Podcast Episode 165: Episode 138: Peek into What's New v14

Description

Ever wonder what is behind Rock’s annual security updates? Today, Jon Edmiston, Emily Forman, and Nick Airdo give you a peek behind the updates and what it entails to prioritize the security of Rock. You will also learn what is new, from news on the early progress of the future content collections feature, what our Next Gen Rock stack progress looks like, and how you can continue to support all these innovations and more with your year-end donations. 

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome back for another edition of Rockcast. This is the podcast where you get to hear all about what's happening at Spark Development Network and what's moving forward with Rock. I'm Emily Forman. Have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here with me today, and we are ready to tell you what's going on. Now we're always starting with our version update because that's a good spot to understand the status of what we've been working on and what's available to you. And there has been a flurry of activity on that front lately, Nick. It's gonna take a while. Yeah. We it's been something we've been working on for a little while and it finally, , came to its conclusion, which is just great to finally be done with it. But it was a flurry of releases, four in total. We, and it was due to our annual security review, and we added some fixes there. So we went as far back as the version before the last general release. So general release is version 12. Mhmm. So we went all the way back to version eleven five. So we patched version 11. So if you're on version 11, go to eleven five, but really, you should be on version 12. So we also patched version 12, so there's a twelve nine release. And we had many, many bug fixes and things that were fixed also in 13.7. Okay. So 13.7 also is secured. It's got all the latest fixes in there and all these new bug fixes as And then we had been rolling all those fixes into 14 o along with all the big features that are in 14 o. So 14 o is also secure and stable, and that finally came out of beta on Tuesday or Wednesday. It was a day late because at the last minute, we found one more thing. , one of our beta testers can I say their name? LCBC. I just did. They found a a check-in iPad issue, and we were able to, , in the eleventh hour eleven no. Fifty ninth minute, fix that and get that into fourteen o. So you you mentioned too the yearly security process. What is that? Well, we we hire a penetration tester who comes in and looks at Rock, kinda understands how how it works. We try and get them into the mindset of the overall platform and the strategy of it. And then they look for errors and flaws. They look in the code, they try to penetrate, they try to hack in. They do things that you want a good person to do and not a bad person. So they are simulating, but they and they know the the tricks of the bad guys. Mhmm. Yeah. That's what they do all day. That's what we hire them for. Yeah. And, , it's always surprising when when when they it's eye opening for us too because we I feel we know quite a bit about these tricks too, but there's always something new you learn every year. Yeah. And so this year, we have a new organization doing it. I think we kind of, , have leveled up on that. And, , the it's a very expensive process and , because these are highly skilled people. These are not, , just someone off the street who just came out of college maybe with that kind of degree. These are very experienced people. And so you pay for that but it's really important so it's not necessarily an invoice you love to sign but it's one that you need to sign and it's good to feel rest assured that not only are we doing our best but we have some we have a third set of eyes Mhmm. Who's, , being very aggressive in terms of how they're looking at this. Yeah. And it it's aggressive, which is great. It's stressful for us, which is good because, , we we have to we're your advocates. We're looking out for you guys. But when these releases come out and the security I forget how it's termed, the latest secured version, which is now 11.5, 12 point nine, 13 point seven, or 14, you need to go to those versions. The cards are in your hands at that point. If you don't upgrade, we can't make you upgrade. Of course, just any platform, you should always upgrade to the latest secured version. And there will always be security fixes and patches for any organization that builds software that that is concerned with that. That's a feature for us. So we're always paying attention to what the latest is, and and that's why we invest in it. And so that helps build that confidence. And, Nick, you said there's stress on our team, and I think the way I look at that is what what we're really talking about is there's attention. Right? , so Andy Stanley's attention to be managed, and it's good because that tension of pushing into innovation, making sure everything's secured, that's where we are just making sure that we're bringing excellence to the table that has the background for trust and confidence. And that's why you're a good coach to me. I I to wear everything as stress, all the things coming in, it's but the way you said it is correct. Yeah. When I was talking to a friend, he or at the time, he was the CIO of a fairly large government state government, organization. He was , yeah. My advisory board was asking me the other day, , whatever we need to spend to make our systems , , completely unhackable. And we were just kinda laughing and , well, , you can start by unplugging the server and That's right. Powering them down. And even then, you'd probably need to make sure there's no, , , battery inside the BIOS with a wireless connection to something. Know? It's even today, that's not enough to to simply unplug it because that's the nature of technology. Right. So just make sure you're spending time, focus, and an investment of funding Mhmm. On that and and doing it with a really skilled company with expertise in the right spots. Yeah. I'm I'm really happy now that, , we've leveled up, but now we have we've leveled up, but we found someone that we can partner with year after year who can take the learnings from last year about Rock and how it works, and they can bring it forward every year. And and so there'll be less training on our side Yeah. At least on the stuff we've already covered, and they'll just get better and better. Mhmm. So Great. Well, that was a lot of information about a lot of activity, and for sure our development team and our testing teams in the community have been very, very busy. So a big thank you to them too because we have been coming back quickly and they've been responding, right? So you mentioned a church that had put in a bug report right at the last minute and we're happy to be able to be so responsive. But there have been many other churches that have been providing a lot of input that's been really valuable to working out all the little details of new releases. So that's super valuable. And that's not all that's going on, right? So that's the maybe the part that the community is seeing, but there's a lot of work that happens behind the scenes in prepping the things before they become releases or or, versions that people can update to. John, what are some of the things we've been working on in preparation for the next big features? Yeah. So two large topics to talk about. One is the the content library. We talked about that at at Rx. If you haven't heard about that, go watch the the State of Rock session, which is freely available to anybody. But that's a feature we're looking at in an upcoming release. And that in a, , hundred thousand foot level is a way that someone inside their Rock instance can say, hey. I have this great content on maybe felt needs or depression, addiction, prayer. And it's reusable. So the the goal is the vision is to push a button, and they can share that up to a library in the cloud, , in the Spark cloud of content that someone else can go into their Rock instance, look at the library, bring it down into their content channel, and then share it onto their site. And so the interesting thing is there's multiple facets of how of what we need to look at. So there's a, , there's a a community aspect to that, who's got this content? , we have to precede it with a lot of content because a library with no no books is not super helpful. It might be pretty to look at, but there's not a lot of value. So we're pre going out talking to people who have some content and how do we get this into the to to the library. We're also having to figure out the taxonomy of the library. , how does this thing even work? ? What kind of of of reviews do we need to do? How do you create a taxonomy of, , topical taxonomy for the for this so that that can come into your instance already preformatted and and, , so there's that piece. There's the technology, , well, APIs do we need and how's that gonna work and how do we gonna know who did what to who , who owns this? , there's then there's, , strategies in terms of, well, what can I do with this? , is what what's the attribution? Is there any attribution? I mean, the best is no attribution. , just do whatever you want. But we know sometimes that there perhaps needs to be some attribution. There could be different attribution levels it well, the author would to be, , attributed. the volunteer who wrote it at church a would that church would to keep that name on it in church b, and that's probably not a a big deal, but but then there might be a church attribution. So maybe some churches would say, well, we'd to keep, , written by x y z church. Mhmm. And some churches are , yeah, we don't really care. Just, , go get the content out. And I think the final facet is just understanding, , what does this mean, from an SEO perspective? And, , I think there's a , researching it a lot, , this is and this is something we've been researching for, , a couple years. There are some, , blanket statements that you could say, well, , you don't repeat content. , that'll hurt the algorithm. And, actually, the the truth is it doesn't. , if you you can there's lots of articles from Google, and there's even a video from from, , one of the lead guys who helps define the algorithm that duplicate content does not hurt the the, SEO. But it can make it confusing as to which which version of that content gets put into the search results. And so this this goes back to strategy. It's , what's the strategy of this content? Mhmm. So the strategy from your from your church's perspective is, hey, we wanna write this content because it drives our SEO and it brings people to our site. Yeah. Then you probably don't wanna share it because you could it could end up driving traffic to a different site. But I think in most places cases, this is the truth. , we don't that that that content isn't the primary means of driving SEO. If our goal is to get this content into as many eyeballs on the planet as possible, then it doesn't really matter what site they land on. In fact, we hope that the Google algorithm would would somehow take region into consideration and perhaps give them something in their area. And so so if you write an article on, , prayer and your goal is to get as many people to read that article and and and be impacted by that article as possible, content library, a % is the best thing for the big c church. If that prayer article is meant to drive traffic to your specific site, then that may not be an article you you want to share. But in most of the cases that we've been talking to to churches, , oh, no. , we we write these articles to impact as many people as possible. So in which case, this tool is a force multiplier to that. There may be a case where someone has, , a microsite that they're writing some content on divorce or something that because they want to be in their community seen as , that's a an outreach to bringing people to their church, well, then that might be some content that doesn't get shared. But I think in the vast majority of the cases, , hopefully, at least 80% that they are higher, much higher, , the the goal is , hey. Let's let's help as many people as possible. And so we're going through all levels of that. so when we say that, , there there's some feedback was , oh, what? You're gonna have some issues around this, this, and this. And and we were not blind to that. , Mhmm. We get that. We we don't have time on the keynote stage to talk about all the details. , we get glassy eyed looks. But that's the stuff that, , we're working through. And a lot of it is education and making sure that we do have , we can show articles that that say duplicate content is not a a bad thing necessarily. So kinda working through all that. Mhmm. So we're working on the strategy of that right now. Are we working on it with any actual content pieces? Yeah. There's some churches that we're working on getting the , they're opening up kind of their content vault and we're kinda going through that. If you and, if you have a lot of content and you wanna be a part of that, , just reach out to me and rocket chat, and I can get you LinkedIn. We just need to make sure it it ships with, , content available. And there's a lot of other details , okay. Well, what about images? , how do we bring the images in? If we bring the images in, do we need to do do do they need to be a standard size and shape? Or and so we're working through all that trying to that's the kind of stuff I still feel we are trying to define. We know that's a problem. We've identified the problem. Don't have all the answers quite yet. But oftentimes, it's working through real data that Mhmm. You start to understand. Another Another thing that we kinda see too, sometimes there's just a little bit of an end paragraph to an article that would say something , and, , if if you're interested in more in prayer, , check out our website. And and we wanna kinda especially with these initial launch people, we wanna come aside come alongside them and and be able to to take that last paragraph out for them so that Mhmm. They don't have to do all the work. That said, we don't have a lot of extra resources on our side. But this but this also is an opportunity. I think long term, we can make this a community volunteer project, and we can go through all the articles that have been pushed in. And as soon as you push an article into the to the Spark Cloud, it's not it's immediately available to everybody. , there's gotta be a Mhmm. A a slight cleanup process. Right. Because we're talking about shared taxonomy. We're talking about certain standardizations that just make it easy for a church to access and utilize that content. Yeah. And even those are weird things that people wouldn't think of is , okay. Well, how what format is the content? Because the format of the future is structured content. So but it's unlikely that most of these articles are written in structured content. It was it's probably more whotsiwig, HTML. So there's probably gonna be a need to convert it. Because if it's in structured content, you can always get the HTML. But if it's in HTML, can't get the structured content. So it's it becomes the master. And so we might have to manually and that's not a hard process. But Mhmm. And, hopefully, someday, everybody's doing it in structured content, and so it transitions across. But we don't wanna deny good content just because it's not in the the format that we desire. So we'll have a strong need for volunteers to kinda help do that. It's always interesting to unpack the things that are being worked on because sometimes it's easy to look at something after it comes out right in a version that we just launched and think, the feature builds, it's some functionality, some algorithms and some UI polish. And there's just so so much that goes into the strategy before it ever gets into to that aspect. I mean, it's really interesting to think through the problems that seem individually not that big of a thing. And till you put them all together and it's just something to work through and that complexity is not really visible in the end product. Yeah. And you you start the journey thinking, this will be easy. We just need to move the content up to the cloud and then a lot of people bring it back in and then you start to go through that and you're Oh. Oh. I mean, and you could do it quick and dirty, but it it you would just make a mess. And long term, you wouldn't have and it's you said, it all looks easy at the end, but the journey was nothing but bumping your head against every single And if we look back at the goal and vision behind this feature, that we're talking about, it's to make that content easily accessible. So there has to be a high adoption rate. Right? Mhmm. But there's not going to be a high adoption rate if you haven't figured out those little complexities that create barriers to entry for people. Yeah. And it got me to thinking too, again, what about the goal, getting as many eyeballs on this content as at all possible. And this is probably a whole podcast in of itself, but I mean, keep reading a lot of books on, , church communication and strategies that, and they're really good and and and they're valuable and they have practices that are important that should be implemented. But I think we forget that the most important outreach tool is not Google's SEO algorithm. It's literally the tens of thousands and millions of people who are in our church. Yes. We are the hands and feet. Now that's not to say don't use SEO. , could read that what I just said and say, SEO is important. Well, of course. Yeah. Don't not do it. But too often we take away the power of the church, which is the people by thinking that a few people can control, , these these little tools, which are good tools, but they're so less powerful than our people. And so if we can get all the best articles, , say, you had the best article on preventing divorce. , it was perfect. , , eighty percent chance of keeping a divorce from not going through. , wouldn't you want all your people sharing it? , you would you rely on SEO as your primary or would you use the hundreds of thousands and millions of people who are in Rock churches? No. You would use the people. And it goes back to something, , when I worked at at the church, our senior pastor would say, and it was slightly tongue in cheek, he's not this prideful. He would say, hey, just give me a soapbox and I can I can bring people to Christ? , I don't need the technology. And he didn't mean it that black and white, but he has a a good point. , at the end of the day, it's the people, and and the technology is the amplifier. Mhmm. But if you amplify nothing, there still has to be a person behind the microphone. And, , imagine if you had a chatbot trying to lead someone to Christ. , yeah, I'm sure there's a case where that's actually happened, but I don't think that was God's plan is for to create people who create chatbots who would lead people to Christ. , let's empower our people. , if we empowered our people to do that, the results would be Mhmm. So much better. And so I think, , there's a as technical people, we wanna use these tools and forget that we have to go build a relationship with somebody to explain to them that this other tool exists, , to go but but our people are our best tools. Mhmm. Well, that's really good food for thought about not taking an individual tool and making it your target, but just making sure that you're using it as your amplifier. Yeah. And I , a lot of times we look in the secular world and they're using these tools. why? Because they don't got the people. That's another great point. We've got the people. Mhmm. , if they had the the communities that we have, if they had all their or most of their customers attending in person a one hour, Event. Rally. I doubt they would be as, , stressed about SEO. But the fact that they don't have that is why they have to rely on SEO. But then we come along and, , hey. They're using SEO. We should too. Okay. Sure. But realize we've got something that they would be insanely jealous of. ? Imagine if every Apple user showed up for one hour, , community rally every weekend or watched it online. ? It's they'd be , okay. Yeah. The SEO is kinda neat, but, , we're gonna focus on these massive amounts of people. Absolutely. So that's a really interesting look at what's going on and why the content library is getting our attention right now. Mhmm. Still a lot of work to be done on that front. And and it isn't fast work. It's it's sometimes a little bit tedious and a lot of things learned and uncovered along the way. So we're definitely going on the journey of moving that towards something that should be a really high impact ministry focused feature in the future. Mhmm. And a lot of times, it's a big feature, so there's a million daily things that interrupt our time to focus on that. I'm hoping I was telling myself last night, you've got to spend some hours tomorrow, , focusing on this. I don't know if that's gonna happen, but it's frustrating because what you wanna work on, but then life, the day happens and it fires all over the place. But the other big thing that we are working on too is just the next gen. , as we said at the conference, again, talked about that at the keynote next gen and and it's hard because we're we're we're maintaining a huge project. We're pushing that huge project forward with new features content library and and in host of others. , if you watch the keynote, , in version 14, , much new stuff? So pushing that that thing forward in so many new and innovative ways. And we're basically, in a sense, creating a whole new project of equal size and scale. And it's not the resourcing doubled to do that. And it's not the and that's a money resourcing and a and a, , human number of humans working on this has not doubled. So it's almost some days you're , what are we doing? but we kinda have to. , we have to make sure that we have a technology platform for the future. And so that's been a heavy lift, spending a ton of time adding new features and rewriting a lot of stuff that, , needs to be done. So and I think coming out of the conference, , it's good to be able to kinda give an update. But, , the more I I work in technology, I think there's certain patterns that are hard to to communicate because they're kinda they're more nebulous. But, , when you pick a platform, it becomes your platform. and you can't , so that in a diverse community we have, everybody's gonna have a preference. Right? and you can see that, , preferences iOS or Android, Mac or PC. And in our technical communities, especially, that becomes it stops becoming a preference and starts becoming a I don't know, , what what the word is. It's it becomes our identity almost. ? Because you I mean, you could literally say, , iOS or Android. In a technical community, you can that is part of your identity. , we start grouping people, at least mentally that way, and PC or Mac. And then you'd go down into the programming languages, what you PHP, Ruby, dot net, Java, Python JavaScript. I mean, keep going. It just goes on and on and on. There's hundreds of languages. And I think in my career, I've tried not to get to , I love Mac. I was on that a % Mac for years, and I love PC. I'm currently on PC, but it's if I , I'm I'm not looking for a job, but if I started a new job tomorrow, I don't know if I'd be too concerned what my what what they handed me. I'd be excited either way and disappointed in either way, , because, I mean, honestly, there's some things I don't about PC, and there's some things I don't about Mac. So, but whatever they handed me, I'd be , cool. Is this what everybody else is using? Good. That's what I want. I want I want to be using a tool where the guy next to me can help me, and I can show him a few things too. And the same thing with with development. We , we've been in a few conversations even lately too helping the coach churches who have development teams. And if they're coming to Rock, , well, how do you do that? And my big thing is , okay. What your first question you have to ask yourself is, , do you have a Python developer or do you have a developer? Because me, again, if I started a job tomorrow and hopefully it would be in ministry because that's what is missional importance to me, I don't care what tool they use. , at the end of the day, is it working for you? Good. Is it is it increasing the ministry? Good. I'll learn it. Mhmm. I've learned, I think, 15 languages since I, , came out of college, and I hope to learn a few more. And even if they said, well, , it's in VB script. I'd be , oh, that's unfortunate. But is it working for you? Yes. I mean, does it have a pathway to the future? And let's just pretend it did. And is it making ministry better? Yep. Okay. Here we go. I mean, there's a lot of products that they wrote their own our Lava, they used VB script. Well, that might still be a good option for today. But if you have a developer who's rigid and is , well, no, I only do PHP. Okay. Well, now you got a problem because, Yeah. The tool in front of you is not PHP and so you're not gonna be able to lean on that resource to help you in your in your goal. Yeah. And when I was working at when I was working in the corporate world and I was volunteering at the church, I remember I I showed up for the first night, and luckily, it was a it was a pivotal night because they're gonna start actually doing web some web stuff. Right? Kinda , oh, cool. That's what I that's what I'm good at. There's two of us who could who could program who showed up that one night. And we're saying, okay. We need to figure out how we're gonna do this programming because we didn't we're starting from scratch. And I was more Unix. Linux wasn't as big of a deal back then. I was more Unix, open systems, Java, JSP, and he was VB script, ASP. And so we're , okay. What are we gonna use? And they bit pretty much said they were an ASP developer. They were not a developer. They're ASP developers. So, well, if it's not ASP, then I can't really do anything. I'm not gonna be able to help. And I was , alright. I mean, if that's what's if it's if it's it's two of us, if we do ASP, then that sounds better than one doing JSP. So we did that And I had to learn a lot of VB script. I knew some, but I had to learn a lot of that. And at the end of the day, unfortunately, he didn't write one line of code. , I he got how life is. , you get Yes. Your intentions are good. But, , at the end of the day, we still won the race. We still got a lot of great stuff done, but it wasn't a preference. Mhmm. Right? And so I think there's a lot of good platforms out there today, but unfortunately, Rock can only be written on one. Right. And so who picks it? Well, , history has picked it. I mean, as even as we go in the next gen, , we're not throwing everything away. Mhmm. The back end is still gonna be csharp.net core, which if you follow it, I mean, it's they're doing amazing things. , they're converting a lot of people and the fat and the speed that that they're running things is blowing other technology stacks out of the water. I mean, it still has the same the the biggest problem is it still says Microsoft on the front. And to some people, that's horrible. Enough to hate it for some people. Right. And it's the same thing when Microsoft bought GitHub. It's , oh, GitHub's gone. It's dead. Well, I mean, look, it's if anything, they've innovative faster with actions and Copilot and all these amazing things. Yeah. I feel that just killed TFS more than it killed GitHub. Right. They killed their own legacy product. And and so is it perfect? Absolutely not. Are there other great platforms? Absolutely. but we can't we can't do it all. We can't we can't be all things to all people. And and if you if you could sit sometimes in our seat, , you might get the the preached at on this platform, and you're , oh, cool. And then, , literally a day later, you'll get preached at from the exact opposite platform. Mhmm. And if you could get them all in the room, that they would see that, oh, right. Every everybody who preached has good points. Mhmm. , they're really they're not invalid points. They're good points, but they're all in conflict with each other. And and at the end of the you have to pick one and Right. And there's limitations that we have that no one else has. Right. So if we Nick and I, we'd say it all the time. If we only had to run this on one server, our lives would be so much easier. If we didn't have to support plug ins, if it didn't have to be customizable with, , rearrange blocks the way you want. But those are things that there's no way. We're not changing. If you didn't have to run a nice simple and easy to install hosting platform that 600 churches could all figure out and that we wanna make even easier in the future. Mhmm. And and it has to be self hosted. There's there's quite a few churches still who self host it for good reason. , there are benefits to that, and they want to be able to self host it. Mhmm. That pendulum has been swinging back a bit in some cases. Yeah. I mean, I am surprised when people still self host. There's good reasons to though. And so all of those things, it's kinda , okay, but you don't realize all the shackles that we have that we and and a lot of those are self shackles. Right? , but we wouldn't be where we are today if we didn't shackle ourselves to certain things. So, know, lot people are why aren't you using this service? That that's a great service. I love that service, but that's another thing someone else has to go provision, figure out, and it's not Possibly purchase? Yeah. Definitely possibly purchase. And to us as technical people, that's not a huge deal. , oh, that's not that hard. But to a lot of our community, , that's that is a hard deal. And it even if it's not legitimately hard, it's another mental tax that they have to do that their lives are already so I mean, are many of these people are doing all of the IT. Mhmm. They're worrying about, , routers and and, , well, they shouldn't. Well, that's the life they live because they don't have the budgets to have a technology team. And and then that says nothing about the fact that your pastor does not care. Right? He doesn't care what does the button click? Does it work? Can I enter in the data? Can I get data? , the the the conversation we're having is purely a technical, , religious discussion. Yeah. I mean, we talk about that inside, , 99.9999% of all Rock people who use Rock could care less what it's running behind the scenes. Mhmm. And then when I use a product Asana, I don't know what they're using behind the scene. what? I don't really care. , I mean, the engineering part of me would be interested in how they do that. But as I'm using it, could care less. Just bit better, Nick said, that when I push the button, it better do what I wanted. And Right. They care about does it function? Did my button move? And are there breaking changes? Right. Sometimes I look in the URL, I'll still see ASP. And I'm , oh, sucks to be them. But it's working. So , I mean, for the longest time, Apple still said web objects. I mean, they're they bought this old technology. Well, at the time, wasn't old, but web objects. And, I mean, I looked at that. It was , oh. But they've been using it. I mean, I don't think they use it anymore, but they used it for decades past when it should have been. But what? It worked. You could still order your iPhone, so success. That's not an excuse, , because we've also in a meeting, we'll be , well, I'll just we should just keep platforms for another ten years because it will run for I mean, easy. It'll probably be ten, twenty, thirty years that you can run it. But and we joke. Yeah. Because But the pastor doesn't care. No. But we do. We I mean, we don't wanna work in that either. I mean, we wanna work on new stuff and And we are. , we the train, which has already left the station. Right? -huh. Rock version one. Now it's a 500 long car train. We've changed out parts of the engine. We've swapped out one of the rails underneath the train. That was fun. And now we're replacing the box cars. , it's happening. Yeah. And we're getting benefits. I mean, I was just working on this week, a project where we're use we were doing something in Lava, and we're having to iterate over, I think, , 600 items, 600 entities, groups, and we had to get the attributes off of them. And it was , oh, it was taking six seconds. And it was , that's not gonna work. So we had to go do some other stuff to because six second six seconds was not good enough. But then over the weekend, , I was traveling, and so when you're driving, you're , that's not good. We we gotta fix that. , that has to be fixed. And so I came back and in a quick meeting we had, , wait, didn't we just we in NextGen, we fixed this for the grid. Right? We talked about that at the conference, if you're at the conference. What , we need to use it here too. And and with, , I think it was, , five lines of code that we changed, it now runs, , in less than a second. A lot less than a second. So Split second. So now we're getting the benefits already of that work. But it would but that was actually not even a technology change. That was a a methodology change that how how we approach that. So we're already we're already getting the benefits and that's exciting. But I do think in terms of what, , why are we talking about today is, , the mindset that goes into, , technology and patterns. And and, , sometimes it'd be great to have more people try to understand the why and and what and the what is there today and then recommend us, , some stuff that's inside the the the wheelhouse of the of the stack that we're on because that would be more helpful Mhmm. Than the point at a stack that's, , literally not something we can just We can't pivot that. Right. And no no project really could. It's going to Facebook and saying, okay. PHP is not the answer. , you need to switch to Ruby or or Rust or and I'm sure there's good reasons, but it's not gonna be too successful to of a of a of a ask to go to Facebook and say switch. To your point about learning what's available, I was having a conversation with someone and it turned out they just didn't realize we have something called these content components that can swap out the I I said that right. Right? Is that the right term for our tech? Where you can swap out the the how you want to look. Use a different template. Yeah. And your content's still the content. You write your content once, but you can change out to different templates. Yeah. I mean, there's so much stuff in Rock that is not well used. And content components are well used by some. , people who know them actually, , really overuse them sometimes because there's they are pretty cool. but yeah. But in that one case though, it was the thing that person was trying to , can't you guys do it the way that other system does it? Because this is and they start describing what the other system does. I'm , oh, that's Rock's content components. Does exactly that. Mhmm. the thing I do, I love reading manuals. if I'm looking at a new product or something, I literally want to read the manuals. I wanna see what's in this Lego kit and know all the Legos And, , I always recommend read the manuals. And when you're done reading the manuals, read them again because the second time, , you start to see other insights to it. Definitely. Well, that's definitely an interesting topic for a lot of reasons. The just retaining the mental flexibility to take new things in and think about them from innovative angles is always a benefit. I think the longer any of us are in a career, we become a little bit more fixed in what we're doing unless we're actively pushing against that. And that requires taking in a lot of information at a lot of times and talking to people that have experience in different areas. And, and there's a huge value to us as people to do that. There's a huge value to our organizations, if we do that. And then, of course, our team's requirements that we have are just very, they're very challenging. And we're providing a tool that works for people that have a full range of technical skills, and experiences and and we need to be able to serve and accommodate them kind of across the board. So there's a lot going on. But when you mentioned we are next gen technology and what we're currently our one point o tech, We're doing both of these at the same time, we didn't double our funding, we didn't double our team resources, we still have the same number of human hours available. We haven't figured it out cloning technology yet. That's not working so well for us. So it is critical. We're our team is doing everything we can with all of the the margin and the resourcing that God's provided us. But your input in the community is critical to this as well. So we're rounding the corner on the fiscal year for many churches, or the budget season. Consider how you can help spark in these ways. We have a lot of formulas and iterations and talking about, , the appropriate way to fund what's happening here, how we support and maintain current technologies, how we're moving to the future. But the bottom line is we're always funded below the effort and innovation that we're putting in. So anything that you can do above that amount, if you have a little extra budget room, or if you're able to increase your budget a little bit next year, your ministry dollars focused at Spark are going further than they can in many other areas. And I hope that if you were able to attend the conference, or if not, you've been able to go watch the free keynote video, you can see that the quantity of what this team is committed to putting out and the quality are they're really kind of mind blowing when you stop and start putting human hours to it. That's how we know God's involved. But we also have to have certain amounts of funding just to make that possible at a base level. So consider increasing your donation to Spark. Consider looking at your budget and finding those little dollars that are left in little budget categories at the end of the year and making a donation. That makes a huge difference in pushing forward some of the things that we're looking to do and and the fact that we really do need to be able to hire additional resources. Also, don't forget to budget for next year's conference because we'll be sharing more about where we've taken the product and where you as a community have been able to contribute incredible, , insights and and time to help volunteer work that you do. We're gonna be at a totally different level this time next year, and it's gonna be, , in combination of what you're doing in the community, what our team's able to do, what our sponsors and partners are able to help fund, and we want you to be a part of it. So go book your conference tickets because you don't want to miss out on that. And that's another great way to don't let it get down to the last minute and then you have to find out where to scrape those dollars from. Do it now. Do it early and do it at the lowest ticket price. Thank you so much for all your support for joining us in our conversations here on the podcast and walking along this incredible journey that is RockRMS with our team. We appreciate this community in ways that we would have a hard time clearly expressing on a regular basis. Just know you're valued, you're appreciated, and we appreciate you joining us today. We will talk with you next time. Have a great day. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's technology hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.