Podcast Episode 162: Episode 135: JIT Development Strategy

Description

Ever wondered what software development methodology the core team uses? Our approach is a little different from most of the best known processes. We find we have to be fast and flexible with our project intake; a lot more like a multi-race PIT crew or a manufacturing line. What do we call it and how does it work? Tune in to find out.

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 episode of ROTCast. We are so excited to share with you today as we draw close to the conference all the things that we're working on, a little bit about how we work in some unique new ways, and a a peek into what's happening behind the scenes as we prep for this big event. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here with me today, and we're excited to tell you what's up. Nick, let's talk about where we are. We always to jump in with our version update at the very top of a podcast. So help us understand where we're at and what release process looks today. Well, we have finished all of the features for version 14. So we are in the final stages of double checking things, getting prepared to start alpha testing. There's a few little things we discovered yesterday, so we're wrapping those up hopefully today. And the alpha testing team will get an email shortly. The interesting thing about this round is we're gonna follow version 14 alpha testing. It's gonna be a little longer than a normal, hotfix round. So we're gonna, start version 14 alpha testing. Then as soon as an alpha tester is done, they can switch over to version thirteen seven alpha testing. We're because there are so many fixes that are common to both of version 13.7 and version 14, we're gonna release them, pretty much side by side, which is gonna take a little bit of coordination. So there'll be a shorter 13.7 alpha testing round and 13.7 beta testing round. But the alphas and the betas will the betas should end around the same time if we do this right. Yeah. Which is which is great because most most developer type shops wouldn't do that. They would say, No, discount the latest. But because of the major release thing, we understand that not everybody can move to the absolute latest in a new major release. So we want to back port those fixes, which is really good because most, again, most places wouldn't do that. Mhmm. Great. Well, heads up to the alpha and beta testing team and in advance a little bit here, and that will be incredible that we can time that that way. Yeah. And then to make our lives a little more exciting, we have we're finishing up our pen testing stuff, so there'll be some things in there that we'll we'll throw into an older version of Rock. We support up to version 12. So anybody's still on 12.8, there'll be a 12.9. Okay, great. Having that annual pen test is a fantastic way to make sure that we're demonstrating how security is such an important feature here at Rock. And so there's always some great little nuggets we can pull out of that and pay attention. If we have an update that comes out that says security patch, those are the ones we always encourage people to make an update to, because we're very focused on it. You will see those from time to time. John, what are we working on right now? What's still in the crock pot and coming down the cooking line? Oh, it's always crazy, but it's way crazy right now. Nick said, we're, , fourteens getting ready to go to alpha. I'd probably phrase it a little bit differently. it's crazy time on that. There's just a ton of things that we're just doing the final checks on, all the codes written, but now we got to do all the fit and finish. And for the most part, it is really fit and finish, but it's super detailed and there's a lot of moving things flying back and forth. Just to give maybe a little picture of that, we might realize, well, that UI needs to be polished a little bit, so it has to go to another team member, or that team member has a million other things to do too. So you gotta get it timed right, but we're on this cadence where you gotta get things in for our pre alpha testing, because the fact that it works in our develop branch, that's great, good, good job, but it doesn't really mean anything until it gets deployed out to the pre alpha because lots of things could happen on your development machine that are not quite production right. You might be playing with something and that cruft is still in your development database. There's a million things that could still be that could work in development but won't work on the pre alpha. But yeah, it takes a lot of time to deploy out the pre alpha. Trying to get all these timelines and , did that feature get into pre alpha? No, it's not pre alpha. Okay, now I got to wait till the next pre alpha to go test that. It's a lot more work than it looks . There's a lot of organization and managing behind the scenes. And so just trying to remember all the things. And then when you see it, you're , okay, oh, that's great. That's exactly what we said to do. But now we also need to do this. there's some stuff that we're doing around personalization. It's , yep, this is exactly what we had asked for, but it probably should do this too. And so it's kind of a moving target. That is very true. Now some of that will get put to 15, , and we're gonna be talking about that at the conference, the personalization strategy. But there's some things , nah. We can't we have to have this little feature in here. So there's a lot of that, but then on top of that, there's the conference. Right. And that is amazing amount of work. And I think there's two parts of of of conference work. There's the logistical. Okay. What Mhmm. Are the menus gonna be there for for the food? Do we have all the speakers lined up? Are all the rooms lined up? Is the AV guys, lined up? All that logistical stuff. And then there's so that's one team doing that, and there's another team that's working on content. Mhmm. So what about the intro video? What's that supposed to do? What's the strategy for our messaging for the whole conference? The keynote. I think people will be shocked at how much time that keynote takes. It's over in an hour and a half to two hours, but it's close to being It takes us almost one hour per minute to get the content right, created, strategy. And it seems crazy, but that's almost exactly what it's been in previous years. And that's kind of trending this way. This year, the keynote's a little bit longer. So it's an amazing amount of work, but it's kind of the highlights, the Super Bowl of the year. On top of that though, there's just and it's always the case this time of year, there's a amazing amount of pixie dust trying to be so that we can get that for the conference. It's kind of crazy because about half of that pixie dust ever gets fully done. There's still stuff that it's , okay, if we got time for that, we'll do that. But that's probably, there's just never enough time. But we're really excited about some of the things we'll get to talk about that we haven't talked about. And even on the personal side, there's personal content I'm trying to get ready so that it can be ready for the conference. So lots of personal side projects that are just little gifts, I guess. , did that once. We'll never do that again. Remember, , what was it? The how many days of Christmas? Twelve days of Oh my gosh. It was a really fun idea. It was a very difficult thing to actually accomplish. Right? Because you always wanna be , , having a little bit of time with family, but when you're trying to make a gift for every twelve days, that was a little I'm not sure what we were thinking. But that's kind of the season we're in right now is we're trying to create these little gifts and wrap them up and put them out there. And some of the stuff is stuff we've been thinking about for years. So it's really cool to get it actually kind of crossing a finish line that you can actually put it there. But it's pretty crazy. The conference does create a good timeline to say, okay, now we have to get this done by this time. Yeah. But then everything lands with that same timeline. And then you have to remember not to talk about it. Right? Yeah. Because you can't talk about it while it's in production if it's something that you want to roll out as pixie dust. Yeah. Think you're right that when you have things Christmas or the conference, there are dates that you try to tie things to, and that creates an urgency that maybe didn't exist. There was a discussion going on where someone said, Well, hey, we're working on one of these things, we wanna announce it at the conference. And they're , wow, that's pretty, not a lot of time to think about that. It's , yep, well, that's, . That's how it works. That's how it works. , there'll be ideas, , a week before the conference that will come to us, or even a day before the conference that'll come to us. Some of them we can't do, there's just not enough time, but what are you supposed to do if you can do it? , just sit on it for a year because, oh shoot, we only have two weeks, we only thought about two weeks ahead of time. That doesn't mean that we just throw spaghetti against the wall and , but we can still be meticulous in how we approach it and bring it through with excellence. But doesn't mean that we don't run and gun. That's how we got to where we are. We run and gun, but when we do it, we do it right. Yep. And we execute well. But yeah, it's funny how these dates sometimes can bring urgency and that's actually a good thing. Maybe sometimes you can use that to your advantage to create urgency. It's a topic we talk a lot about here too. Even some of the stuff we need to do, we're working with vendors and I'm working with some of our team members. I'm , okay, well, tell them we need it by next week. Well, the conference isn't next week. It's , I don't care. What's our backup plan? What if something goes wrong? What if they mess up something? What if we mess up something? What if know, things happen. So I'm always in my schedule creating urgency. the t shirt vendor thinks we need the t shirts two weeks ahead of time. Actually, I think it's three weeks ahead of time. And I'm , well, what? And I still gave them plenty of time. It's not I'm being unfair. we plan this out. , they have plenty of time, but I'm not gonna tell them that they have, six weeks if Deliver them on the morning of the event. No. You have no margin for error if that happens. And supply chains and delivery systems and things are even wackier now than they have been in the past. Mean, usually what I do is , how long is it gonna take? Three weeks? Okay. So I'll back it up and I'll tell them six weeks ahead of time, but I'll tell my woman three weeks just because there's this You have a plan B. Yeah. And already , , some things changed and I was able to give them a few days because I had already booked those days. So it's , Oh yeah, sorry that we got that to you two days late. So yeah, totally just wait till this date. But we're creating a lot of fake urgency because some of the stuff we're ordering too, we're not quite sure. , Is that gonna be the quality we want? So we have a backup plan. Actually, we have a backup plan to our backup plan too, on some of the things just to make sure that we can get it delivered. Some things we've already done with established vendors, so it's easier, but some newer things, it's , well, I'm not sure what that's going to look . Mock up comp doesn't look super great. Worst case, we can use this part and we'll reengineer this other part they're doing. Just a lot of, , insane details. Right? Yeah. And then keeping them all moving at the same time. Because it's not we have one brain for each detail, right, or each small project. It's the same brains moving so many things forward at the same time. Yeah. And that's kinda the cool thing about ministry too is you get to do stuff you never would have thought you would do. Right? as a when I came from Honeywell, I never thought if I went to work for a church, and this is a true story, I would literally one day be on the phone with a sheep farmer in his field trying to figure out how to order I think I needed, , 46 raw sheep pelts, , non processed, right off the sheep. That is really unusual. I never thought I would be making that call. And the and the the rancher's , And why do you need this? What are you doing with this? It's for a project the church. We're trying to make an experience for Christmas and we want raw sheep pelts that we were gonna cut into pieces and make a kit for it. Wow. Yeah. And I actually had one while I'm talking to him and I'm cutting it up and my hands are all full of lanol. Yes, That one was all this stuff. It's , had the softest hands for a week. But who would have thought? Right? Who would have thought? And those and ideas, quality ideas can come at any time. Deadlines are good because they create that urgency, but ideas can come at any time. So we do frequently find ourselves short on timelines, and we still approach with craftsmanship. When I I was hearing you talk through that, John, I was thinking, , that's just an exemplification of the tension we have between two of our core values of craftsmanship and innovation. Innovation says, go, go, go, new, new, new. And craftsmanship says, but get it right. Yeah. And one of the projects that is probably not for RX, but, , I'm working with a, directly with a Chinese manufacturer and communication barriers and he has no idea, an understanding of what we're trying to do, but we're ordering a product through him. And so it's interesting. Just a lot of stuff that you wouldn't normally think, oh, I bet that team just develops all day. It's , yeah, that's what happens at night sometimes in the day it's . Yes, a day in the life. We could have a really interesting video podcast of tracking what it actually looks to have a day in the life around here. But that's the cool thing, think, it's for anybody, but if you put that into your work, you'll never be bored. I can't remember the last time I was bored, , or thought, what am I going to do today? It's , oh my gosh, what do I have to get done today to move all these things to the next? I was thinking about that on the way in, I'm , what it's to have a job where you're just kind of bored or I remember sometimes I'd start an internship as a college and I'd look up at the time, I'm , okay, it's 01:00. Oh man, I have four more hours till I go home. The day is just dragging. It's , I look up, it's , oh, it's 05:00 already? Oh no, I need three more hours. Now I can get started working. Every day. Yeah. Right? But we all have the ability to inject some of those extras that make the job a little more varied and interesting, but also can take maybe an end goal or a a key deliverable that's been established for us and push that into new ways and and add to that in a way that adds more value to what we're doing and is interesting and and adds a little variety. Most jobs have the capacity to have, oh, you wanna do more and you wanna add something new? Great. Yeah. Every job has that. I mean, it might be a couple that Sometimes the internship you were mentioning there may be a little less flexibility. Well, that was , , the first week, by the time I was leaving there, I mean, I was , I need more time. this is Yeah. And I think this is kind of what you bring to it. That's a good way of saying it. It definitely is. Sometimes I think people think that that should be given to you. , I need to be told that and that is never gonna happen. Someone doesn't have the time to do that. You have to create that. And it does not create overnight in a week or a month, but over time, it can almost become a bad thing because you get too much. Well, speaking of doing things in different ways and adding your own flavor to things, we've talked a lot over the years about little snippets into how our development works here and what makes it kind of unique. Our processes of how we move through projects, how they come to us. And it's it's a little bit different than what you see in most development shops, and yet it's the way that it has to work us to be relevant in the trenches, innovative, and doing what we do. So we thought it might be interesting today to share a little bit more behind the scenes about our theory of our development processes and the way that we work with our team here, just to kind of give a picture into a little more of what it really does look and function . Nick, how would you describe in a really short phrase or sentence what our development process is here? Well, if I could have a few minutes to unpack it, I'll start with, we're kind of calling it JIT, just in time development. And that'll make a little more sense if we kind of unpack the story. Definitely. So when we talk to new or potential developers, they're often confused about how our environment works. And they can't quite relate because our environment is quite a bit different. It's really nothing they've experienced or read about. There's not a lot of things I've found that match the way we operate. So the common types that most people are familiar with are, and I can't unpack all these in a short amount of time, so don't try to get your scrum certification from what I'm about to say here with this over generalized abbreviation. Traditional, that's typically called waterfall, has sequential phases, each one is so many weeks long and gathering requirements, design implementation, which would be the coding verification, and then maintenance on that feature. We do all that in days or a day in some cases. The pipeline is so tight and we move so fast, it passes what the other common type is agile. And there's so many definitions of what agile means, and there even an agile manifesto that tries to capture the items of agile. And without going through all those details, because I'm sure you don't really care too much, most of the definitions agree on these three things. Iterative development, which we definitely do, rapid delivery, which we definitely do, and high productivity. And we definitely do that too. So the problem is agile also has a bunch of other things that we don't do. We don't agree on, we don't work together daily throughout the project. We will often have each person who's a specialist in that role do what they do best. So a ministry analyst or somebody working with another church might gather a requirement. We don't know anything about it yet. So they're kind of talking through that. It's not even in our world yet. At some point it comes over to the technical architect for Spark, which is John. John gets to look at it and decide how it's gonna be done if we're gonna do it. And I say John, but he likes to incorporate other people on that team. Sure, and that's kind of product owner. Right. Yep. Technical architects. Yeah, that's really the other term, the product owner. And we've been calling it product owner team because he might have me on it one time, he might have Daniel or someone else. , it really just depends. John likes to bounce things off of other people. That's probably the most collaborative part of the whole process, I would say. Once it gets done with that, which again is sometimes days. Sometimes even hours. I mean, there's times that we've get the requirements, turn it back over, it's ready for development the next day. Yeah, yeah. So in those hours, we usually get a mock up and a description of how it's going to work. And then it comes over to the developer team. And so I'm going to pause at this point and say, this is the hardest part of managing the developer team is we don't know what's coming when. So we call it just in time because that's what happens. it comes, we got to deliver it right away. And we've tried to find some analogies manufacturing. You don't know who's going to order what, but if you're a jet manufacturing shop, you produce it when it's ordered. Also the pit crew analogy, except imagine visualizing this, the pit crew is a single pit crew for a set of race cars, you don't just have one race car, it's a set of race cars and they're all in different races on different tracks going at different speeds. And these race cars come in, you gotta find the right tools, know the procedure for dealing with that car and then get it back on the track. And you might be in charge of a wheel and another person might be in charge of a different part of that, and you're executing at the same time in getting that thing on the track. That's an interesting analogy. And then there's the special forces analogies, Navy SEALs or Delta Force, where kind of a specialized team of developers that know how to do certain things. And so that specialist may be involved if the project involves that one thing that they know how to do. But for those, it's similar in that you go through a basic training, then you join your team, but on your team, you're kind of learning advanced techniques and procedures and how things operate, the operations, but on mission day, which is when your project comes in, you're it, you have to execute your role. There's not collaboration, really not much, if any, at that point. Just in a special forces operation, each member of the team is relying on the other person to do their job correctly without somebody to handhold them or catch their mistakes. That will not function here on Rock core team. So it's a hard role, it's a tough role, and it requires the best of the best to be successful on Rock. Is that unfair? I don't know. I think God deserves that. God's kingdom deserves that kind of team that we can operate in that manner. Yeah, I think it's good that people can't see into the kitchen. I mean, I probably wouldn't eat at most restaurants I eat at if I could see back there, but it is different. I think if you look, especially at what comes out around conference time or with these major releases, it's just new feature after new feature after new feature. And then if you consider how small that team is behind it- It's incredible. That's where it is. Proof is in the pudding of does it work or not? Is it a good system or not? Well, everybody can have an opinion, but judge it by its fruit. That's what we're called, Bible recommends that judge all things by its fruit and the fruit is coming out with abundance and we give God the glory for that. If you look at all those things that we do and all the money and all of the resources that went into making it, it's a miracle, so give God the glory for But I think we've also stumbled on and he's probably given us this vision of how it can work. And there's always this tension of , okay, well now we can slow down. And it's , And you can't, because if you look at what's coming through, the mission of that, the impact it's gonna have is too valuable to rest on your laurels or to say, okay, well, that might've taken us eight hours in the past, so it's okay to take thirty two, which is, I mean, the development environment I came from at Honeywell, I mean, might've taken three weeks. And Steve Jobs was very good at this. he would create that reality distortion that says, you're saying three months, you got three weeks, or sometimes he'd say three days. And you can take that to extreme and hurt. So we try not to do that. We try to be on the Our analogy is go into the locker room at the end of every day with grass stains and mud on your jersey and leave, don't work a lot of extra hours, but when you leave, just be , that was a good day. And if you do that every day A lot gets done. It's very efficient. And if God's pouring his favor on it too, you're gonna be surprised at what happens every year. Yeah. Without God's favor, without him having put the skills and talents into the team members, this wouldn't be happening. He assembled this team essentially. we're just identifying when they come our way, yeah, he's the right person for the team or she. And I think even the strategy, what you're calling JIT, it wasn't we sat in a room and said, what the brilliant thing to do is? It's just how it brought, God brought the projects in a certain way. In a sense, it just kind of happened. But it is funny when we were in the interview process and they're , Do you use agile? And it's , Yeah, it's Agile plus plus or They call it super Agile. Yeah. And the two week sprint just doesn't work. The needs are too important. Because you might think, Well, they're features, so your features don't come out all that often, but we're reacting to lots of different things. Sometimes those features need to get in there because the next release is in a week or two, or gonna go to alpha. So while the release process might seem not that stressful behind the scenes, trying to meet the needs of all this. And sometimes there's a church newsprint that's on pre Alpha, they can, And anybody can grab our pre alpha, that's out there for everybody, but I don't recommend it. Unless you want to just test, thank you. Yeah. I'm so happy NewSpring does it. That's a gift to the community. Yes, is. Truly is a gift to the community that they do that. But we are trying to meet some of those deadlines too. So if I had to describe the maybe biggest misconception of somebody who's asking about how we work, is, I think it's that they think we're a big collaborative team all working on this one two week sprint, which is John just said, we don't have a two week sprint. And for the most part, each developer's working on their feature, and each developer's working on a different project, and they're all interleaved different, they're all in different phases. Mhmm. And when they're past, , for those projects, , cross, then there's communication. Right? But it's not they're pair programming on something or it's almost too maybe the analogy could be , it's a spy network in the CIA. You don't have all your spies collaborating when they're all across the world working on different things. What's the value of because we did try that once. We did do the standups and it was just kind of weird because everybody's talking about stuff that's not germane to the next person. Plus, with the environment we have, it's not everybody starts work at the same exact moment. So we were finding that, okay, it's in the middle of the morning and we're stopping because the last person to come in just got here, so we had to wait for that. Yeah. But we're a lot of other people are in the middle of their highest productivity moments. , they're fully engaged. And then, , that person who comes in last is obviously the the last to leave. So And in terms of efficiency, the developers don't need to know about every single feature. They really don't. And it's inefficient to stop and explain everything to them. It's sort of the soldiers want to come up into the general's offices and understand, hey, what's gonna be, what are we doing here? And then what other operations are going on? You don't need to know that. And it's, again, it's a tougher environment. You have to kind of self sacrifice and realize that you're a specialist. You're going to get that feature done and you're going to move on to the next. And I think it's rewarding to be in that mode of cranking out feature after feature, but you don't always understand the whole battle strategy. Even myself, when I'm in the director role, I don't know what John knows. He knows more things. I only know I've got to execute what he's expecting me to execute, and I also know there's something more coming. I just always expect there's some other additional thing. Yeah, and just to clarify, I mean, someone does have a question- more For sure. They never get shot down for Yeah. Asking it, but usually it's they understand this is the battle I'm fighting right now. And and, , tons of questions there. They're raising tons of questions about their battle, which are good. Yes. Actually enjoy that. Sometimes they're catching, did you consider this piece? And it's , please keep doing that. Please keep Mike on our team is so good at that. He gets, and he's one of the most experienced too, obviously on our team. So you would think he wouldn't have a lot of questions, but he's backstopping us and saying, Hey, did you consider this? Hey, I know you're naming it this, but have you considered that? And I love that. , it really helps us, , improve and make sure that the excellence is always there. And if there's a question about someone else's battle that might be germane to theirs, I mean, it. And even if it's not germane, they just wanna know, that's great too. But some of the features that are coming up, outside of 14, there's thoughts of where we're going with this and they're pretty well conceived, but they're not full. So I don't really sometimes to share something if I'm not even certain. And those ideas are being cross pollinated by all the conversations I have. the personalization features is not something that I just went into a room and sat down and said, is the way it should work. I have a one idea, and then I'm working with someone in the community and they're saying, Hey, I need something this. I'm , Oh, that's really, that kind of ties into what I was thinking about the other day and makes it better and different. And then someone else comes and adds it. I mean, I think the personalization features even 14 is a collaboration of probably about 14 organizations in the community. And to think that one person could take credit for that, I mean, at that point, only God gets the credit for that. Because sometimes the timing is so perfect that you're , okay, coincidence. These things are all lining up in such a weird and unique way that there's no way. And I think as much as our development is legit, so is the product. There's a whole thing in the industry now called product ownership. And there's probably a degree in it now. It's weird. How do you chart and manage a product? But we have a JIT on that too. It's just in time what people are asking for, what the world's needing, what technology is coming in, what God's putting in people's hearts. And that's quite unique. But I mean, we saw that play out in the urgency of COVID and we've seen it in many other illustrations as well. The reason Rock has remained so relative and innovative is because of that. Yeah. And we tell our team that, hey, we have a hard job to do. So and we want to become we we have organizations that we strive to be that are very well known. And we admit, we're not even close to these, but the church deserves these. And so we're going to reach high to become these for the church. And so therefore not everybody in the marketplace can do that. They're not called to it or they don't have the gifts. And that's okay. That's not a value judgment. But if you go back to Apple in the early days, not everybody could work there. Not everybody could be in the garage phase of Apple. If the average engineer was in that garage and that's all they had, they wouldn't be Apple and they wouldn't exist anymore. So that's okay. We need to be in the top 10% striving for that. And it's important to live in that tension. We're not here to try and resolve the tension and go, okay, well, now that's good enough, because that's complacency. So we have to recognize the tension of wanting to be where we're not yet, because it's important to be there. Keep that as the vision, acknowledge where we are and push into that tension on a daily basis. Yeah. I mean, because we're under serving the church. Even our team is under serving what the church's needs are. Unfortunately, we're probably doing it better than anybody else out there in our circle, right? Of what we're called to do church management and digital management, but that's not actually a good thing. I was talking on the call just yesterday and they're talking about the topic of the call was kind of about the state of the industry, the church management industry. And I didn't say a lot of things I was thinking, but I was , the industry is , there's nothing happening here. it's just micro improvements of product. I would say we're different. we're making huge strides on our capabilities, but it just feels a dead industry and it's so much needed. And I even say internally, it could be nice to have some better competition because I feel sometimes people come to us and say, Hey, our church can't run without Rock. And we want you to know that. And when they say that, it's really meant as , they're trying to give us a gift. They're trying to hey, you guys are doing such a good job. Literally, our church could not run without Rock. And on the inside, it's , -oh, don't mess it Don't fail. And that's not what they're trying to impart, but that's what we feel. And it would be nice to know that there are more things out there, but I just see continual micro improvements of current features. There's no reimagining. And we got some pretty heavy reimagining of some features coming up and that's stressful. And I don't think that's good for the church. And honestly, most of the features that are being pushed that are more creative are all around giving. And that's good. We should do that. Not a bad thing, but if that's the only place that's getting it, and then you seeing the mergers and acquisitions that are happening all around the giving platform, it's kind of scary that giving is important, of course, but that's where the money is too. And that's where you have to be a little bit careful. you make sure that all your hearts are in the right place. And that's why I love the fact that from the very beginning, are open, we want lots of options, and we don't want a piece of that action. Yeah. Right? Because not that everybody's tainted by it, but it's easy to get tainted by that. And I the fact that we've never wanted to touch that tithe piece. We wanna be open and support it and know that all of our churches need that and want the best tools around it. And we can do that, but we don't need to necessarily touch the part that if you're not careful can taint. Yes. But it's a weird industry. I think there's a lot of opportunity, but the barrier to entry is so high. I was talking to someone else who was thinking, well, maybe we should write a church management system. , oh, you have no idea. And I wasn't trying to discourage them from the ideas. I was trying to tell them, you don't understand how much, even just to write a check-in system, how hard that is. And we've done it twice. And I thought the second time was gonna be a lot easier than it turned out to be. And so if I was fooled by it, having done it once, I do think if someone were to analyze this industry, they would probably say it's being underserved. Yeah. There are always systems that will spring up and do, for example, check-in their way. , this is how check-in's going to work. Right. It will never But when there a new check-in system that was brought into the market? I can't think of one recently. There's some good, I mean, there's other options that do it, but I haven't seen a new one in a while. Yeah, I haven't seen any either. I just think the mindset of Rock in our philosophy is open and extensible and adaptable. I've not seen another platform that is as open. Maybe ministry platform has some flexibility And integrations, yeah. And kind of modify. But I think it, and this is a changing topic from the issue, but I think the problem is open is not a good model. it's not a good business model. No. Right. No, it's hard. Yes. Oh my gosh, is it Closed is a much better business model. If you're looking to maximize and monetize, closed is better, easy. Being open is really hard. But again, I think that's what God had laid the foundation to say, Okay, well, we're going to do some protections here. And who are we protecting ourselves from? Us. Future self is the biggest person you need to worry about, is what I kind of felt in the beginning, God was saying. The competition leave that to me. I'm worried about you guys in the future. And so being open source, again, switches at the side so the church has the power. If we're not doing a good job, the church has an open license to go take it and do it elsewhere. Our job is to make sure that we're doing a good enough job with that. That seems ridiculous. Being a nonprofit was another protection. So unlike many others in our space, we can't cash out. There's no benefit personally to cash out. It's not ours. There's no ownership of that. And that's great. If we were to cash out, technically we could, but that money would all have to be donated to another charity. It cannot come home with any of us, which is great because the church is the one who donated that money. It wasn't ours. And I just love the levels of protections that are built into what we do, that on the hard days or the hard weeks, who knows what future John, Emily, Nick, whatever, anybody at Spark would want to do or think to do, but it's comforting to know those aren't even on the table. Right, it takes the emotional responses out of it and says, Hey, this is important. This is the reason that we exist and we're going to protect it no matter what. Yeah, the extreme LGB, if you're an alcoholic, don't have alcohol in your house. Right. those things have been taken out of our house. They're not options. Right. Right. So it's nice not to be tempted by them. Because sometimes you hear about a couple of deals that maybe have happened in the last couple of years, you're , Oh gosh, Rock's more valuable than that. But they're not even in the house to be tempted by. If I had to summarize all of this, I would just call it, it's a calling. If you're a developer and you're feeling called, then that's how you'll probably be successful. If you're not called, it's probably not gonna be successful. I feel that applies to the entire project. We were all called to start this and you just said it open. That was the thing. I'm , why isn't the church building an open system for the church? Yeah, And it's highly rewarding because what you do gets used in incredible ways. , I'm always telling the team, Hey, you just did this prayer request thing. Just think of the millions of prayer requests that are gonna be funneling through this thing. It's gonna increase the amount of prayer. Yes. And prayer changes things. The course of history, the course of even a daily life can change because of that. And you have a huge piece of that. And it's the great untapped potential in the church. I'm still sure of that, that we just don't do enough of it. And we need to innovate more around that too, how to make it easier and more accessible in every single hour. Yeah, if only technology would stop and let us catch up, but. Well, thanks for sharing a little bit about that. I think the insights, the details, the formation of it, it is obviously what we need to do to best serve churches where we are. And it is different, and it isn't easy. But, , the the paved streets of gold are for heaven. Here, we work out our calling day to day, and we overcome challenges. And we're happy to do that because that is why we're placed where we are at the time that we're placed. So we it's been our pleasure to share some of this with you and give you a little bit more insight into how we work here and why. Now right before we wrap up, I do wanna make some reminders, because everyone's calling is unique. We have also created some training programs that can help you get to that next level of where you are to do what you need to do in your space as well. So we do wanna mention there are a few, masterclass spots left open before the conference, so that's coming right up. There is still time to register for Rx. If you haven't registered for that, this is your once a year opportunity to really find out what the community's doing in this space and it that engagement, the connections, the learnings, those are things you can't just pick up by not being there. You really have to be there in person to get that, and it's very beneficial all year. So make sure make that a priority if you haven't yet signed up. And then additionally, we have the sequel for Rock and the Rock 100 series classes coming up if those are next on your list, and that will be, during the month of October. So check out what's available. Make sure that you prioritize getting the training that you need, for where you are so how to do what it is you're called to do. Thank you so much for joining us today for this conversation. We look forward to connecting with you next time, and don't forget to subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. 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.