Podcast Episode 64: Episode 37: Special Edition Garrett Johnson

Description

Garrett Johnson has recently joined Spark! In this episode, we interview him to help you get to know him better.

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 the special edition of the Rockcast. This is a profile edition where we go and meet some of the people behind what Rock is doing, from our team, eventually from our community. And, it's a great time to get to really know the people whose names and faces you see, online or once a year at the conference and find out what makes them tick. So today, I'm Emily. I'm and John is here with us as usual, and we're interviewing Garrett Johnson, who recently joined the Spark team and is working with us. Well, let's let him tell you what he's doing here. Garrett, what are you doing on the Spark team? So I'm here doing web development work for Spark, which means the user interface and the user experience for a lot of the core product, so the components that people are interacting with every day. Really excited about improving those and continuing to iterate based on feedback from the community and best practices. Great. And how long have you been doing this kind of work? Wow. Been doing web development in one way or another for the last, oh goodness, probably over a decade somehow. Fell into it right after high school working for my dad's company and kinda learned all along the way. Self taught, didn't go to school for it, but love it. Great. Well, we're really excited to have you on the team. And as we sit here on a lovely April day in Phoenix, you are not a native Phoenician, but you are familiar with the desert. Right? Yeah. So I'm from Fresno, California, which is in the heart of California's Central Valley. So it gets up to 110 there, but it's nothing quite the dry, dry, dry heat of Phoenix, which I'm coming to love. Good. Don't say that before July. Oh, yeah. I'm not ready for soft asphalt, which is something I've been told to look out for. As long as you're not wearing high heels, you'll be okay. Pat, put away the straw out of this. I've never had that problem. Okay, well, maybe it's just me. Alright, well, why don't you tell us a little about the story of how you came to join the Spark staff? So it was time to make a change, started looking at other jobs all over the place. Spark reached out to me as they found out that I was doing that. And the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Interviewed and made the move to Spark. Really excited, coming from a church that I love and learned a lot. And honestly, I got to experience the introduction to Rock because of the church that I was coming from. So really thankful for that, but I said, it was time to make the change and this couldn't have worked out better. Yeah, mean, think the timing is perfect. Even though you've only been here two weeks, I mean, impact you've already had on a lot of the features that we're working on and the velocity of these projects is amazing. Yeah, we've really seen things kick up in that area that have been kind of lingering and been difficult for us to circle back to because it's just been we've been so stretched thin. And even just I mean, God's timing is so perfect. I mean, Mike literally was working on group history. So from a senior development perspective, getting all that data in the right place, and it was literally almost to the day that of your first day that it was ready for someone to start working on the UI. And just how all that alignment works is just amazing. So what is it that you're most excited about about this position? So we're hearing you're doing UI, you're doing web design, seems there's a full range of things. What is most exciting about it? Well, I absolutely love building systems that help churches to thrive. I love the ins and outs of creating something that is repeatable and usable across organizations. That was what I was super passionate about in every role that I've been in in my career, is how do you make something that is replicatable across entire organizations and across people groups? Because when you can do that, you can multiply the effectiveness of your church. And that's the power of Rock. That's what brought me here ultimately is that passion for great systems that care for people. Because when that happens, the church is unstoppable and so excited about where Rock is pushing that and where the churches and the community are pushing that because without them, obviously, this is just a software platform, but when there's innovation that's coming from churches, there's really something special going on in this community. I think that's one of the uniquenesses, is that when a church signs on, they have the ability to help push the innovation, either through projects they work on and share with other people, or by working directly to put some of those features in the core. And I think that's something that I've never seen before. And you said, it's not really a software platform as much as it is a community. We're all working together to push this forward. Yeah, the iteration that happens on features, even when I was in the community, there's nothing quite it. Because you don't have the opportunity to normally go back with a vendor and be , Okay, well, let's tweak that so that it better meets the needs of this subset of people. But by being involved in the Slack community and being involved on GitHub and coming to the conference, there's so much that you realize, oh, we're not unique in this. And that's been so helpful, realizing that while the process of an individual church might look different, we're not as unique as we think. We want to care about people, we want to love people, we want the mission of the church to reach people with the gospel to thrive. And that's the same at every church. So with that kind of heart, you can't stop what's going on in this community. And it's interesting to see too, in the secular world, someone might , improve their checkout experience slightly and that gives them an edge over their competitors. And in the church world, they they want to do the same thing the first part, but then when they do it, they want to give it out to as many people as possible. I mean, that that's it's cool to see that we're all working to constantly make things better, but the radical thing is that we want to constantly share that to everybody so that it's not from a competition perspective, it's from a sharing perspective. It's interesting to see that. Even with some these, , what I might call a micro change, it makes something a little bit better, but not everybody gets it. And I think that's what's really unique about the church community. It's not the competition, it's just really raising the excellence bar for everyone. Right. Yep. That's very cool. So, Garrett, your perspective of recently being inside of a church and working there, but inside the Rock community, and now being part of the CORE team still inside the Rock community sounds a really great one that churches could benefit from. Will we be hearing from you at the conference that comes up this year? Yeah, I'm excited to be talking on a whole slew of topics with web development and email design, which I'm both really passionate about. And Rock really brings some unique features that I haven't seen many other platforms use. And to have churches be able to take advantage of that in terms of customization especially is gonna be really exciting. I get a lot of questions frequently related to moving someone's website onto Rock. It seems a lot of churches started out with saying, I need a database system that I can report off of. And oh, these are great features, let's add the feature sets. And then they're circling back around a year or two later, and wanting to take that power to the next step and power their website based off of Rock. So I do hear a lot of questions about that. It sounds the content's going be pretty heavy in that direction at the conference this year. Yeah. We're going try to make it accessible for both developers and church staff where features are gonna continue to be added and improved upon so that it's accessible to all churches, and really just taking a deep dive at the conference on how to make that happen for churches of the 50 to 50,000. Narrow range, narrow range. Yeah, yeah, that's just our market, right? That's great. The timing on that is absolutely perfect. What projects have you been working on for Rock? You've touched a little bit on some of those, but, , tell us a little bit about what you're doing now, what you're gonna be doing that's coming up. So right now, we're finishing up the group timeline feature where you're gonna be able to see a history of everything going on inside of groups along with a view of the groups that someone was involved with on their profile. Really excited about how that works and the visibility that it's gonna provide churches into their data. Beyond that, working on a lot of the website stuff, so starting to look at getting themes back into the community so that more churches can understand that there is life beyond Stark. Yes, thank you. Thank you. So yeah, that'll be really exciting as that evolution happens. Yeah, I love the fact that you have such a depth of skills and knowledge that we can take these features, which might be 80% there, and take it the full way, and then back up and start working on the documentation and the discoverability of how stuff works. Because I think that's almost half the picture. , okay, so it might be there, but what does it do and how do I use it? I love the fact that we're gonna get really polish out the features, but also start getting more content out there about how to use these features. Absolutely. The documentation is such a huge part of how I came into the Rock community because there weren't local Rock churches for me back when we started. And that's so exciting and important just from my perspective, looking at the documentation and going , how do we make sure that this is a great experience for everyone, even the person that's brand new to Rock, so that they have an amazing time with the platform. That's great. So we know what you do in your on time at work, but what are some of your hobbies? What are things you enjoy doing on your own? So I've absolutely followed wow. Absolutely I've fallen in love with Rock climbing. So How fitting. Yeah. Falling and Rock climbing, is that a good It's terrifying. I don't there's there's a thing called bouldering that all of my friends got me into. And when you're 15 feet up the wall, that's the point that I know you shouldn't be falling, but you kinda have to at points because otherwise, well, you'll just skin up your face. I've never had a desire to do that. For some reason, I'm doing Rock climbing. Love that. And yeah, that's the new passion of late. I think we would have accepted your application a lot faster if we'd known that was your main hobby. Can we bring a Rock wall to the conference? Can I get a firm commitment right now? We'll have to circle back to that. It is right in theme, though. Tell us a little bit about your family. Grew up in Fresno, born and raised. Have two excellent siblings, brother Jonathan and sister Emily, who just got engaged. Ironic. Not to each other. No, thank goodness. It sounded a little I'm just Just circling back there. Wow. Yeah. And I work for John and Emily now, so that's that's pretty great. Parents both in Fresno as well and, yeah, love them to death. That's great. Yeah, so are we your older brothers and sisters? You're my younger brothers and sisters. I'm the oldest of three. Not here. Officially am Jonathan. I mean, that's my real name. And I'm officially Emily. Yeah, always have been, right? Yes. Tough guess. It's good. Well, we're really excited to have you on the team. Thanks for taking the time to share with the rest of the community a little bit about what makes you you and what you're bringing to the team, which is a really strong skill set. Awesome. Thanks for having me. And today's show was produced by Emily Forman. And Nick was our audio engineer. He does all the processing of the audio. And Jim Michael does all the editing of the audio. And our amazing show notes are typed up and put together by Michael Harrison. And 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.