Podcast Episode 69: Episode 42: This Duck is on Fire!

Description

In this episode we want to give you an update regarding the current and future versions of Rock, some upcoming events, and some staff 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 and thanks for joining us for this episode of Rockcast. We are here at Jon Edmiston, myself Emily Forman and Nick Airdo to give you an update on what things are looking right now, along with the current and future versions of Rock, the events that we have coming up and a little bit on our staff. So I think the most relevant and up to date piece of information has to do with v eight, which of course we've been talking about for a long time. And we had released to alpha. So Nick, if you could give us an update on where things are with that and what we're looking at on our timeline right now, that'd be great. Sure. Yeah, so alpha testing had been going on for a few weeks, and we got great feedback from the community, and we decided to pivot from what we were looking at, and we made some changes to the code again, just to make it better, Because one of our passions is not breaking things for our community of developers and the ecosystem. So we spent a lot of time trying to get that right. And unfortunately, because of that, we're going to have to do another round of alpha testing, which is good. So we're repackaging. We we've made changes to the code. We're repackaging that alpha into a new release, and that's about to go out to the community. Probably by the time they're hearing this podcast, it will have just been released and we'll do another round of alpha testing. Hopefully we won't find anything. Normally we don't. This is kind of rare that we would do a second round of alpha testing, but this is what its purpose is for. And assuming everything goes well with that, we'll move into beta, probably have a decent sized beta as well, that expands the number of people that are using Rock. And again, because we're lots and lots of changes, fundamental low level changes in Rock for the better. I mean, it's going to be great. And then we'll go to, to, production, but I don't have a crystal ball. I don't exactly know when that might be. Might be right after the conference. That's gonna be the conference. I mean, a lot of it gets out of our hands at this stage. It really depends on how fast the community can get in there to test. Our part is almost done in terms of what we can do. We need to be waiting for the community to test, and then we're super responsive on fixing what we see, but at this point, falls in their court, in your court. Yeah, that's true. So we rely on our beta testers next, and are looking forward to, getting them going on Rock. But that's still probably a week or so away, from beta testing. I think this is such an interesting topic to talk about in the podcast because it's really a behind the scenes one that only a few people in our community that are part of the alpha testing team and that really have the right setup to do that alpha testing because it's a you have to really have the correct setup in place, right, in order to be a part of that. And so you can't just run that. I mean, you don't want to pop that onto your server if you don't have everything set up just for that. So it's a small group of people that have insight into what's happening during alpha. So it feels people , wonder what's going on. And, and it's such a delicate balance of hitting this really high bar for craftsmanship and elegance of code, and keeping everything, , moving forward in that direction, while also having backward compatibility. And it's this balancing act that's so delicate. And it's such a cool thing to see that we have this alpha testing team that's in our community that really helps out with that. I mean, it's a it's a very interesting process. And it's one that, , I guess it's kind of a little bit under the covers inside the Rock community because it's not, it's a little quieter, but it's so crucial and essential to getting everything right so that when we hit beta testing, we're looking at all kinds of different things rather than, , the system level of things. Right. As much as possible, we love for alpha testing to go as deep as our beta testers do. But beta testers tend to have, their real environments, running Rock, and or their entire a copy of their entire normal Rock Right. System is on the beta. So, yeah, if you're a power user and you think, hey, I could do that, , drop me a line, and I'll see and get you signed up to be an alpha tester. Yeah. It does require a good commitment of time and It does. Yeah. And I think there's this tension too between wanting to innovate and add and change. At the same time, don't break anything and don't change anything. It's difficult to navigate, but it's attention that has to be there. I mean, we definitely want to keep changing and innovating, but we definitely don't want to be dragging community developers, plug in developers. And the end customer seeing that these breaking changes. So we're very passionate about that. It gets you have to be kind of creative sometimes because we're also passionate about just the quality of the code that makes sure it's elegant and simple and easy to maintain. So it's a challenge. Sometimes you think things would be so easy and it's just going work that way. And then you find out deep, deep, deep under the .net even covers that, Oh, I didn't know that. And then you kind of live in their world and you're , Oh, that makes sense. I can see the tension that they're having to manage too. All I can say is nothing's easy, but we're committed to make sure that we limit the number of breaking changes. And when we do make a breaking change, it has to be well thought out and leading to a long term improvement direction for the product. Yeah, hopefully also scope it's not going to impact that many things. It's part of the equation. Right. And the scope naturally is so much greater than, let's say you've been working on a development that one or two churches is a part of, you can pivot so quickly that way. But when you have many churches with different levels of technical ability and different things built out on what you've created, it's a whole different ballgame. Yeah, and someday we should do a podcast just on the personas that we have written up, cause we are always talking about these fake fictitious people and looking at the features and our decisions through their eyes and our training through their eyes and our documentation throughout their eyes. , we do nothing with our own mind in, , in the criteria, we're always thinking about somebody else, these fictitious people, what will, , Alicia think of this. Right. We're always trying to strip those assumptions out of things we know and think about, , who are the different people inside the community? What do they know? What makes this work really well for them? And it's a different thought process for sure. Yeah. A podcast on that would be interesting because there are some hidden secrets in in some of our personas that I think some people would find funny. Mhmm. And, , it's a great lesson to learn from. , you could take that back and start operating your own projects and church that way. Oh, good point. Yeah. And should, really. Yeah. Every everybody has a target audience, whether you have defined them or not. It's way better if you're intentional and have defined your target audience. Who are you trying to reach? Right. Well, enough on that today. Yeah, because that would we could launch into John said, a whole new podcast on that topic. But the next thing we're talking about, so that's that's where we are currently. Where are we going? What's upcoming in our next version? And there's been a lot of talk about one particular feature set. I think John, you can give us some updates on that. Yeah, so we're kind of at this stage, it's always interesting as you get ready to release a major release. We're already working on nine. I mean, there's already work on nine, we have a code branch already that we're submitting code to for nine. We're already looking at some of the feature sets. So it's kind of funny, , you live in two worlds right now. One is being very reactive and quick to respond on issues for the eight point but at the same time, strategically starting to get to some of these other things. And it's at this point of the project where if we are going to make some messy changes, we try to make them right now in nine, because it gives us several months to operate it in our own environment behind the scenes to kind of polish out some of those things. So we've already kind of made some weird changes and then refactoring them back and stuff. So it's kind of a fun time in the project. It's where we get to be a little bit more creative and a little bit more dangerous because we know we have many more months to work out these things. We would never make some of these changes right before release. But yes, so version nine, we've talked about it being a little bit smaller of a release. It's really focused mainly on trying to get volunteer scheduling out. And of course, there'll be some other changes that go along with that. But we've been actively working. I don't think we've ever put so much pre thought into a feature as volunteer scheduling. So we've had several internal meetings. We've done several releases out to GitHub with all of our ideas and mock ups Collecting feedback from the community. Yeah, so again, we've never had this much input. And I think it's good because it's leading us to a good direction. That said, I mean, this is a feature you could basically make a whole company around, some people have or started their company around. It's an important feature. It's a feature we wanna get right. It's a feature we wanna do well in Rock, but it's not what Rock is about. It's not the center of Rock. It's a feature bolt on for Rock. And I think we just need to have that level of expectation. Because again, we could we could literally start up a whole dev team that all they do is add features to this thing and automate this thing and and And and there's not a short supply of ideas and feature requests for this And, , most of it is good. There's a there's a few ideas. It's , understand what you're saying, but based on the requirements, there's no way a computer could read the mind to determine how to do that. ? So so then we need to keep, , working it down, asking why. Why why do you want that to get down to the root. Because usually when you get to the root, then you can kind of figure out how to plan it. But for the most part, there's just a lot of good ideas. And we're going to try to get as many of those good ideas into the version one of this feature as we can. But also, think there needs to be a balance to that we don't want Rock to be a volunteer scheduling system. We want it to have a relationship management system that can also schedule volunteers. But that said, I think when we went into this feature, we were thinking a very simple feature. We've already blown that out. it's probably four times bigger than we thought we were initially we're gonna do. And I think all those decisions were good and valid, but we're kind of going through that. So if you are interested in looking at that, go out to our GitHub repository, look in the issues. It's kind of weird to have something in the issues list that's not really an issue. It's more of a collaborative discussion. Yeah. But that's what issues in GitHub are really for. It's more than just a bug report. Sometimes it's to talk about a feature and just search for volunteer scheduling, you'll see it and you can kind of read through that. But we'll actively start development on that in probably the next week. Yeah, and we've already started dissecting into components and starting to understand the scope of it, lining up people who are gonna start working on it. Yeah, the blueprints are done, the permits vary, and we just need to break ground at this point. That's a good analogy. But I think because we've done so much pre work, feature from a development perspective should be done at a good clip, and we shouldn't have as many issues on that backside because we've preloaded a lot of planning and a lot of decision making. Now there is a lot of other things that we're thinking about trying to, , put in the v nine that that we're also working on because you can only have so many developers working on a project at once. Development's kinda some project management axioms. , one of them is if if you wanna have a baby in in four months, you can't add, , another woman. You at a certain point, you can't add people to project to speed it up. So that's the same thing with this one. So while some of our devs are working on that, the other devs will be working on some other features for v nine. And I would kind of transition maybe into the next topic. If you want to know more about those plans, we will be talking about that at our conference, Rx twenty eighteen, coming up in August. And I would highly recommend that you come not only to see and understand about where Rock is going, we'll be talking about that, but also to see what's been done. Think if you look back at what we've done as a community in the last twelve months, you'd be blown away, not only from the development perspective, but in terms of the projects that have been done in terms of how people are using the product. I keep seeing these projects, and it's blowing me away. And those are going be shared at RX twenty eighteen. There's over 60 sessions. We are doing a very small portion of those. A lot of those are going to be from the community sharing what they're doing. And you're going to get a lot of moments of stuff that you could do probably all the way back in version four, but now you're seeing the recipe and the practical use of that. And you're , that's brilliant. So you're gonna get so much knowledge from your peers. But we also have a lot of guest speakers who also are gonna blow you away. I'm so excited about hearing from some of them. We have someone who's going be talking about personality tests, and you're going to get some hints of where we're going with that. And you're going to be able to talk to them. They're going to be available there. They're going to be able to tell you about where we're going, but then also you'll be able to work with them on your own. And that's just one. We're gonna talk about Wi Fi presence. There's gonna be tons of technology. And Emily's worked on getting some really good speakers in terms of communication and marketing that you'll be able to learn a lot with. , some of it won't be super detailed about Rock, but these are best practices that you should be doing in your communications and then following it up with how do you do that then in Rock. There'll be some great sessions on data. We have an expert coming from the BI perspective, sharing their experiences at some of the biggest churches in America, and then what they're doing from a consulting basis. So you'll be able to learn that. I mean, there's just so much content. Every day I'm on the phone or emailing or Slacking with people, and I'm , I'm always pushing the conference. And it's not because we want to increase our numbers, Ben, this, there's content here. You need to get this content. You have to be there. And then you throw on top of that the icing, which is meeting people, building relationships. And you need to go. You're going to learn so much in two days. And also one person cannot take this conference in by themselves. Yeah. It is gonna be overwhelming. If I have a fear about the conference, it might be that there's too much stuff. Yeah. FOMO. I already have the fear of missing out on sessions. That's what I've heard from the community too. They're looking at things going, I don't know how to pick between these three tracks. I want all the things at the same time. And the best thing I can tell them is bring your team. Yeah. Because you'll you'll wanna not only bring your team so you can hit the different tracks, but then when you get back home, you wanna have blocked out some time for a debrief with your team so that you can unpack all the stuff that you've learned and figure out a game plan, a game plan, right? And then you may want to have some time where you talk to your leadership about, hey, here's some stuff we learned and and we need to start incorporating this, we need to work on that, you're going to come away with the stuff that's going to help you set your goals for the next year. And, , honestly, it'll help you stop reinventing the wheel on some projects you're working on now, because other people are sharing their recipes, you can get your answers you need right there, and then see some directions on things you might really want to focus on going forward. Right. And we heard feedback last time that, , more sessions, we want to hear more tracks. And honestly, I think we might have You got it. We always take your feedback. And we always revamp this event based on what community needs are. And we always raised the bar. We We raised the bar high on this one. We pushed it way up there. Days of small Rock conference are sadly behind us. Yeah, and even the production quality. I'm , I'm blown away with some of production things that we're going be able to do that. I'm excited. Yes, if you've been to a previous Rock conference, this is kind of going to blow you away when you get there, think when you see it. If you've not been to a Rock conference, this is going to be the best event you can come to that we've ever had. Right. And we call it a Rock experience intentionally. We want you to One of the things about the conference is we want you to experience Rock too. See, we're we're gonna try out some new technologies there, which I'm a little nervous about because every time we try something a little new, you're you're always wondering in front of, Right. 500 people. That's always a little nervous. So there's a few things I'm really nervous about. But you'll be able to see it, try it, kind of an expo, you can kind of see all that stuff. And one little hint, last year, we kind of had to choose between some of the technology that we were able to show you and having a really cool check-in experience just because of the resourcing that we had at the time. So we've made strides in check-in. That's just a little hint. I won't say anything else. But every year we go in with 20 things we want to show off and then by the time we do have to bring it down. There's even some stuff that we already have planned for 2019. That's true. So yes, so keeping that budget in for your staff is good. And remember that you need more people this year than you had last year. So if you've registered just yourself, go pull up the schedule, which is online. It's sortable. It's really nice. You can filter by things and see the different tracks, and just determine whether or not you think you're gonna be able to take that in by yourself or whether you need to get somebody else registered for that. Again, it's August. Do not travel on the twentieth. Do not travel on the twenty first. You're going to miss the good stuff if you do that. Travel on the nineteenth and the twenty second. And then use your evenings to connect with the community and the partners who are there because you'll, you won't regret that. That's a great investment. And it is at Southeast Christian. I mean, that's a church you should visit. That's right. I mean, they've innovated so many things in the past, in the future. I mean, it's a church I've always wanted to go visit. For some reason, in thirteen years in the church world, it's just one I've never gotten to. So I'm excited to finally get to take it in and see firsthand the stories that I've heard about for the last ten years. And it's a lot of work for their teams too, to to host this event. So this is a this is a big deal. There's some home home Rock pride because they were one of the original, , helpers. And I remember Chris Page at a church IT network conference, , telling everybody that's a project we all had to get behind, guys. And And Tom Powers has been in in our community forever. Forever. Yes. And We love those guys. Yep. So this is a really exciting experience for us. And, , one reason that I really love the conference, and actually this podcast too, but in the conference, we have more time and can go deeper, is because there are a lot of things that to the community, the there's not a lot of visibility into what the core team's doing just because we don't have a lot of time. We do our best to keep things transparent and open, but the amount of time it takes to say, , this little thing's going on or that little thing's going on, we kinda look , I think, the duck floating on the water. Right? And we're heading in a general direction, and people are , what's taking so long? Get a move on, duck. Right? So that's what we look in a lot of cases. But, we're furiously paddling under the surface. So that's what is not visible. We give it out a little podcast. But at the conference, you'll see all these things that have been done because we're paddling as fast as we can. So we're really taking this from the the, ShoreCam, right, where you're checking the duck out on the ShoreCam across the lake and going up close and underwater with the underwater camera. And so you'll see what's going on. This is the chance to do that. And I really that event. You could take your analogy and just take that duck, douse it in gasoline and light it on fire. That's how I feel. Most of the time, we're blazing fire running across the water. And yeah, that's how I feel, guess. That's true. But the external perspective, I think sometimes can be , that duck's just floating out there. The duck's going somewhere really fast. Sometimes it's on fire. Why is it smoking? Interesting. Roasted duck. Yeah. I'm hungry. We should have roast duck at the event. We should not. So that kind of leads into another topic, which is our team is always furiously paddling. And you may have seen some announcements about some staff hires recently, We've had quite a few of them come out back to back. Some of these we've been working on for months and known about, and it just the timing lined up to be sort of altogether. Some of them have just been a natural progression of what was going on. And it does not indicate a lack of furious paddling. We're still furiously paddling even with everyone here, even if they were onboarded super quickly, which, , for the most part is going really, really well. It's just that there is still so much work to do. The community is growing so fast. And I'm not sure our team will ever actually keep pace with that growth. We're always kind of lagging. But we had to move up and forward and make some adjustments in that this year, or, it just would have been impossible. The duck would have blown up. Yeah. And I think you're gonna see some of that in the metrics that we show at the conference. Yes. That's gonna be clear, it's gonna be amazing, the success that the community has achieved in the last year. And our team is still quite small for what is expected of us. So definitely, that's another reason to go to the conference. You'll get to see and hear what's going on. Yep. Sorry. I keep bringing that back. The DUC? Oh, the conference. The conference. Yeah. You can't bring the conference up too much. If you're not going, you should be going. It's too long to go. This community is going too fast. The technology is coming in too quickly to go twenty four months before you come back to the Rock Conference. As some people ask me, , how do I know what to budget for? Always budget for the Rock Conference. Always. You won't regret it. We hear a lot of feedback from a lot of churches. We've never ever heard that someone regretted coming or the number of people they brought. We have heard I didn't bring enough people and we have heard I really wish I had gone. One other event that a lot of people ask about is our masterclass. We hold a masterclass here at the Spark Development Network headquarters about three times a year, and they're limited in size. They're led by the core team. We have a lot of really great inside information. We have a curriculum that has been developed with a lot of blood, sweat and tears is kept up to date with everything that's going on, and is extremely valuable in getting the most out of your Rock experience. So I wonder why you would go into Rock as a new organization and not send someone to be trained at a core team masterclass. It seems you're kind of setting yourselves up for a painful start. And we have another one coming up here in September. The dates are the eighteenth through the twentieth in Arizona. It's an excellent thing to send your database administrators to the people who have to be really deep in Rock. We usually have between one and three people from an organization that will come to a masterclass. And that seems to be a really good fit for most organizations. But take a look, it's online, rockrms.com/masterclass. The registration is there. The information is there. We're always happy to answer questions about it. Our class of alum is really growing, and you can see the benefit to that in the Slack community. So not only are you doing a major benefit to yourself and your church, but in the whole community benefits as we kind of elevate the level of education and insight into how Rock works. So you should come to that too. I think we have exhausted the updates for today. I'm exhausted. You're also on fire. Yeah. Yes, I am. I think this duck analogy might live on. I think it might. Somebody grab a bucket. Yeah, sorry about that. I don't know how I get this in my head. I'm , if people could live in my head, they'd probably be scared to tap. It reminds me of a Whitney Houston song, This duck is on fire. We have a new theme song. Can we have you walk in at the conference to that song? how in the movie she just starts with that, Yeah. Power ball. Yeah. That how is on fire. We need to consider reconsider the opening to our conference. Yeah. If anybody has singing skills, please email Emily at Oh, I thought you were gonna be doing it. Nah. I don't know if they have the Whitney thing on. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. I hope I don't have the Whitney thing going on. Not today anyway. Yeah. Okay. That's good. I just don't know if I have that diva in me. We are so far behind the scenes now. We've got to cut this off before we get scary. Yes. Yeah. Thanks for joining us again for another ROTCast podcast. 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? 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