Podcast Episode 71: Episode 44: The Birds and the Bees for Blocks

Description

One final pre-conference episode to bring you up to speed!

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 to Rockcast, the podcast where we take you behind the scenes with Rock and the Spark Development Network team. We're actually doing a podcast that's a little quick and a little out of order this time in order to bring you some quick updates that you'll have in hand before the conference. So we've had a lot of things going on as our team is working very hard to prepare for the conference and to prepare for the release of version eight. And then we filed a lot of other interesting things we're working on, some of which will come out at the conference and some that we'll cover today. But we wanted to give you a quick update before we see you in person, which we're really excited about. Nick, why don't you tell us about version eight and where we're at with that now? Sure. VA just went to alpha. That's, I'm sorry, it went to beta. And we've been in eight point beta for about, I wanna say a week and a half or so. We got a lot of good feedback. So we've made a lot of bug fixes and we put them into an 8.1 release, which is just about to go alpha testing. So once that goes to alpha testing, probably through the weekend, hopefully, if not Monday, we'll start alpha testing, but it's gonna be a very quick alpha test cycle. We wanna really get it to the beta testers and let them kick the the tires hard on that. And we are hoping then it will be in beta during the conference. And then when we come back from the conference, the goal is for it to get released to early access. So eight point zero and eight point one will be released simultaneously into early access, depending on how the second round of beta testing goes for, or first round of beta testing for version 8.1, how that goes. Hopefully there won't be an 8.2. Yeah, that's exciting. Yes, it's been a Right, come on beta testers. We really count on them, and they've done a great job. We've had a couple new people step up and do beta testing, and yeah, I can't tell you guys enough how appreciative I am of our team. If you're one of our beta testers, I personally thank you because you really do help me sleep better at night. And that's not really good. I don't sleep good at night because I'm often thinking about lots of things. Yeah, and I just put out a small warning that when you update at the V eight, then go into the Rock Shop and update your plugins. There are a few updated plugins for V eight, a few changes in V eight that needed to be polished in plugins. Yeah, that's a good catch. Yeah, great. All right, John, why don't you talk a little bit about the conference that will be right around the corner as soon as we release this podcast? Yeah, so Emily said, we're very excited for the podcast. Just a few tips and tricks for this year's podcast. I'm sorry, a conference. We're doing the podcast now. First of all, there is a meetup room, so you can go into the meetup room to just hang out with people and network. This isn't a conference where you kind of show up in the morning and kind of leave before dinner. Have all the meals there, we hope and expect and know that the best time actually is after dinner. And so we have a meetup room that you can use anytime during the conference, but definitely after dinner also. Or you can come early. If you need to arrange a time to meet with people, just say, Hey, let's just meet in the Meetup room, and then we'll just stay in there. Or if it gets too busy, we can go off into another area. And do stay late. Plan to stay late. I'm sure there's plenty of attractions you could go look at, but there's so much great networking that happens at night. And Southeast is so generous that their campus is open to us there in that area until 10PM, including the meetup room. So there's no reason to go do something off-site. You can connect really well right there. There will probably be a bunch of people that will continue their conversations after 10:00 at their hotels. I know that that's happened in the past too. I bet you're right. Yeah, the hotels love Rock conferences because their lobbies are busy till the wee hours of the morning. And then the final one is just don't plan to leave early on day two. We have content all the way through, and you're going want to stay late even after dinner on that too to network. But we may have made a mistake this conference, we've just packed it full with content. And so we're going through to the very end, and there's some great content at the end. if you want to know more about V9, it's in the last session. So you're gonna wanna be there. That's a good preview. Make sure you stick around. You don't want to sit in the airport waiting extra long time for your flight to get there. Mean, you've already invested the time to be there. So make sure you do the best you can with it because once a year you get this opportunity. This event is going to be, I mean, you said, John, it's going to be a completely different content this year than we've had previously. The amount of it, the kinds of it, the speakers that we have, it's gonna be very content heavy. Yeah, and before you complain about us having too much content and you not being able to see enough of it, you can get it all in a subscription, a content subscription, so you can see everything. Right. And we're just kind of meeting the feedback from last year, just always a hunger and desire for more content and more tracks, and we blew it out. Can we talk about that subscription? How does that work? Every attendee Does make how does that work? Yeah, do the attendees get the subscription? I thought you were asking, is it a content channel? No, no, no. I was , oh, I'm going there. Okay. Now, yeah, so available for anybody, but if you attended the conference within the first day, right, there's a special conference price. We'll have a special pricing. So we'll announce that and we'll make that available to you. And if you come prepared to get that, we'll extend it for the week for those who attend. But come prepared to bring that content home because the cool thing about the subscription is that it's not just you getting that subscription to remind yourself or to see what you saw, Your entire organization has access to that. And we have at least triple the content from last year. And last year was probably double the content from the year before. So we have tons of great information. And the feedback last year, you said, John, was that I want more information, but every person who said that had a different type of information they wanted. So everybody's coming at it from a unique angle or unique perspective of what they wanted to hear. And we've tried to get as much as possible of that incorporated this year. So you'll be able to share with all your teams when you subscribe to the content from this conference and it will be very valuable. And what we can't do is give you more time. We won't be able to give you enough time to watch all the content afterwards. Is that in one of our future features, creation of time? If only we could do that. So once this event is passed, which I can hardly even look beyond it right now, we're really excited for it, do remember that we have a masterclass coming up, which has a totally different purpose for attending. And that is to really dive deep into the features and learn about administrating the database and the best way to do that and even learn how to train people on your own staff when you get back home. That is not necessarily an event for your entire team. That is definitely something that you wanna be sending your main Rock people to as you bring in a new hire that needs to be trained or, once you've had one person go through, continue budgeting, make sure the right people on your staff go through that. We have two left this year. The registration is live for the one in September, which is the one that we'll need to fill first. And then, sometime within the next couple of weeks or so after conference, we'll probably make the registration live for one in November as well. So do continue to remember to budget for that and to send your people to that. And it's it is a very different event from conference. Sometimes I get that question. Now those are the things you've been hearing about. I mean, we try to give you new information on it, but that all of those are coming. Sometimes we have other things going on behind the scenes and it's the little stuff that we're working on that makes a big difference. John, could you share a little bit of what that looks around here? Sure, yeah, it's always an exciting moment around here. So we are looking at V9 features. Volunteer scheduling is coming along, and so we're in the process of bringing that down into requirements documents and some detailed notes for the developers to start working on, trying to do a better job at that, which maybe we can talk about a little bit later too. Also, just all the other features that we want to get ready for v nine digital signatures. There's some CMS tools that we're working on. So we're actually partnering with NewSpring on a new concept called a content component, which is a really cool blending of the HTML block and the content channel concept. So if those two things were to date, get married and have a baby, they would have a content component. Is this weirder or less weird than the duck on fire that we had on our last podcast? I don't know, but I really regret that comment. It seems to have lived on. But yeah, if those two things were to come together in union, they would have a content component, which is really neat. I think you're really gonna it. So we're working on that, which is exciting. Also working on project with NuSpring, something called Assets. So if you're familiar with the file provider inside of Rock, how you can upload files to different places, whether it be the file system, the database, s three, Azure. That works great. That's a great way to put your file that you have into those systems. A lot of times you already have those files in those systems that you didn't upload through Rock that you might wanna pick and use in Rock. So this kind of blows out that capability so that you can track your your files in Azure s three database file system and pick from them. So that's an exciting component and been a challenge trying to get that to work. In doing so, think we added some new other cool dev tools for folks that I think they'll enjoy. But the other big thing that we're working on is probably not as exciting, but definitely probably one of the most important things we've worked on is just working on our processes and our documents that we use to develop code. I think until now, we've been a little loose on the development methodology. We could, we were small, we were moving fast, we are creating new things. And now we're realizing that we really need to get more mature. Our team is growing. As people come new to the code base, there's definitely knowledge that's in our heads that we need to get on the paper, so we're doing that. We have been doing that for about a year, but we're really getting better at that. But we're also looking at the development process and what kind of documentation should we have, putting more time in the upfront piece of documenting what the code should do and then getting to code with it. Hopefully over time, that will increase our speed by doing it right the first time and not causing a whole bunch of issues, but it should also definitely increase our quality. There's some bugs, I mean, bugs are always going to happen, but there's some bugs that have come out that we should have caught better. And I think just in any time when you do development, if you find yourself refactoring before you even ship, that probably means you have some business processes that aren't quite in place. And so we don't want to overdo it. I've actually worked at a place that overdid it, and it was a horrible place to work because you couldn't get anything done without filling out tons of paperwork, but I think there's a healthy balance, and we're gonna try to find that healthy balance. Yes, and so I think one of the things that John has asked me to take on is helping manage that more, pulling stuff off of your plate so that you can work on things that only you can do. So yeah, that's gonna be fun and challenging at the same time. Yeah. Since you've been here full time, you've probably I mean, you've always been around. Right? You've always been here, , once a week. Yeah. But I think you've seen under the covers in a lot more detail than you've ever seen before behind curtain. Yeah. So much so that I almost feel I'm brand new. , I really didn't know anything about what was going on. Know, being here once a week is a totally different perspective than being here in the trenches, , ten hours a day. It's way different. Right. And it's exciting that I think that we can increase the initial quality of our releases and then hopefully share some of those practices out to the community. Because if we're increasing that, but the pull requests come in, that doesn't help us. We need to make sure those pull requests have the same kind of thought. Yes, and as we mature and do more testing, we will ratchet that pull request process down too. So you will have to supply tests. We can't just get code without seeing and having a test that backs it up, that we can press a button run a test against it to verify that it works the way it's supposed to work. Right. Cool. Growing pains and growing challenges, but that means really good things. Yeah. All right. Well, that's kind of a peek into what we're working on right now. We are looking forward to seeing you at the conference very soon. Make sure you say hi if you catch us walking by and make sure you take the time to connect there. The best time to do it. We'll see you next time. Today's show was produced by Emily Forman. Nick was our recording engineer who turned the dials and pushed the buttons. Jim Michael handled all the audio post production mixing. And our amazing show notes, which you can find at rockrms.com/connect, were transcribed and written up by Michael Garrison. 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.