Russell is looking into a masters degree in MIS (management information system) from Utah State University. As part of that, Russell might be looking into an internship with Adilas to help with data warehousing and data analytics (working with totals and aggregated totals).

We were going over some of what Russell is working on (small demo). He was talking about and showed me some internal classes and being able to extend them out to the API socket level. Lots of building things on the fly and then reusing code as much as possible (internal engines and code engines). Some of the things he was showing me included automatic documentation, validation rules, preset defaults, and allowing exceptions and exclusions. Lots of layering of the data using the different classes. In a way, almost a shorthand syntax with encapsulated functionality.

As part of the demo, we were talking about how he loves making versatile tools that can do tons of different things. Building and extending classes, extending code, methods, functions, etc. Making an extendable architecture as part of the backend platform. As a fun concept, some of his API calls had some standard selection options (an API socket engine of sorts). These standard arguments could be things like sort by, return columns, restrict columns, pagination, limit by (virtual where clauses), joins, matches, contains, comparisons, like, greater than, less than, equal, in, between, group by, order by, etc.

We also went over some concepts of adding in custom code by passing it in through arguments to a function. Basically, storing small pieces of instructions (aka custom code snippets) and then using those code snippets to run the data through the dynamic normal API socket engine. This is very similar to the black box concept, only you start holding small database entries (mini instructions) in the database to provide the dynamics vs actual code changes. That concept could work with some of our needs but sometimes you just have to create custom code or custom look and feel to get the job done. Lots of moving pieces.