I joined and they were doing a dealership sales meeting. Marisa was leading out. Talking about trailers, dealership stuff, custom paperwork, processes, and getting serialized (stock/units) into the system as part of a dealerships inventory.

After the sales meeting, Steve was doing some new settings and using some include files for a custom gram controller in the view cart top mini area. His goal is to get rid of a bunch of similar custom black box code. That is awesome. Black box code allows us to interject any code on any page to make it custom. However, if you end up making tons and tons of black boxes that are very similar, you can actually create more work and maintenance. Steve is starting to move into a great one-to-many relationship on some of the new code that he is building. That is a huge step.

When a developer starts out, they build a bunch of things that are coded specifically for one client or one purpose. That is easier to wrap your head around and each thing (function or feature) has its own part to play. Lots of simple things that basically stand alone. As their skills improve (developers), they start thinking more globally and start building in functions, methods, special includes, etc. Basically, code it once, use settings and defaults, and let the users configure what they want (make it more dynamic). Then the features become what is called "data based" vs "code based". It allows the application to flex without having to hardcode every option. The settings and defaults determine what it does and then you can reuse it over and over. Instead of copying and pasting code from others, you start building your own code with a purpose in mind. Huge steppingstones. Good stuff!

As a fun side note, As Steve builds this new code and stuff, he is actually able to delete thousands and thousands of lines of code to make it more simple and concise. Sometimes that really boots a developer's sense of being if they can get rid of extra code vs just adding and adding to something that is already huge. Great little mental battles and victories.

Dustin joined us on the meeting and wanted to go over some harvest functionality. He and Steve were talking about keeping up with master on the different code branches. Marisa wanted to see if Dustin could help be on a demo for cultivation stuff. Good little meeting.