge

- Find patterns that work

- Capacity - keep watching the downstream services - keep things flowing

- Minimal on batches of data and more on just in time or real-time transactions - smaller bites with more accurate results.

- Orchestrating and chaining workflows - step functions - ideally with visual maps of the logic

Good conference. Both Bryan Dayton and I went to the conference. Bryan has his own notes, but these were some of mine. For all of my notes, see the media/content upload for my full notes. Overall, I'd say that we are going in a good direction. Always things to learn and improve on but making progress and going down the right road. Good stuff!

10/10/22 checked and pushed code with Brandon.

Code edited:

classic/view_cart_body.cfm

classic/view_cart_bottom.cfm

secure/custom_cart_5.cfm

Client paying for modal and settings to allow view of sub attributes when not enough stock is available upon adding to the cart or flipping a transitional invoice to a customer invoice.

W-2 for tax year 2022
Test printing too

1099 NEC

1099 MISC

1099 INT

Listening in on a call between Steve, Sean, and a representative from Barbados and the Caribbean. I jumped off after about half an hour listening in over the GoToMeeting session. I then started to clean-up from being out of the office. Text messages, emails, organizing my desk, etc. I also did some scanning of my notes from the Adobe ColdFusion conference.

Sean, Steve, Bryan, Cory, and I talking about reaching out to a client, here in the Logan/Smithfield, UT, area. Talking about what we can offer and who is going to do what. We also were talking about options for mobile payments and getting some new hardware configured for demos and testing.

After all of the others left, it was just Cory and I left on the meeting. I was reporting to her about the conference and things that I learned. Going over projects and talking about a huge upcoming custom data export for a client that has tons of data (lots of CRM stuff). They have flex grid, additional contacts, customers, log notes, and tons of media/content. They would like an export of all of that data. That's going to be a big custom project. Lots of one-to-many relationships. We are also storing close to 500GB of data for them. That could make it interesting.

Cory and I looked at the schedule and booked some time to work with John on finishing up the discount engine project and get all of the backend stuff all wired up. After that, we spent some time talking about value and the value of clean data. That is huge. We went over a number of other projects for Bryan, Eric, Chuck, and John. Our goal is to break things down into smaller and smaller pieces.

Talking about automating aggregates and getting that data to start surfacing and being spread around the site. That is a big goal of mine, for the coming months/years. I want to get it out to the business intelligence levels (BI).

Other topics that we covered were dealing with database triggers, email servers, building in a cost plus - mark-up system, lifespan of software and systems, and other known and upcoming projects.

On a Zoom meeting with Eric and Cory. Eric was showing Cory and I around the site and how to use his new gift card stuff. We made a few suggestions, but mostly it was looking great. Going over flow, logic, and other questions. We also spent some time and went through a number of scenarios and demo transactions. Making plans for the next steps and pushing things live. We still have some work to do on the financials but looking really good.

Emails and cleaning up my inbox. Responding to questions and what not. Checking some code for Wayne that he asked me to look at. Light testing on the update inventory counts pages on my local box.

Emails and answering questions from Hoodie Analytics for a client. Light review of a custom export page.

Paying bills and uploading scans and documentation.

Recording notes. Almost a week behind. Trying to catch-up.

Finished recording notes from the week of the Bear 100 mile race. Crazy week for me.