Podcast Episode 112: Episode 85: Architecture Series

Description

Join Jon, Emily and Nick for this latest episode of Rock Cast where they discuss everything from best practices and tools for your Church during the Coronavirus to the architecture series and new Rock updates

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 Rockcast, the podcast with Spark Development Network, where we talk to you a little bit about what we're up to and what Rock is up to. So we always have some fun, exciting updates, and we the opportunity to help help take you behind the scenes so you can, just feel you're a little bit closer to what's going on and, be in the know. So today, we have a great lineup of topics. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Erdow here, and we are going to tell you what's up with Rock. Nick, why don't you kick us off? Sure thing. Well, I can say that we are either just ending 10 dot two beta or it's still in beta, and maybe we're still doing some testing. But all all is going well so far, and ten two will be coming out of beta should be by the time you hear this, which also means anyone who's been waiting for version 10 because that's been in early access can now realize or get excited because now that comes into general access, so general release for 10. We definitely recommend you not sit at version ten, ten point zero, go right through to 10.2. There's bug fixes, tons of features that were added into 10.2, so definitely check the release notes. There's Rock You videos. Documentation has been updated. And anything I missed, John? I don't think so. I mean, that's actually a big deal for us to have the RockU videos ready at this point. I mean, they've been ready for a while, for 10. It just shows that we have our documentation team firing all cylinders and and doing well. And I know we've said it before in other areas, but 10 to really I mean, it could be called 11. It has so many new and exciting features. Some point, I hope that we can get our versioning refined to have more smaller releases. I've never heard that before. I know. We keep saying it, but it's just there's so many things so many strings at play that pull us different ways that make that so hard. It sounds it should be so easy, but it's not. But you could almost call 10 to 11 if you if you looked at what's new in it. Absolutely. That's very true. So that's a good reason. If you're ready for ten, keep on trucking. You wanna get all the way up to current. Yeah. Lots of good bug fixes, as Nick mentioned. Great. Well, the subject at the top of everyone's mind and news feed right now is the coronavirus. And, we have been hearing from churches that have had to suspend their weekend services or are trying to anticipate what that might look if they had to, temporarily stop holding services together in one location. Now the good news is we're at the age and stage of world history where a lot of people do things remotely, but churches haven't always been set up for that as a main way of reaching people. There are a few churches that do that as their main outreach, but most typically have a congregation that meets together at least every weekend. So thinking through that, as we've been working with a few churches on that topic and helped one out incidentally recently, we said, well, wouldn't it be great if we could pull some best practices and guidelines together for those churches that run on Rock to help them consider what they might need to do as first steps, and kind of an overarching strategy. So if they're in the position where they have to suspend services and they pull together their service programming team, their communications team, and their leadership, what are the first most important things that they can present as an agenda of to do items? So we've recently put a little time into aggregating that content, put a guide together to help churches consider what they should consider relates to communications, relates to and that includes email, your social media, what are your strategies, what type of content do you put where, what do you do with your website? And for those churches that currently have services that they broadcast online, great. How what's your strategy and plan there? Do you have to do something that is live streaming? Can it be on demand? If you aren't doing that yet, what's a quick and easy way to just start getting your messages out there? We we really believe that authenticity and timeliness is more important than polish in responding to the public and to your congregation at this time and in these circumstances. So we've put some of those things together in our guide and also created a Rock chat channel for the Rock community to share tips and tricks. Yeah. I mean, and you said, it's not meant to create a best in class live streaming experience. It's meant to, hey. You don't have anything. You need something fast. How do you get there? So many churches who already have something, great, but there's a lot of churches who don't, and we're just trying to help service them. And I feel this is a really good chance too for the community to come together to really help each other. Mean, this is exactly what our community is about, is helping each other, and different areas of the country are being hit in different ways. And so just because maybe your area is, , business as usual, , maybe you jump in that channel and just see how you could help or answer questions for those who are in a different situation, that are being required to not have services on on weekends. Mhmm. That's a great point. And we've worked with a couple churches that are that have a web page up for, their coronavirus updates and are working through that. And there's some really great ideas that they're having out there. So I think that sharing will help everybody take everything to the next level. Now if you have a Rock website and you're looking for help on what should I do, how can I get that up fast, my team's already fully committed to the initiatives they're working on, I need help to stand up a page for this, you can reach out to us? We'll we will be able to to have that conversation with you and and may be able to help you put that website together. Yeah. And and there's some, , interesting small details that people were putting in that we put into the guide that sometimes you take for granted is, make sure there's a date of last update that's very pronounced on that page that so it's easy to know, okay, have I seen all this? Little tips that we've kind of aggregated into that guide and we'll try to keep it up to date with other tips as they come It's obvious when you see it, but it's not obvious when you're thinking through from scratch. And that's what we're trying to do, gather those. Right. Those best tips for people. Especially if you find yourself in a short time frame under pressure, you don't wanna have to think through all of those things. So we do have a place on the on our website, which is rockrms.com/coronavirus, where you can download that guide, and you can add your tips and the things that have been working for your organization as well. Alright. So if we can help you out with that, we would love to help you. Hopefully, everybody can work together. We actually heard from one of our remote staff who works in Tennessee that her local church was considering if they went into shutdown, how they could reach out to the pastors of smaller churches in their area and offer them studio time to produce messages. So when you're talking about pulling churches together and people working together, that's exactly the kind of thing that the church is uniquely poised to help the community and to help those who might I mean, maybe this is an opportunity to reach people who wouldn't set foot inside church doors. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about that just last night. Mean, , how can God work through that? How is he gonna work through this? It might be a bad situation in terms of health, economy, politics, whatever, but it's an opportunity that we get to maybe shine a little bit brighter. Right. Jesus shows up a little brighter when the status quo is interrupted. Mhmm. Definitely. Alright. We have been working on a really exciting new series of documentation that we've kind of teased a little bit on some previous podcasts and talked about a little bit. But, John, you've been putting a substantial amount of work into, crafting some additional best practices and documentation tips regarding how to use Rock well in our new architecture series. Yeah. And actually, it goes back all the way to the conference to some extent when we were talking about it there. I think what we kind of see as the more we work with churches using Rock, the more we learn about how they're using it. In some ways, they're using it in great ways, but there are some ways that are somewhat challenging in that there's some best practices perhaps not being done simply because they don't know and it hasn't been articulated. And I really feel to get the best out of Rock, it's a partnership. We need to do our best as a core team of community developers to make sure it's efficient and that it scales well. But at the same time, those who are running it also need to partner and make sure that they implement it in the right way through configuration. You can have invalid configuration, can make the system not perform, or they could write extensions, either simple lava can have a terrible impact on performance if not done right, or all the way down to C. And so we're trying to take these lessons learned that we're gathering and put them together, aggregate them together into a Rock U offshoot called the architecture series. And we're gonna talk about performance, we're gonna talk about mindset, how do address this the right way, we're gonna talk about some tools you can use to do benchmarking. Oftentimes, again, I see this happen a lot. Someone will write something and it'll work great, and they'll be running on their local thing on Monday afternoon, then they're shocked that it doesn't scale to work on Sunday morning. And that's because there's a big difference. Right? One person pushing the button is very different than hundreds or thousands of people pushing the button at the same time. So how where are some tools that we can use just to kind of predict if this is gonna scale? , I can't guarantee it, but we learned some stuff even at the conference with the mobile app where if we hadn't done that level of benchmarking, the app would have totally just crashed. But because we proactively, a couple months ahead of time, had done some initial load testing, we found that, oh yeah, we have a problem here, and we found ways to make that more efficient. But if we had done the normal path, it would have failed, and that would have been very embarrassing. Also, the series, we're going talk about project management, how to talk to your clients and get the best requirements out of them, Just lots of different topics to to really, give you and share with you the lessons that we're learning. That's great. That is something that we're realizing that everyone working with Rock needs. We're building that up in our staff, we're building that up in the churches that we work with through professional services, but we don't want to stop there. We want everyone to have, access to be able to to understand better what is going on Yeah. With their Rock system when they're confused about maybe some performance issues that could have been prevented. Right. Now the challenge on this is the time to make it. Right. It takes a ton of time to make this content. So, we know we're pushing through on that. But there's been some internal conversations about , well, how do we make sure that we can keep doing this? And how do we how do we, fund this this work? Because it is a lot of work. It is. So, , what we came up with is it's too important to make someone necessarily pay for it as an extra thing. , that would be, I think, what most people would do in our situation. It's , okay, well, the architecture series is subscription to it, and you can get per person this much money. I mean, makes sense, but we really feel it's important enough that we want to get it out there. We don't want to be the average place that just makes you pay for everything. So what we kind of landed on is a balancing point, is it's free for organizations who are part of the early access program. But if you're not part of the early access program, then it's just not available. And we feel that's a good trade off because we want to help those who helping the community. And honestly, if you're a smaller church and can't afford to donate to Rock, we get that. That's why we did this model. But also probably you don't need the scaling features or understanding education as much. Right. So we feel it's a good balance. Who honestly can't afford to donate, this is probably not the content that they are needing most. And, but those who do need it should be donating. So it's not going to impact anybody. Right. It seems to respect the model that we've created as far as the funding goes. And we do want to encourage that engaged behavior. I believe that if if you're wondering about early access level donation and you're considering it, talk to the churches that are funding at that level. And I think that you'll find that their Rock experience is very positive, that they really are receiving as much as they're giving. It's just one of those really unique aspects of giving cultures and giving models. It also the book that we have modeled a lot of this off of or that resonates with our model is give and take. Mhmm. And that explains a lot about how the the giving economy works. So this this falls right in line with the standards and the model that we've already established. But if you were wondering who you might speak with, it's in that, early access program right now. We do have on our website, rockrms.com/organizations, and you'll be able to see badges of those who are donating and donating at early access levels. So if you'd to engage in a conversation with one of them, we would definitely encourage you to reach out and do that. So I think moving on to other things that we're working on, we've talked a lot about the conference mobile and that continues to get a lot of effort and drive. We have a lot of new things there. We have a lot of new blocks that we're working on. One of our first apps is about ready to go out. It's a little bit different than a normal church app. It's not meant for all members and attendees. It's meant as a group leader toolbox, which is kind of cool. I think at the stage we're at now is , there's a lot of blocks done, a lot of development done, but what's missing is a style guide that consistently and coherently brings together the look of all these, widgets that we have. And so we're working on that right now to make sure that everything lines up right and looks cohesive. That's so much harder, especially even on mobile. I mean, just yesterday, just trying to get the typography locked in, it's really hard. You have considerations between iOS and Android doing different things. The the framework we're using, Xamarin, tries to, , boil that down and make it consistent. And it it does a decent job, but it's not super consistent. And then you have things with fonts even with accessibility to make sure that if a if a individual increases their size, that it gets that that request to increase the font size gets respected by your app. If you're not careful, it doesn't. , it's actually kind of hard to get it to to be that way. So trying to balance all of these little things, it sounds , oh, just pick four sizes and you'll be done. Nope. It's taken close to ten hours to to be able to get everything just right. And that's just the typography. I mean, it goes so much bigger than that. Right. Under every corner, around every corner, you run into something related to that and it's all very deep and But I think doing it now, you have to do it now. And a lot of the reading that we've been doing in terms of consistent spacing and stuff that is, we're really putting that to bear in a highly detailed way. Right. Well, that's a really interesting and great update on mobile. all the projects we work on here, it's harder than it might appear, but very important and exciting to continue moving that forward. Right. We definitely have a lot of initiatives we have to move forward at any one given time. And on that topic of another initiative, we heard from a few churches in the community, several actually, that they were interested in knowing about additional features that they might be able to help contribute toward or fund. And these are churches that are already donating, that are engaged in the community, and we've heard several of them say, give us some other, features that are being kind of held back by funding that you would be able to pop to the front that we we could help contribute toward. So we spent some time internally talking about what could that be. Again, things move so quickly here. Sometimes it's hard to identify something that's flying past, but there is one feature, one initiative in particular that we would to move forward in a new way and in a better way than we have done previously. And that is, with regard to, upping again our, our look at security inside Mhmm. So with every modern system, , security has to be considered, very carefully. And we do that in our development. When we're writing, we're, , we're doing our best to make sure that there's lots of different ways to consider how it's going to be used the right ways it's supposed to be used and then the wrong ways it could be used. There's just thousands of different things to consider. And then we do have tools that we run across the code that would look for things that might have been missed. But those are automated tools and those tools are good, but they're not the same when put a human behind it, that can infer intent of how things are supposed to work or know that. So what we want to do is crowdsource some funding to be able to hire a top person who could apply his craft of pen testing to Rock, and then continue to engage him through updates. But the big one is just getting ahead of it and doing it's kind of the snake swallowing the rabbit. That first huge piece that we have to get through all the stuff that currently exists. And so we've been out talking to some people, and I think we know who we want to go with, and so now it's about funding that work. Mhmm. And that said, it's not even that can't make things perfect. We have to always be in our vigil. We have to always keep, , looking and seeing how things go from different angles. But that will definitely increase the security nature of Rock because there is no such thing as a perfectly secure system. It's just impossible. The only secure system is one that's unplugged. Right. And our community knows us. They know that security has always been of utmost importance to us. We've always approached it very carefully and with great consideration. So as our code base has grown and as what we're working with is getting larger and more complex, this is the natural next step for us. Right, and we feel , , we're ready go on that. And based on the feedback from the community, think this is a perfect example of one we could all jump in And it's too big for one, but it's not too big if ten, fifteen want to all jump in and do it. Right, so if this is something that your church could contribute a few thousand dollars to and you'd be interested in helping fund that initial, pen testing, Spark would take on the ongoing and continued testing of new features and and things, but we are looking for some help funding that initial, initial test. So if this is something your organization could help out with, please let us know. We would really appreciate that. We we're looking forward to to getting that moving forward. Yep. Well, that was a very interesting series of topics today on our agenda. So thanks for joining us for this conversation. We appreciate you, Rock Community. We are always encouraged by the things that you're doing, the new ways you're using ministry to impact people. And anytime we get to connect with you, we come away feeling encouraged as well. Thanks for all that you do, and thanks for joining us. 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. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.