There were a bunch of folks on the morning meeting when I joined. I believe that John had invited Cory, Chuck, Eric, and Steve to talk about the discount engine and new shopping cart functionality. As the meeting progressed, they were talking about servers, tech support, maintenance, new sales tax aggregates code, database update scripts, doing some data clean-up, and the new changes to the cart. We were all over the place.

The more we can make things data driven, the better. Currently, if we have some switches, they are in code and some in the data. If we can make it all data driven, then it works great based on the data or switches that are thrown or used.

We got into some big discussions on maintenance and who is going to maintain what pieces. Nobody wants to be that guy who has to fix everybody else's issues or problems. There are definitely some reoccurring or ongoing maintenance pieces that we need to look at. Also, as maintenance gets done, it also helps us see where to build and creates a focus or focal point.

There was some talk about taking the existing shopping cart and changing it over to a more object-oriented model. Once the cart object existed, we could have some simple switches that told the model which version of the cart it was dealing with. It could then have methods or functions based on the cart mode built into the model.

We flipped over to the short and sweet cart and talked about pros and cons. We also went over some client expectations and how to help manage those expectations. Some of that gets tricky and tough. Cory was giving Chuck and John a small demo on the short and sweet cart stuff. It still needs some loving, but it works (ish). Our current goal is to get the other carts functioning faster and faster and then go through the short and sweet cart. It is only being used by a few people right now. Our priority is the existing classic cart and the kush cart. We run thousands and thousands of carts or shopping carts a day, per server. We want to make sure that those pieces stay intact and running smoothly.

The final subject for the meeting was Cory and the guys chatting about plans, goals, and resources. We have some bigger cart planning meetings planned for later this week, but we are going to either cancel them or slim them way down. We need to look at what the costs are and where we are headed. We love ideas and dreams, but someone has to pay for all of that as well. We just need to mix and blend the different pieces to see where we are headed.