Podcast Episode 51: Episode 25: Bugapalooza One

Description

Hear about Bugapalooza One our first, 12 hour, community bug squashing fest and learn about the upcoming Rock Master class offering.

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 today's episode of the Rockcast. We are here to discuss what is new in the Rock community and in the core development of Rock. Have a couple of great opportunities and some interesting information about what's on the horizon. I'm Emily. And today, we have Nick, John, and David, and we are going to to kinda give you a peek behind the curtains. So, John, we've got a really exciting opportunity coming up for the first time this May. Why don't you tell us about that? Yeah. So we're putting on our first, series of master classes. And this is a concept and an idea that we've been wanting to do for actually a couple years. And we just thought it was time now that there was enough, interest and enough people in the community, to put it on. So we're hosting a three day event where people come to the Spark offices, and we put on a really detailed, , deep down in the weeds, how does Rock work, everything you'll need to to know to be a successful administration or administrator. This isn't a developer's, class. This is a administration class. And it's not meant for all your end users. It's just meant for the two, , maybe in a smaller church, one Rock administrator to learn everything about groups, check-in people, everything really inside of Rock. I think the surprising thing is that we put the first class out there and it filled up almost immediately. So we did open up a second class right after, and that one, we still have a little bit of space, but it's going quickly. So if you're interested in that, I would definitely sign up as soon as possible. And for those of you in the community who maybe are Rock stars and and maybe don't need that class, we still need your help in one thing, and that's really communicating that these classes exist. So when you're in Slack and you're talking to people via email or maybe even direct messaging, please feel free to to, , make sure they understand that the master class exists. Don't take it for granted that they already know about it. So help us spread the word, with that. And, this sounds a, , small thing, just, , some classes, but it's actually a big thing. The more of these folks that we can personally train and get them a complete understanding of Rock, and really a lot of the philosophy of, , how do you set up reporting and and how do you set up check-in the right way, the stronger the community will be. So this is a manufacturing class of Rock stars, a future Rock stars. So we're really excited about it. And it's so much more than just a class. Right. It is more than a class. What does the learning environment look ? That's a good question. So it's gonna be fairly intense. There'll be a there'll be a presentation session. So teacher led conversations for about an hour, a little bit more than an hour. And then after each hour or a little bit more than an hour segment, there's gonna be a set of exercises that really enforces and makes concrete what you've learned. And that also gives you the opportunity to actually do it when we're still around to help you. So those exercise sessions will be not just you just working alone, but you working with some of the other people in the class and then also with us. Just to make sure that you understand it. I think more questions and more understanding will actually come from those exercises than from actually the whiteboard or the or the PowerPoint driven, learning. So we're really excited about that concept. We've prototyped it a few times in a smaller way, with a with a couple churches. So this is really gonna be taking it to the next level. And you mentioned that one of the classes had filled up. What's the class size? Yeah. Class size is limited to 12. Okay. And that's key because we really wanna have that low teacher to to student ratio so that we can, we do the exercises that there's plenty of one on one time to answer questions. And it allows us to also have a few more questions that might be slightly targeted towards your environment. , if we had 20, we couldn't do that. We basically say you can't ask any specific questions. But we have that smaller class size that really allows us to really personalize it. And I think another thing, we're all about community, right? So those 12 people are going to be developing intense community over three days of not only working together and learning together, but there's gonna be a lot of relationship building there too. And we also plan for those 12 folks too to have time where after the sessions or even in the mornings before the sessions that that we can meet with them one on one if that's something that they want. Oh, great. So there will be a chance to to learn some of the inside tips and tricks directly from the core team. Right. Now we have limited time, but we wanna make sure that there's, , as much of that time as we can to to have some one on one too. Plus, , you get to see where we work, you get to see, , how we live in this environment and and see some of the things behind the scenes, which is I always think is kinda fun. Well, there is a link on our homepage that you can use to get to this class to register. John said, we are filling up quickly, you'll wanna make sure and grab that spot, pretty soon. It takes a little while to get your travel booked and things and and, the class is coming up. The one that's available is May. So check your calendars or go ahead and start talking to the people who might, benefit greatly from this class and, this is not really something you can delay on. Yeah. So that is our closest opportunity that's coming up for a little bit of training and for the Rock community, but we have another opportunity coming up that I know everybody's been excited to hear about and that's the conference. So we've just touched on that a little bit in the past and we have a little bit, more to tell you about that today. Our conference will be in late August and it's going to be at Willow Creek Community Church. We're really excited about this venue location. We are going to have two tracks at the conference. One for people who are really familiar with Rock and and a part of the community, probably a lot of our listeners today, and one for people who are exploring Rock and wanna learn a little bit more. So we have definitely information and, great community activities for everyone altogether. Maybe half of the conference or so will be broken out and the rest will have a chance to interact really well together. But there's definitely something for everybody at whatever your level is and we would encourage you to start, working on getting that in your budget, getting that approved, and registering. The we do have an early bird rate that's, available right now, and again, that has a time limit on it. So you'll wanna make sure and and get that, registered pretty quickly. And if you happen to be a vendor in the Rock community or one of our Rock partners, don't forget that sponsorship is a really great opportunity to interact face to face with the Rock community and share how you can help them and what you're doing to innovate in the Rock space. We've had a lot of positive feedback from our vendors last year about how much they enjoyed and how much they benefited from a sponsorship at the conference. So that's another great opportunity that's coming up. I noticed there's been some some questions too on Rx twenty seventeen if we're gonna be doing live streaming or or content. And we might live stream one or two of the sessions, and we definitely will be trying to get the content out for a subscription we did with 2016. I think the thing I wanna just kind of put out there too is that the conference isn't about content, it's about relationships. So if you get that content afterwards, that's that's that's good. That's beneficial. But it's really about relationships. So I would really And you have one shot really for the year for that. The conference is the time. It is the place. And you definitely understand and experience Rock differently when you're part of that community face to face. The whole rest of the year has a different feel to it. So Right. I agree. It's definitely a huge priority to be there in person if you can make it. Alright. We had, we've looked started looking into the way that we, handle bugs and the issues that come up, and we have we've tried a few things out lately and we have some good plans for the future. Nick, can you fill us in on some of that? Sure. With so much non developer activity being planned in the future, we sort of said, hey, what can we do for with our developers? There's a lot of unharnessed energy out there. And people have a desire to wanna do things, a lot of people were are off doing their own things. So we said, hey, let's round them all up, and let's for we initially wanted to do a twenty four hour bug marathon where we just squash bugs for twenty four hours. It ended up scaling back to twelve hours, which was good, and it was actually last Friday. Mhmm. So I thought it was pretty successful. We gathered I wanna say how many people were active at any one moment? Probably, , between seven or 10. And I think there were a total of, , 12 or 13 developer types and nondevelopers that were helping us deal with bugs. So it was a live all day thing from 6AM mountain time to 6PM. And during those, twelve hours, the community squashed basically 50 to 52 bugs. I know John, I think, submitted the last two bug fixes shortly after the the clock was officially stopped. Oh, there's a cut off? John didn't come in in time? You were , who puts a time line on that? I'm gonna keep working, man. John. But I thought it was pretty awesome. So it was almost a quarter, , close to a quarter of of the total bugs that are out there. Now all all of the issues that are in GitHub aren't actually bugs. A number of them are enhancement requests. So it was still a good a good day. Yeah. It was kinda cool to have a hangout going too and seeing people all over the country kinda just just working and just fixing bugs and verifying bugs and confirming they were fixed. And I think the big thing too is that I almost don't even want to talk about Bugapalooza. In the past. That was a one day event. But it's this isn't about a one day event. This is about a continuing effort to to to have the community help squash bugs. And I think it goes back to our whole strategy that this is a community led project. This is not a vendor led project or organization led project. We all own Rock. Right. And this is the ability for all of us to get in there and help. And it's not about only developers. Now developers have a huge role in helping with issues, but that's if you're not a developer, you can still greatly help us by confirming bugs and by marking them as, , confirmed. And then testing them too. , that's another big thing that we really need to get into our processes, someone to test these fixes. Because it's often, even a good developer, by fixing a bug, they introduce sometimes another bug or sometimes two. So the testing of those fixes is really important. So we're working on continuing that process. And so the process that we rolled out for Bugapalooza, if you were part of that, continue going. , the event is not over. Just pretend it's a perpetual Bugapalooza. We still want help. We still need help. Right. That's real a really good point. If you've got time on your hands, , you could you have two choices. You can go do do your own thing, or you can actually get involved and continue with what was started Friday and keep dealing with bugs and issues. And and some people have been doing that. Mean, there's already been pull requests coming in to fix issues all week. So Garrett, I think I saw something from And Trevor Tart's been working on some too. So keep that up. We still have your right access enabled. So if you need to tag and and close, you can. In GitHub. In GitHub. Yeah. So continue the process that we talked about at Bugapalooza, and we're working on finalizing that and maybe tweaking that and simplifying it a bit, as an ongoing. And if you have any questions about that, just feel free to, direct message me on Slack, Nick Airdo. And so I have a question. What if someone's hearing about this for the first time, didn't have a chance to participate in Bugapalooza last Friday? How do they get involved now? They could contact me directly. I'd be happy to work walk them through that. Or should we point them to the issues page? Yeah. I mean, they're they're go I would go to the Bugapalooza page. So that's rockrms.com/bugapalooza. And if you have a hard time spelling that I do, you can also use a slash issues. And that will show you the video that we were kind of working towards. And I think if you follow that video, you you will need to request access. I think there's a link on there to to get access into the GitHub. And we'll refine any information on that page if we change the process or adapt it. Yeah. Slash issues will live on after we finalize that. So we're still trying to figure it out. I mean, GitHub is not perfect in its security rights for issues. So we're trying to figure out different ways that we can kinda get where we wanna go. We haven't figured that out yet, but we're working on it. So the process is evolving, but please don't think we don't need your help because we're a small team and we definitely need your help. Yes. I mean, it goes back again to our strategy. This isn't about a vendor or one organization doing it. It's about community and, , that that's how we're gonna kinda make this successful. Great. So also coming out of Bugapalooza a little bit, have, , what are we doing with our fixes? How's that working? Well, we have 6.3 that will be coming out. So 6.2 was released, what, a month or two ago? Yeah. And we've been fixing things up even before Bugapalooza, but with Bugapalooza we got a lot of issues fixed. So a lot of those will make it into 6.3. We're already running with that in production with Rock and the Spark sites. Those changes are going to our pre alpha release this week. So other people will start using them, testing them, and then we should be packaging that up and sending it to Alpha by the end of next week. Okay. So then beta would follow that general release a couple weeks after that. Okay. So Alpha in the April? That's yes. Yeah. Today is the thirty first. Yeah. But you might be listening to it later. Yep. And there are some features in six three. I mean, typically we try not to put features into these patch releases, but because of how long seven is taking, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger, we are slip stripping a few small features into it that are needed by some folks in the community. Sort of features that are not really impacting other parts of Rock, would you say? Yeah. They're safe features, I would call And there's features that are just urgently needed by some to make their ministry goals. K. So Good. Well, that's exciting. I think that wraps it up for us here today. Thanks for joining us. Have a great day. 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.