We weren't quite finished with our other meeting, so Bryan had to wait for a bit. As we were wrapping up, Bryan and Steve talked and chatted about some project details and direction. Once I got back, we pushed up some code. Looked at some other code and talked about a coupon and promotion code project. The deeper we got, it, the project, got deeper and deeper with multiple unknowns. Lots of questions about settings, guesses, assumptions, needs, wants, and bell and whistles. We could see what the client wants but there are questions that come up. Do we do it core or custom? Do we allow for settings or just be bold and do the minimum? What about taxes? What about settings? What about financials and tracking things all the way through the processes? It got deep.

We looked at in-line discounts, standalone discounts, payment options, coupons, promotion codes, automation, cash values, and tons of other things. Some of the projects have teeth and need to be looked at from multiple angles. One of the biggest was taxes and how to satisfy the sales tax questions (charge for it, don't charge for it, back it out, try to match it up, etc.). Standalone discounts can get complicated due to taxes and trying to keep things straight. I ended up giving Bryan a bunch of questions to take back and talk with his client about and see what they wanted. As part of that, if it was going to be full custom, we weren't going to chip in on anything. If it was going to be more of a core and standard thing, we would be willing to chip in on the development planning and cost portion of the puzzle.

Towards the end, we had a good conversation, between Alan, Bryan, and myself about how our current model really encourages custom code development and it almost penalizes the developers for making things internal to the core. Especially if they do most of their work outside of the core anyways. They take a cut in pay (potentially - internal rates vs external rates), the projects get bigger (more requirements), and they then have to answer to one of us (internal adilas control persons). Kinda interesting. Anyways, as we go along, part of job will be figuring out how to help and handle custom code and scope creep and project creep. Bryan will be a good resource as he spends most of this time and efforts in the custom project world.