Steve had a question on ecommerce redirects. The guys were giving us their sales updates and report (where they are visiting). I showed them some of my new graphics that I have been working on. Michael and Sean showed me a new gift card flyer that they made. See attached. I also did some research on some numbers and sent an email out to Bob with some R&D numbers for expenses.

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.

Just Cory and I were on this meeting. I was reporting on projects and timelines. I showed her my progress on the duplicate recipe project.

Emails and watching the gift card setup demo from Sean (recording of Sean and some clients). Sean was talking about next round options for gift cards. There is a lot of setup (currently) to get them going. Once that is done, it is pretty quick and slick. There are a few things that are kinda quirky dealing with session stuff and turning things on/off. Instead of it just switching a switch, they had to logout and then back in for it to reset the session. We'll get that fixed. They were talking about physical and virtual cards. Sean was doing a great job showing options. See attached if you want to see the 26 minute clip. The first part is just setup stuff. The last part is using the gift cards and going over options.

Working on the duplicate recipe project. Spent time working primarily on the action page. Going over loops, logic, and validation stuff. Some of the loops are over complex data structures.

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.

Quick GoToMeeting session with Bryan. Looking into his code on the multi date select for the date-picker stuff. He is working on a scratch file and playing around with functionality. We talked about using AJAX and smaller helper pages to load the date-picker calendar and visual assets.

Working on the duplicate recipe project. Most of my time was spent on the line items section. Validation, looping, and inserting correct values. Lots of local testing and doing some page sign-off. Running through scenarios and then merged in code and pushed up to servers. Sent an email to Cory and Steve that the project was completed. Still need to work on help files and other small clean-up stuff.

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.

Working on the help file for the duplicate recipe project. This was a custom project that we rolled out as a new feature/tool for all of our users. After writing the help file, I then had to cascade it to all of the other servers. While in there, I also updated all other tables that are shared or synced between servers. This task takes a while.

As a future project, we may need to get in there and add a last modified date and maybe rework the API socket calls so that it only grabs the data that has changed vs all records (thousands and thousands). It could be much tighter and more efficient.

While I was waiting for some of the page reloads (transferring thousands of records between servers), I was thinking about documentation and training. We need good help files, tips, how-to's, samples, and documentation. This could be for internal tools, API sockets, client facing tools and features, etc. All levels. Eventually, we will need content for beginners, intermediates, and advanced users and clients. These subjects have been weighing more on my mind lately. Not sure why, but they feel like they are in need of some loving.

Recording notes from earlier entries this week and today. Ended up flipping over and adding the new graphics and images to the teaching and training photo gallery. I added 4 new images. They are the Star Wars Death Star image, the rose pedal model, the progression of things image, and the adilas value add-on core model graphic. See element of time # 9967 for more info and to see the actual graphics.

Talking with Sean about making a tighter game plan for credit card payments and which merchant account types we will allow and support. Currently, we are super open which is nice, but it also introduces too many variables. We have done integrations with a number of different companies and vendors, but not all. It gets really tricky when new hardware is introduced and chip or EMV requirements are needed. Anyways, we'll work on refining our options and how we approach custom solutions.

Eric joined the meeting and had a few questions. He let me know that there was a problem with the Herbo server (most likely a test branch of code). We also chatted briefly about some other MVP special account options that we would like to get to. We talked about in-store credit, round two on gift cards, coupons, and promotion codes. We also mentioned that we may need to do a full review of what we call our standard merchant processing setup and credit card payment options.

Emails, reviewing some videos on a time formatting bug/complaint on employee timecards. We used to leave it very open and allowed users to enter times as they see fit (for example: 5 pm, 5:30 pm, or 5:30:00 pm). The new time pickers require a certain format and some of our clients have been complaining about the requirements. We had time-pickers for hours and minutes, as well as one that required hours, minutes, and seconds. Basically, they want it back open where they can just quickly slam in a time vs having to comply with specific formats.

Prep work and checking out a reported bug/issue on the time-picker. It actually wasn't a bug, it was just forcing the users to play clear out to the minutes and seconds, based on some settings.

Cory joined and we spent some time catching up and talking about projects and issues. We talked about it and we will take off the time-picker for most of the pages that allow for user time inputs (files like add new timecard, clock in/out for users, edit timecards, customer logs, follow-ups, and both main and sub entries for elements of time). We did a search and it only looked like a few (20+) pages that need to be edited.

As we were talking, Cory gave me a few other small projects that need to be done and finished. She will send me some emails with more details, but it sounds like a data clean-up for a client that had the wrong cost of goods based on manual changes. There is also a request to add a few new search filters to a sub inventory PO based advanced search. We went over a few other projects and requests as well. Cory and I finished up around 11:30 am.

I then started working on the project to remove the time-picker from certain files. I uploaded new code to all servers and let Cory and Shari O. know about the update. Small work session.

Multiple different sessions between 2 pm and 6:30 pm - recording notes from last week and today (3/14 to 3/20). Also met with Bryan for half an hour to go over AJAX and date-picker stuff. He is working on a scratch file to help with some concepts for booking reservations and rentals through the adilas ecommerce system.

Met with Hamid to go over his wireframe for the business zipper website. This is a small side project that Hamid is doing as somewhat of an internship for adilas. Eventually, he'd like to get into some backend coding and database stuff. See attached for a couple of mock-up and wireframes.