Four of us on the morning meeting. Steve and Eric were talking about the transition between full independent (able to serve anybody at any time) and independent under the main adilas wing or being part of the internal team (still independent but getting specific jobs passed your way - no time to just server other clients at will). Eric was expressing how it sometimes is hard with older legacy clients that were used to just reaching out directly to the developer to get things done. Now they have to go through the process and filter through the queue (virtual line). That is good, but it does add some strain on some of the older looser independent relationships.

There were lots of talks about 3rd party solutions. They are good and bad. At different times, we have needed the influx of revenue and paying work. At the same time, we have also spent countless hours working on their stuff when we could have been working on our stuff. Somewhat a mixed blessing. As of right now, we are trying to avoid as much outside 3rd party work as possible. We have a tons of different pieces and projects that are needed internally.

Lots of good talks about customer care and serving those willing to invest in what we are doing. Even now, we are happy to help those who are helping us push the ball forward. Having said that, we are not so keen to help those who force their way or wills upon us. No one likes that. Along those same lines, we also talked about some of the pains of doing one-off development work and efforts. That then rolled into talks about feelings and how those play into the mix. We want to help people but we also need to balance being business appropriate and acting as business professionals. Lots of tough adjustments. Far from perfect, but we are trying to adjust where needed.

Steve brought up an interesting point, we are seeing, at this time, a massive movement to create and manage a conglomeration of systems and software trying to integrate and mix together. That is an interesting movement. It is almost like they are seeing the need to become a platform or a full blown system, all the pieces in one. 

We also talked about hidden costs and what it really costs to do that. Some of these 3rd party solutions don't go very deep. They seem to need deeper waters to swim in, basically, they need a comprehensive system and something that goes end to end. As the conversation went on, we got into putting up barriers and establishing rules in order to play well together. Lots of our talks were dealing with how we want to play the game and interact with others. Interesting topics.

After everybody else left, Steve and I stayed on and worked on some code together. He has some custom JavaScript that he is trying to do for one of his pages. We then talked about some older legacy code and older 3rd party solutions that may need to be cleaned up. Some of that code still exists on certain pages, even though no one is using those solutions. We may need to do some internal page clean-up.