Podcast Episode 135: Podcast Episode 109: Special Edition with Jonathan Anderson

Description

Join us for a conversation with a familiar face - Jonathan Anderson at The Ark Church - as he shares about his approach to learning and growth which has powered his path in the Rock community.

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 to this special edition of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and a very special guest with us here today who happens to be in town in Phoenix for a Rock master class going on right now. Welcome Jonathan Anderson, the self styled IT guy from the Arc Church. Yes. Good to be here. Thanks for joining us. We really appreciate the time that you've given us today. And it looks you're holding up after a full day of masterclass training so far. I sure am. It's a lot of knowledge to take in, but, Michael does a great job at it. And we're in for day one. We know glazed over looks possible until after at least day three. Oh, yeah. I won't get glazed over. I'm gonna try not to get glazed over. I bet you won't. So Jonathan, tell us where, if your voice is sounding familiar to someone who's listening, where might they have run into you in the Rock community? Mostly rocket chat. I hang out there quite a bit whenever it's possible and I'm not dealing with other issues. Stay pretty active in there. Maybe have seen recipes or just things that. It'll be community mostly. Definitely. You seem to be someone who's quick to jump in and help out if the answer. And to do a lot of collaboration there too, which I think is Yeah, really figuring things out. People come up with problems and I'll think about it and I'll be , oh, well, if we do it this and I don't helping with it. You learn stuff at the same time. Definitely. I think you kind of learn more when you're helping people sometimes. Oh, you definitely learn more, , because you're going about something in a way that you probably wouldn't have or wouldn't have thought about. So whenever you're coming about it from somebody else's point of view, it always opens your eyes up a little bit. Stretches your brain a little bit. It sure does. And so let's see, we've seen you contributing in issues and doing beta testing. I know that the team really appreciates everything you do on that front. We couldn't have enough beta testers and really value the ones that, faithfully do that. So thanks for all your help with that. No. You're welcome. Glad to do it. Good. Well, let's see. How long has the ARC been on Rock? So we implemented Rock in February of twenty eighteen, and, it's just been growing since then. Know, it's, coming from another church management system that really didn't allow you to do a lot of things other than only what they allowed you to do is taking some getting used to for our staff. Of course, whenever we came on it was , no, things have to be done this because that's the way that it was always done. And it's not the case. And so there's been a lot of work. I think probably a lot of churches go through that having to rethink how things are done and even going back and redoing things that you had done whenever you first came on. And then now you're two, three years in and you're , oh wow, I should have done this. It'll be better. So growing pains. Sometimes all that freedom is scary. It's almost you come out of prison and you don't even know what to do anymore. you're so rigid into doing it. Then all the options just start to seem overwhelming sometimes. Yeah. And sometimes you don't know which way you should even try to tackle a situation because you're , well I could do this, well I could do this, well I could do this. And so you just gotta kind of draw out and talk through with someone. I love getting people to talk through things with me. It's , if we do this, , what happens if we do this? What are the caveats? What are the pros and cons? , what makes it easy? So, that's great that you're planning ahead and kind of wargaming each of those options. Yeah, I really think you have to because I mean, while in ministry, a lot of times it's, we care about what's going on now with people in people's lives, we also have to think about what's going to happen later in the future. And so, , we're always trying to think farther out. Okay, well, do we want to be further down the road and try to look at that. Yeah, that's what Wayne Gretzky used to say, don't skate towards where the puck is, skate where the puck is Puck is going to be. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's important too when you look at new features that you give yourself the permission to just try something knowing that you can just destroy it, delete it and try again. So you learn a lot through that process, I feel everybody wants to get it right the first time and get everything just right. Just get in there, just play with some group structures, knowing that you have permission given to yourself to delete it and start over. Waste hours at night because you're single. Or waste a few hours to save yourself hundreds of hours by doing it wrong, you Exactly. And it's just that's the way you'll learn. Just don't be afraid to get in there and play with Yeah. So Jonathan, some people might say, , they see you actively answering questions in Rocket Chat. Why would you need to come to Masterclass? You're always going to hear something in a different way that sheds a new light. Today, I learned some new things. Rock is so big and massive in the things that it can do. It has so many features. And for one person to under, one person is not going to understand all the features. Don't even think John or Nick would know everything that's in there. There's just too much. So you can come even if you've been in it for a while and learn new things. But for me, I think it was more about networking and community. I've never been here before. I've never met y'all in person. That was one of the things that was , hey, I wanna go. I wanna meet Nate. I wanna meet John. I wanna meet Emily. I've seen y'all so many times, talked with you over the phone, over video conferencing. And while that's great, it's just something completely different whenever you're in person. Definitely. That's true. We love connecting in person. We wish we could do that with everyone all the but it's pretty cool to have such a far flung network inside the community and then have some opportunities to get together again. So, well, we appreciate you traveling out too. That's been great. Now let's see, if you started out doing IT things, but not Rock things, how did you move from outside Rock to inside Rock? So being a medium sized church with only two IT people and me just having the knack for tinkering with stuff, I've done my home automation myself for years and I've always just played with code. I've written a few programs before, I'm not a programmer but if if I want to get something done nothing's going to stop me. And so being from a smaller IT department, it was kind of , hey, if you can help, go for it and help. And I was just given the freedom to play with it. And of course that leads to building things and then people liking those things and then them asking for more things and the list of work just gets longer. That's true. It sounds you have a lot of curiosity. I do. Yes, I do. I always love playing with new stuff, sometimes to my detriment. Never know what you don't know until you try. Exactly. Definitely. Good. Well, what are some things that you might attribute some of that, the growth that you've been having? how would you share with someone, let's say they're intimidated. They pop into Rocket Chat for the first time. They're , oh, there's Jonathan answering all these questions. Don't know. He'll probably come answer this one too. I don't know what to say. , what would you tell them? How do you get started on that? Closed mouths don't get fed comes to mind. I mean, you want to know something, ask. Or if something, say something. I what John said one time about taking in and getting a bunch of knowledge and now you've kind of learned things, but whenever you start divulging that information to other people, you even learn more about it just because you've read something now go ahead and share it because the more the more that you share, the more that you'll know. And I think it was probably a year ago, a little longer on the podcast than I reset that and it just kind of stuck with me. It rang so true. And anybody can do it, . Right. I mean, even people me or maybe a lot of tech people that are kind of more introverts, of course it's on a, not slack now, it's all rocket chat, but it's a little different and so it takes, even then it takes some getting used to, but just, , believe in yourself, have confidence and, stick around on the chat, ask questions. And then as you learn and you see somebody ask a question, answer the question because you already know it. And the more you do that, the more that you'll learn. So in your Rock experience, what percent of your enjoyment of Rock is based on the extensibility of the platform and what percent of it is based on the community networking? Just to drop that one out of the air. It's really both. That's hard to choose. I know I threw that at you. Not nice. Oh, that's really hard to choose. So the extensibility is what gets me there but then the community is what pushes me over. Oh, that's a good way to say it. So the extensibility because I can play with something but then whenever it's , well I can't figure it out and I go to the community and then they help me figure it out and maybe even make a suggestion that says, hey, why don't you do it this? And so it's a combination of both and I don't think it can be one or the other. It is a combination of both. I think it was probably a trick question. I think it was. Not very nice at all. What kind of things do you to do in your free time besides Rock? Am I gonna get in trouble saying buy Bitcoin? No. So I play guitar. I volunteer at the church some. I'm really into crypto and just learning things in general, home automation. So I'm on my computer a lot. What are some examples of the home automation projects that you've done? So there's a specific platform called Home Assistant. It's an open source. You can run it on a Raspberry Pi. I'm also kind of a Raspberry Pi guy. I have all of our checking systems at the church ran off of Raspberry Pi. Nice. And so for home automation, I really Home Assistant. If you're a Python coder, you can code Python and you can write modules for it. It uses Jinja, which is Python's version of liquid or lava, It also uses YAML on the back end. It's really extensible. There's a plugin for everything and home automation has really started pulling me more and more into tech. There's just really cool stuff that you can do. Definitely. So don't mess with your house. It probably fights back, right? It'll have a picture of you. So, you I mean, you mess with it if you want to, but it's on video. You'll know we were there. Yes. We'll know you're there. Exactly. Well, what do you think of Phoenix? Have you been here before? I have never been here. I've never really traveled outside of Texas much. This was my first airplane ride in over twenty years. So are honored. It's nice. I prefer green over brown but I haven't explored much yet, but I do plan on in the evenings going out and exploring some things. My coworker was telling me, hey, go to the Grand Canyon and take some pictures, and I'm , well when am I gonna have time to drive seven hours? He was , you leave right after the class, you'll make it back at a decent hour and I'm , know, yeah, you're probably right, know, so. It is a long drive. It is a very long drive. Yeah, think you said it was I haven't looked at it yet so that was just He texted me in master class, I wasn't paying attention, I'm sorry. It's best not to view in the dark too. you wanna be there. Yeah, yes, you definitely would be there whenever it's light. Yeah. It seems I've met numerous people so far and of course it's been here hotel, know, eat out eating and I've just had people say, hey. Oh, hey. How you doing? And I don't know. Maybe I look I'm from out of town. I'm not sure. ? So people seem nice. I feel people are friendly here. A lot of people, if you ask them where they're from here in Phoenix, will tell you somewhere else. Where in some cities, if you ask them where they're from, they tell you what part of town they're from. So we have a pretty big transplant So I've found them to be pretty accepting and fun to interact with here. It's not, well, it's not hot now. I know y'all to say it's hot. It's not hot now. Today was nice weather. It's not too bad. And this is our green season by the way. This is the green season? Wow. So it gets really brown. Light brown to dark. Yeah, a little light yellow if it's highly flammable. this, whenever I came into the airport, you could just see the skyline where it was, I'm gonna say mountains. Maybe they weren't, maybe they were, I think they were, I don't know if they're tall enough for that. They're mountains to us. They're the exact Okay. There we go. So we're in the same boat. That was that was very different. It was neat. And I was just , oh, I wanna go see that. I wanna go up close. I don't know where they are yet. Yeah. There's some great hiking even in middle city. You can hike up Squaw Peak or I guess Paestua Peak now. Yep. Renamed it Camelback Mountain. Mhmm. Right in the middle of of the city. It's pretty cool. It is closer than the Grand Canyon, but warmer. Yes. I will have to go. I will have to go. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your insights. We're happy to share time with you this week and I know the community has enjoyed hearing from you too. Yep. Thank you for having me and it's always a pleasure. 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 amazing 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. 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