Small bug fixes and emails to Wayne, Cory, and Kelly.

Training session between Russell and Brandon. We met over a Zoom meeting and talked about all kinds of project management styles and techniques. Russell was showing me stuff on his Notion app, how he organizes things, and all of the cool drag and drop type styles for his to do lists and project boards. Lots of linking back and forth and dynamics. We talked about IT structures and how to best manage teams. We talked about scrum, agile, sprint (if you know what to do) and kanban (one project at a time from start to finish).

It comes down to what are your resources, timelines, and talent pool. Do you know what you want to get done or is it more open? The dev team does the story points. Not everybody can do virtual (meaning the work environment). Some people really need some handholding and someone to watch over them. Those are harder to manage virtually. The virtual guys/gals need to be somewhat self-driven and self-motivated. Are the developers full stack (able to do the whole thing - start to finish) or are they limited and/or specialized (just a few of the tasks are suitable for them)? Lots of questions and different styles.

One thing that I was shocked with was how many different tools Russell has to use to keep all of his things going and flowing. Tons of different software and web apps like: Jira, notion, Git, Toggle, Google Drive, all of their internals, and tons of others. We do some of that as well, but Russell had a bunch more. Just me speaking, but no thank you. I've got plenty plus a few.

We flipped back to talking about sprints and getting into a grove. Other topics included owning a task and that is just the starting point, a task is never the end all be all. Helping to share understanding. Also getting help and helping to complete certain tasks. Somewhat of a shared workload vs just owning a certain task and being done with it.

People see things differently. Kinda like the telephone game, what you hear and pass on may not be the actual thing that you are trying to do and/or achieve. It is more of a process of growing and becoming vs just being or having (all at once).

Russell was sharing some of the stuff that he goes over with his guys in the interview process. His interviews are like 3.5 hours long and pretty brutal, testing all kinds of different levels and personality type stuff. We talked about documentation. Other things like dependency injection and how testable are things with dynamics vs hardcoded or static values. We got into testing, mocking data, logic test, integration test, etc. It got pretty deep. Russell is trying to mix all kinds of data and tools to get the testing coverage that he wants. He was even getting numbers and test results (scores) back on some of his processes. He was then using those scores to keep refining until he had less crappy code and in theory, better results.

Spent some time talking about breaking things up into smaller pieces. Using flow charts, wireframes, and other schematic type design tools to show the overview of what the functions and/or processes do or could do. I liked that. He had some new big words for me - I didn't fully understand them. Just being silly, but one of the things he was talking about was "Cyclomatic Complexity" and other things. I thought that it was kinda funny and it made me laugh. I kept thinking, if I don't know that... how am I supposed to teach that or expect it from my guys. Just having fun. I did grab a few screenshots with some of his memes and graphics. See attached. Nothing too special.

Hours of emails, tech support, and other stuff. Emails to Wayne, Cory, Kelly, etc. Going over validation stuff, routines, logic, fixing small bugs, and looking into sub inventory data and attribute mappings. On a Zoom session with Kelly, Wayne, Dustin, and I. Looking over code and testing things. Kelly even pulled a client onto the meeting to get some approvals and have her do some live testing. Pretty deep session.

As a side note, if all is going well, the value of the systems admin person doesn't seem that important but when all things go crazy and he/she helps to get it back in check, the value of that person is huge. They are often overlooked when seas are calm and the wind is not blowing (which means that they are doing a good job). Lots of unseen efforts. Thanks Wayne!

Rolling back server times to help with daylight savings. Hit all servers and rolled things back. This is the smoothest that it has ever gone. Good stuff.

Touching base with Steve and Sean. Planning and scheduling demos. Talking about getting my dad (Wayne Moore) involved in some adilas sales. He is really good at talking with people, organizing things, and taking things to the next level.

Cory and Dustin joined the meeting and we switched gears and started talking about a possible error or errors. This took quite a while. We talked about possible date picker problems and using our new date picker. Everything keeps moving. The ground we stand on is in constant motion. That seems to be our reality.

We then switched over to other projects. Cory had a list and we went through that along with multiple things from emails. We got into a discussion on the hierarchy of different settings and which ones take precedence over other things. That can get tricky. It gets even trickier when you get layers of logic involved. Anyways, making progress there.

John and Cory were going over year end forms and documents. They then switched to talking about the discount engine and back merging in master to that branch. It's only a couple of months old and it already over 150 commits behind the master branch. Everything keeps rolling forward as a crazy fast pace. I would almost call it a neck breaking pace.

Zoom meeting with Bryan. We were working on his upload section for new display images out in ecommerce. We did a small work session and got his form submitting things correctly. Images can be tricky to upload, validate, resize, and rename. It gets kinda tricky. We got him going in a good direction. Small work session.

Zoom meeting with Steve and Kelly and tracking down settings. We were looking at cause and effect relationships and turning things on/off in different places and whether or not those same values cascaded to the other settings (show/hide and active/inactive). It can get pretty deep.

The last topic for our meeting was a switch from developing to marketing through training and education. I thought that was a fun idea and topic.