Completed Address Autocomplete

Total Unlocked: $230

Spent: $136.73

Balance: $93.27

Cards:
[Whimsicott V deck]
[Misc Support cards]
[Regi deck]
[Ice Rider cards]
Hisuian Sneasler V x3
Duraludon V x3
Shaymin V x2
Darkrai V x3
Darkrai Vstar
Gengar VMax
Palkia V
Another Darkrai Vstar
Dialga Vstar x3
Dialga V x2

I finished the Address Autocompletion project. It turned out to be significantly more complicated than expected, largely due to domain restrictions the 3rd party applied for using their API. Because of these restrictions, there was no way to test things in development, which created a delay between when I'd get things mostly working (I hoped) and when it was available for me to test to see the results (e.g. after Brian had deployed it to production servers). In the end, we got it completed before anyone even knew about the new system, so it was all well and good. This unlocked $30, counting as a one-level stage.

On the Pokemon side of things, I found great deals on getting another Darkrai Vstar ($7) and a set of 3x Dialga Vstars ($15 total). So I went ahead and paid the $5 needed to get 2x Dialga Vs. This rounds out the decks I will be using for IRL play until the next set releases.

Replacement Orders Complete-ish

Total Unlocked: $200

Spent: $109.33

Balance: $90.67

Cards:
[Whimsicott V deck]
[Misc Support cards]
[Regi deck]
[Ice Rider cards]
Hisuian Sneasler V x3
Duraludon V x3
Shaymin V x2
Darkrai V x3
Gengar VMax
Palkia V
Darkrai Vstar
Dark Patch x3
17x Misc Pokemon Go cards

Last week was a short week, with Monday being the 4th of July Holiday. I did complete a few tasks, but the only one that was big enough to unlock any funds was the completion of the Replacement Orders DB Efficiency upgrade. That unlocked $5 for the task itself, and $25 more for the Replacement Orders level completing.

Tasks on the horizon include:

• Address Autocomplete API Integration - will unlock $5 or $30, depending on complexity.
• Return Status Project - will unlock $30 to $55, depending on complexity.
• Consumer-to-Business Transitions - will unlock $30.
• Customer Support Ticket Interfacing & Tracking - will unlock $30.

There is a chance that all of these things are completed this week. But more likely, I'll finish the Address Autocomplete and Return Status projects.

From a Pokemon perspective, I have purchased a single copy of Palkia V and a single copy of Darkrai Vstar. I will be acquiring two more Darkrai Vstars, and may acquire a Palkia Vstar or two as well. Other than that, there are not many cards currently in rotation that I will be buying. However, testing has shown me that I will also want to get a playset one of the headline cards from the next set, as it has performed amazingly well in the limited testing we have done. Thankfully, I found a way to use my pre-existing judging points to get a free order of nearly 100 packs of the next set, so that should mitigate my costs.

On another note, I'm focing myself to start including some element of exercise into my life as often as possible. To make that a priority that I don't ignore, I am adding the requirement for at least a few reps or minutes of exercise ANY DAY that I play Pokemon. Whenever practical (e.g. weekends mostly), that has to happen BEFORE I start playing.

Consumer Transitions, Replacement Order Updates, CS Ticketing & Dark Deck Purchases

Total Unlocked: $170

Spent: $84.60

Balance: $85.40

Cards:
[Whimsicott V deck]
[Misc Support cards]
[Regi deck]
[Ice Rider cards]
Hisuian Sneasler V x3
Duraludon V x3
Shaymin V x2
Darkrai V x3
Gengar VMax

The last couple of weeks, I have spent a fair amount of time pursuing projects that don't-quite-finish. Sometimes that has been due to other priorities rising to the top. In other cases, it's because of factors outside the company's control. In any case, that leaves me very close to finishing up a number of stages, but not quite there on any of them. Here's the blow by blow:

• Customer Support Ticket Interfacing & Tracking: We have a third-party customer support system. It's currently entirely separate from the rest of our backend site. But we are integrating things together to make it easier on our Customer Support Agents to keep on top of things, since happy customers mean good things to the whole business. Except, this was put on pause while we worked with the third party site to overcome some obstacles (e.g. their API had very low rate limits). We've sorted out a few ways around this issue, but won't be circling back to it until the high priority projects are done, as well as the Consumer Transition project (below). This is probably at 80% complete.
• Consumer-to-Business Transitions: We are around 90% complete with a single-level stage around the project to enable automated transitions from an account and all connected features to go from being an individual user's consumer account to being part of a business's heirarchy of accounts. This will ease a lot of work for our account staff, but went on hold this week to address two large projects that were higher priority.
• Replacement Order Updates: After an onsite demo/test of the Replacement Order System, a few small bugs were found, and a laundry list of nice-to-have requests came back. The goal has been to get this ready for release by the end of the week. It became the highest priority item, as it apparently makes a ton of things easier and will actually support a much broader part of the business than us Engineers even realized. Moreover, I achieved that goal. The high priority stuff is done now! But there's one lower priority task remaining before this stage is deemed complete. I'm splitting the stage into 3 levels:
  
  1) Listing Page Updates -- Complete ($5 unlocked)
  2) Details Page Updates -- Complete ($5 unlocked)
  3) Database Efficiency Updates -- Pending
  
  The first two levels were by far the most important in terms of fast turn-around and ability to deploy everything to production. The DB Efficiency Updates basically consist of shifting a large number of Entity-Framework database pings into a single database call of a stored procedure, and then using in-memory datatables to more efficiently load and process everything for these pages. The EF version works fine, and was probably preferrable for getting the initial version out fast while allowing easy rapid adjustments. But now that things are getting finalized, EF methods result in a lot more database hits than we want, which will be slower page performance as things grow. So we're getting ahead of that ever being a problem, by moving it all to an SP-driven system with a single DB hit.
• Return Status: Lastly, the next highest priority after the finishing the Replacement Orders, is a new 6-part project around Return Statuses. I haven't delved into what this one is about yet, but it will be the largest priority for next week. I'm not sure how many levels will feel like the right number for this stage, but I'll figure it out next week.

All together, that's another $100+ worth of work-stages that will be unlocked in the next couple weeks. For now, I've stepped forward to acquire some of the parts for a couple of different Dark Decks. I traded to get 2x Gengar V + 1x Gengar Vmax. Then I purchased 3x Darkrai V + 1x Gengar Vmax. The goal here is to end up able to run up to a 2-2 line of Gengar Vmax and up to a 3-3 line of Darkrai Vstar. Testing will determine exactly which counts we want to settle on. I'm still holding off on purchasing Darkrai Vstars as they are the only cards involved that are still likely to see a significant reduction in price (and because I don't know if I will end up wanting 2 or 3 of them).