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.

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.

Quick meeting with Bryan. We were going over some progress on his AJAX code for selecting items to do bookings and reservations. He got with Dustin and the two of them made some good progress (code wise). They also used some ChatGPT to get some ideas and answers (open AI - artificial intelligence). Making progress.

Various different things. Small data fix for a client and their costs of goods sold. Flipped a bunch of costs to $0.00 for unlimited items. They had a cost associated with those items and it was throwing off the balance sheet. Part way through, I noticed that some of the items on my list were actually real inventory items tied to sub inventory. I stopped and made some notes. I called and left a message for Cory.

Did some emails, light tech support, text messages, and finally heard back from Cory. I jumped back on the data clean-up project and only modified the unlimited items. Light backend database updates and changes for a client. Little clean-up project. Sent an email out to Cory and Shari O. with notes on what I ended up doing.

Looking into a reported timeclock issue with the AFB timeclock stuff. Read through a few pages and wrote down some notes and a possible small plan for things that we could do to help. My head wasn't in it, I'll have to actually code it tomorrow. It wouldn't have worked today.