Podcast Episode 94: Episode 67: Don't Be THAT Guy

Description

In this episode of Rockcast, we'll discuss the upcoming v9 general release, our RX2019 Conference and Master Class, API improvements, and the importance of not being THAT guy when it comes to doing big things with Rock RMS.

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. Hello and welcome to another episode of Rockcast, the podcast with Spark Development Network where we tell you what's going on, what's coming up, and what we've been working on. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here with me today so we can give you a little behind the scenes scoop. Now we know it's summertime, everyone's been busy. We've all been working in our own corners trying to get things done while balancing vacation schedules, ours and others. So we hope you're able to take a little break and tune in with us here today when you're back in the office. The first update, I think we should just do a really quick, brief update on V9. Nick, do you have any information about that for us? Yes, I do. I wanna first thank Jim Michael, one of our main alpha testers. So we were in alpha testing and we're now in pre release testing, which may be alpha or beta, it depends on exactly when this is published. And I just wanna say that we, because of the vacations, I think it's been a little light for our alpha testers. So we're really looking for as much testing as possible from the community. Great. So while we're continuing to work on that here with our development and testing teams, we have also been working on a lot of things recently about our community. John, what can you tell us about that? Yeah. So we keep saying it. Rock is not a product. It's a community. And so we need to focus on on the community. And we definitely talk a lot, and we talk a lot about the time and effort we put into the product. We also to talk about the time and effort we put into the community. And so we've been developing and continue to develop our community site. We didn't used to have a community site later this year. Earlier this year, we we did create a specific site just for the community, and we keep adding micro features to it. Some of these micro features of later are more than micro. They're they're a little bit more major. All in effort to build community to help get more people involved and to help improve the experience of those who are. So we've had things Rock U has a new user experience. When we've originally did Rock U, we really focused on the content over the user experience. And so we we honestly, really, it took maybe an hour or two to build the the interface for Rock U. Took many hundreds of hours to do the videos, but, the actual presentation of it, we had to rush. And so we've gone back to the board and and kind of polished that up. Garrett did a a lot of work on that. And so there's some really nice user experience, but also behind the scenes, we're actually gathering a lot of metrics of of the videos that people are watching. And, you can now see which videos you've watched. You can it kinda helps you keep track so you don't lose your place. And it also helps us get metrics too to see which topics and videos are of most interest. So that's a great tool. I'd I'd encourage you to get back out there, look at that, watch as many videos as you can on the topics that are are most, germane to you. But on top of that, we've also added a really nice set of pages on how to get involved. I think, many people assume that you have to be technical to get involved, and that's that's certainly not true. So we're trying to give people as many different options as they as they can to get involved, and a majority of them actually, don't require any technical experience. Again, we're a community trying to push this this product up a hill. It's not a a vendor or a business trying to do that. It's a community. And so just as your role in your church is to help get people involved through volunteerism, we're the same way. , we all grew up our , big piece of our careers in churches, we've learned those some tech same techniques. We wanna have that same kind of community and spirit. And so this is our way of just, again, providing opportunities to onboard as many people as we can into the ex the experience of helping push Rock up the hill. So when you get involved, you can go to your profile page. The profile page has always been there. It's always been kind of a private page for you. Even though everybody could see it, they can't see everything on your page, obviously. I mean, there's certain certain things only you can see. But it has been a page that other people could get to. We've really expanded that, though. We really want people coming to your profile page and seeing your badges of how you're involved and how you're, connecting with the community and and celebrating that. So the profile page now has a a lot more badges. They used to be badges where kinda seen as, , chat points and things of that nature, but we wanted to provide a richer experience for those badges that shows all the different things that are are really what we'd call maybe good behaviors within the community, things that we want to encourage and and see more of. And so you can see how many recipes a person has, how many answers to questions they've had, how many times they've helped us classify a a GitHub issue. There's just a lot there's a lot of badges out there. So go take a look, and, on each one of those badges, you can click and find out how you can do the same thing. And, you can also update your page a little bit, so you can have a a profile header image so you can personalize it a bit. And we hope that you do that because they make it kind of a fun place to go to to find out more about people. We've always had a bio. Very few people have actually entered that, but I would encourage you to do it so that it's a way that people can kinda get to know you better. So we've invested a lot of time into this community site, and I would just kinda maybe encourage you to go check it out, but also while you're there, just take a step back and take a higher view and and just look at all the tools that are there. And for such a small, , open source community, it's it's it's cool and impressive that we have these types of tools for our community. And as a community, how strong it is, it's it's easy to say that. It's kind of once or twice a year, you can kinda see it at the conference, but it's going and it's operating twenty four seven, three 60 five, and all that community is built off of Rock. That whole community site is is Rock and and powered by Rock. So, maybe there's some ideas there you wanna take and, implement at your church. That's very exciting, and I think it just goes to the heart of what it is that makes Rock different, and that's the community. So we wanna make sure that we're investing there. A lot of the things you talked about, it's interesting because the way we work is to really iterate quickly, right? So we want to get tools in people's hands and sometimes that means go, go, go, let's get it out there. And then we put down on our roadmap, let's circle back around and add some polish and add some more, a little bit of flair to what that particular feature is. And I think you just mentioned three or four things that we've done that with. Yeah. And even some of those blocks were some of the first blocks we wrote a long time ago, , they kinda operated a little wonky, and so we've polished that out and and we'll continue. We're still not even close to being happy with the site, but, , we're getting there, and it's getting better and better and better. But it is kinda cool just to take a step back and go, wow. There's, , multibillion dollar companies that don't have community sites this. So they may have one or two of the tools, but they don't have, , all of those. And it's kinda cool to say, hey. Our community does have this, and it's there because of we've slowly, over time, as a community, kept building and and just, , when you kinda you can sometimes you can look at your accomplishments. And, and we appreciate everybody in the community and helping with that. There's so many people who have given ideas, , bug tested it, told us about some of those, and then we really appreciate that. Especially our Rock stars, they have early communication on some of that, and so they really help us, find the little polished points and issues. And we have a lot more to share on the community front about what's all been going on this year and what the plans are, but you will have to come to Rx2019 to find out. So on that note, let's talk a little bit about the conference this year. It's September at NewSpring Church in South Carolina, which we're excited about. Feels a little bit coming home. Mean NewSpring's been such a key partner in whole product movement and community of Rock for so long that we're just thrilled to be able to work together on this big event. But I would encourage people, we say this every year and every year so far our surveys tell us it's true, this Rock conference will be bigger and better than any Rock conference you've attended and we remake it every year. You'll see a lot of the the some of the some of the things that you're familiar with about the conference that you . The opportunity to connect with churches, the ability to learn what everyone's doing and even recipes on how you can do the same things at your organization. The connections, the interactions with people that really drive the ministry the rest of the year. But you'll also find a lot of new things and we do that on purpose. There are a lot of surprises this year, a lot of really great opportunities. We're always trying to improve that. So if you've been before, don't think everything that goes on at a Rock conference. You're gonna have to come check it out. And if you've never been, well, is definitely the year to come see what the hype is all about. And as usual, we're continuing to add content. We're continuing to add, tracks and sessions and speakers. I think we have over 60 this year speakers. So if you're coming, you're going to wanna do one of two things. If you're from a larger organization and you have a team where you can bring multiple people, you're going to want to bring your whole team. If you're from a smaller organization and you are the only one that can come, you're going to want to jump into the Rock community, probably now, find some other people in your position and team up with them so that you can predetermine which sessions everyone kinda maps out and goes to. And then you can come back and share content. Ultimately, the community's all about sharing content, but you're gonna be hard pressed to make it to every session to hear everything that you wanna hear. Yeah. And I think if , what is this? Our fifth one now? I think so. So the if if I was gonna kinda put them in categories, the first one, Rock Conference, we had was really about, , what is this thing? What is it's an introduction to, , this product. The next one was about an introduction to the community. So we're really trying to build up that community. And then the next two were probably more around content and and how and why and and, , how people are using it. And I think this year, you're gonna have all of that. But the big thing that we're that's gonna be layered on top of that that I think is gonna be news. There's gonna be a lot more talk about vision of, , where where is this going, What types of features do we want to implement? So we're gonna have all that same content as before, but there's gonna be a huge layer heaped on top on vision, and kind of a direction, going forward. And I think it's gonna be really exciting. Mhmm. And I'm I'm just thrilled at the maturity of the Rock community. There are so many people that have really self educated and brought each other up, empowered each other to learn and try new things, that the topics and the content that people are bringing this year, we're just seeing a great maturity and depth and breadth in that. It's gonna be really an incredible event. Yeah. And there's gonna be, , a lot of stories that this Rock conference shared, and there's some really inspiring ones of how they how these churches have used technology to really, really help people. And I'm really looking forward to that. And the cool thing is literally everyone that's gonna be on stage has had to learn Rock from scratch within, , the last four years. So if you're new and you come and you're feeling slightly overwhelmed at the amount of content or how to get up to speed, all the people that are there that are on stage have done exactly what you're looking to do. And I promise they'll be excited to help you figure out what worked for them, what didn't work for them, who to connect with, what steps to take. So if you're kind of exploring Rock or you're new to the community, the conference is gonna be really critical to getting to know the people behind the pictures in Rocket Chat and making those connections that help drive your experience for the next year. Yeah. And it is drinking out of fire hose, but I'd say too, if you're if you you might get overwhelmed with the content, just take in as much as you can. Yep. Then tap out, eat good food, and meet a lot of people. That's right. Don't have to get you don't have to get every bit of knowledge. Just take as much as you as you can. I know I have to, , at some point tap out and be , okay. Now I'm gonna eat, and then we're gonna talk to some people. I'm gonna write down the name of the speaker and we will connect when I get back to the office. Yeah. It'll be on video. You can watch it later. That's right. That's good. And the other thing that we have heard is that a lot of churches need the opportunity to send people to a master class, which is where you take your Rock knowledge from baseline, further down the path of information. It kind of helps elevate the whole community when more people are master class educated. It definitely helps an investment for your church when you have the, administrative chops to be able to really do some things yourself that you might have had to hire otherwise or forego. And then it just helps that you're able to reinvest some of what you've been gathering from other people by sharing a little bit of your knowledge as well. So we've tied a master class opportunity to the conference, and that will be directly after the conference ends the very next day starting at Fellowship Greenville, which is about twenty, twenty five minutes away. We'd recommend changing hotels because you'd probably don't wanna hit that traffic every morning, But it's very close, so you shouldn't really have additional travel expenses if that's the way if that's something you need to do soon, this would be a great time to do it. As usual, we do have caps on all of our master classes, so we would recommend that you secure your place soon. And we'd also recommend that you get your conference registration in as soon as possible because we're having to start providing accounts for a lot of things. So if you're thinking about doing it, you just haven't gotten around to it yet, it would be very helpful to us if you could get around to it kinda soon. Yeah. You want a t shirt, right? Yes. And per our last podcast that we had, you want a t shirt that fits? Great. I forgot about that. We won't go back there. I was trying to forget about it, but okay. Alright. So enough on the things that we're looking forward to with the community. I mean, we couldn't talk about it enough, but I think that where you need to go. That's go register today to the two things, the master class, if you haven't taken one yet, or if you need a refresher, and the conference. Beyond that, John, I know that there's been a lot of hard work on, the API. What can you tell us about that? Yeah. So the API has always been important to us. From day one, we said, hey. For starting from scratch, let's make sure that we're always considering the API. We don't want it something that's just tacked on and bolted on at the very end just to kinda, , oh, we got that. Check that box. So from day one, we've always been, working to to get to that. And so nothing new. We've always been working on it, but we've been putting a little bit additional effort and and and eyes into it, trying to, , eke out more performance. And I think what's really interesting, there's probably not enough time to really unpack this concept, , in the podcast, but more and more churches are trying to do more and more things, for their attendees and and and members, and that's awesome. It's also, , , it's kind of mind boggling that that this space of of of organizations, what they can do. , a lot of organizations in different spaces, , whether it be in the secular world or other nonprofits, they just don't have the capabilities. They don't have they read the the magazines and they get the ideas, but they don't have a platform to build it off of. ? And so Rock kinda gives you that platform. It it maybe doesn't do everything you want to do, but it gives you the Legos to build a lot of that stuff. And so it's really exciting to see people really doing big things with it. But I would the the caveat I would say is, , as you get into to hard things, they get hard. And so and what does that mean in terms of some of the ideas that you have is that you have to become and I'm not saying you need to become uberly technical, although a technical skill is important. But you have to you have to approach these things more with a research or scientific mind and not just a a third against the wall and hope it sticks kinda mind. So the analogy I've been kinda using in head is, , if you if you're trying to be, if you want things to scale well and you wanna do these advanced things, you have to kinda approach it as a as a scientist would would and not be maybe the computer guy on the first Jurassic Park movie, who, , smart, but didn't really put a lot of effort in testing, and he's just kinda smacked third against the wall, see if it sticks, and, , if the dinosaurs get out, oh oh well. Oh well. A lot of people died because of him. That probably won't happen, but let's let's not think about that. Let's just think about, , getting this thing done. And I think as you're trying to do things at scale, you have to do a lot of testing. You have to not just approach it. , I'm just gonna make this API call, and it's just gonna work. You have to think about, well, how many people are gonna make this API call? What is what is the server gonna have to do to get me the data that I want, and is that gonna be performant? And how do I need to shape the data coming back? Because sometimes it's not even the server, , crunching through those numbers. It's getting all that data back to you, streaming it back to you over the network. That if that's not performant and and you're asking for a whole bunch of data that you really don't need back at the client, then you're gonna have issues too. So a lot of it is just really approaching it and and doing your testing before your load testing before that time you roll it out, you really have to do that. And, while it seems fun to do all the work on all these projects, find fun and joy in making sure that you've done a good job in architecting it. , find the joy in architecture and and really trying to do the research beforehand. So I'll say that is, , we work on the API. So we have found some ways to improve the API speed. And so some of the work that we've been doing, actually, even this week, which by the time you listen, this will be, , a little bit in the in the future. So, we maybe even have some more stuff. But we found some ways that whenever you do, the retrieval of data a GET in in the API, we've been able to increase the performance of that significantly. It's, , in tune of, , 30 to 50%. That's incredible. Yeah. I mean, was already fast, but now it's it's even faster. And we're working to put in a few more endpoints that help you get exactly what you want. So the API, can get any data in Rock, you can get through the API. But does it come back the way you want it? And and and how do we make it more efficient? Instead of having to make four or five calls, how do we get one call that can kinda unpack the data a little bit better than and do exactly what you want? So we've been working on more and more of those. And so what we need to get that, though, is the ideas. And what's really helpful is the user story behind what you're trying to do. Don't tell us which API you want to be faster. That doesn't that's not very helpful. What we need to know is, , what are you trying to do? Because in, , 99.99% of the time, what people ask for in the API is not what they really want. They're just trying to make the current one fit the mold better. But if we know what the mold you want is, we can shape it to fit versus trying to, , take something that already exists and shove it in there and stretch it every which way. And and it it's not an overstatement. Almost every time someone asks us to change an API or to make an API faster without telling us the user story. When we get the user story, it's almost a % of time it's , okay. That's not really what you want. You want this API. Right? And they're , yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what we want. So help share the user story of what you're trying to do in your project. But also, no matter what API we have, you have to make sure that you're looking at all the options of those APIs and and thinking through performance. , what is the server gonna need to do to get me the data that I want, and how do I make that easier on the server? So one one easy, dumb example is if you're if you're querying a data view, is the data view persisted? , if it's persisted, the server's , got it. I just have to go, , get you the data that's already been, , sliced and diced and stored for you. Whereas if you ask for it in real time, it's , it's got a lot of work to do. It's going back to the kitchen and cooking from scratch versus pulling it out of, , the the freezer, putting it in the microwave, and handing it to you. Completely different for weight on the server, and then shaping it as it comes back. I see that, , probably 80% of the time, you're just asking for all the data back, when actually, you only you may only need a few fields. And you might think, well, it takes a little bit longer for the server to, , just, , redo the sound of those few fields. And it's it it barely takes any time. But the amount of time it takes to stream all that on from the server's perspective and then the network's impact to that. And bundle and unbundle. It's huge. It's huge. So if you only need three or four fields, just bring back those three or four fields. And the cool thing about the REST API with Rock is you you get to shape your data. It might be one endpoint, but you can ask for just specific data points. Very, very, very few APIs, can do that. Some of the new GraphQL ones, , that's the big selling point of GraphQL is you get to kinda shape it. We use a different technology. It's been around a little bit longer called oData, and it allows you to do the same thing. You you can really shape it. And and I not to keep harping on on on wrong patterns, but I see a lot of people with their oData, they're always expanding. They want, I want this, but it also, send me back this, this, and this. And that's good. You need to do that. But I hardly ever see anybody tell you tell them, give me less data. So expand these things, but I only need these properties back. And I'm guilty of this too. So, , we it is a a natural pattern. It's almost a gluttonous thing. Give me all data, then let me figure out what to do with it. But if you put a little bit time into it and just kinda shape it down to exactly what you need, it'll be so much more performant for you in the long run. But I fall into the same traps too. I would say that, , probably 90 of the time when I'm calling those APIs, I'm not shaping it either. Usually, it's not I'm not getting back a ton of data, so it's not gonna have a huge impact. But as I'm doing, , more and more research and trying to help people get their things faster, I'm , oh, we definitely should all be doing this. And again, this is we could probably do, , a three hour class someday on on some of these tech days. Don't make promises. Well, that wasn't a promise. Well, maybe we'll have some at Rx. Yeah. Maybe. But the the we want to. The heart is there to do that. It just don't underestimate how much effort it takes to not only find these things, but then you have to document them well. Right? Right? You gotta show the before and after. You gotta show, and I literally have books filled with all these things I want to do. , I really wanna do a class walking through the data model of Rock. And, , part of it I can do from my head, but but to record it and to , I'd probably wanna just make sure I went through all the different things I wanted to cover, because I'd hate to finish that video and be , oh, I forgot to talk about that, that, and that. So the the heart is willing as this is sometimes not a lot of hours in the day. I have seen the books. I know they exist. And I've also seen things from the books slowly come to life. So they eventually do get better. They eventually do come to life. Yeah. But the intent is I'll just do it this weekend. But then five other things take up. That's true. Well that's a real gold nugget right there, the discussion and conversation about the API, about how it functions, about what some best practices are, and and what to do, how to pre think to really get the performance that you're looking for. And I think that's really key to the audience wanting to hear, well, , what should I do? How can I do it? And so that's a good a good best practice you just shared. Right. And if you're maybe what I just said didn't make a lot of sense to you because it maybe was a little too technical. What the thing I would get out of that is as you add capabilities to Rock, server resources are a finite thing. They're not unlimited. And and so as you work with technical people, just make sure that that you're asking them to make sure that they think through what they're doing from a performance perspective and with a limited capacity perspective. The other thing I think I've been thinking a lot about too is as we as I'm impressed that churches are adding all these capabilities, I think they have to also be thinking that that has to come with infrastructure cost. As you wanna add all this stuff and you want it to perform in a scale of thousands of people hitting it at once, at a certain point, you're gonna have to pay the piper for that. Some of that's gonna be time and making sure that it's performant and efficient, but then at the end of the day, you're always gonna have to pay more for infrastructure even if you get it to be brilliantly brilliantly performant and efficient. At the end of the day, you still need to make sure that you have the infrastructure to back that up. Right. And I think we might still have a perception change here that we still we want all these capabilities, but we still want the website that can barely run the grandma's recipes website, ? And that's just that's just not gonna to work. Good things to keep in mind for sure. Well, we'll look forward to the day that class is released. Yeah. Now, again, the the majority of the of the knowledge there, we we just talked about the the class part would be, , showing the examples and then giving you the actual syntax of how that works. But And I know people will be interested in that. Yeah. Someday. Someday. Well, we love to take you behind the scenes and give you glimpses into what the some days look , the things that we dream. The dreams eventually become reality once they've passed through the crock pot, which is a whole another conversation. But right now, that one's sort of in the crock pot. Thank you so much for joining us for another edition of ROTCast. We hope you are well. Until the next time. 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.