Podcast Episode 44: Episode 18: Ask the Architects

Description

Have a chance to 'Ask the Architects' in this episode of the ROCKCast podcast.

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 our eighteenth episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily. I'm part of the Spark team. I work with our financials as treasurer and with our churches, donors and people in general. So I'm kind of the people person here at Spark. And let's go around and introduce who else is here. How about you start, John? Okay. I'm John. I'm part of the core team working on development and other activities. AKA mad scientist? Whatever you want. I feel this is the episode on Survivor where that fill gives everybody a code word for the secret agent. I don't if anybody watches Survivor, but anybody who does would know what that reference was about. I'm David Turner. I work with Sean on the core team and Emily, and, just do a lot of developing. What's his? What's my code word? Don't you have one? From your slides, 02/2009? Oh, gosh. That's 2009? Yes. A lifetime ago. Seven years ago. Yeah. Okay. I don't remember. We'll look it up for next time. I'm Nick Airdo. I work at Central Christian Church, and I just do some miscellaneous tasks here at Spark, but I'm primarily at Central doing Rock stuff. And brought a guest. We have a special guest. That's right. Taylor. Yep. I'm Taylor Cavalletto. I work alongside Nick at central Christian church, just helping roll out Rock. And you just happen to be in the area and decide to stop by. Yep. Cool. Thanks for thanks for joining It's good. We have a full team here around the microphone today. So let's talk about the conference first. I'm really excited about that. Yeah. Yes. Yes. If you've not had a chance to sign up or register for the conference yet, do it. Let's get your stuff in order. We have a really fun conference coming up in August in LA at Bel Air Church. Thank you Bel Air! We're going to have a great location for that this year and it is August. Register soon to get the early bird pricing locked in. It's at $3.49 right now. It will be going up by $50 so you'll want to get going on that soon. Also, if your organization would to be a sponsor at the conference, we'd love to have you. You can go to our conference page to register a sponsor or as an attendee. And that's rockrms.comrx2016, which is the name of the conference. We have some pretty cool things going on this year. John, you wanna give a little sneak peek? Sure. I think as we get closer to the conference, we're brainstorming different ideas and obviously a lot of it, we want it to be community, support as people get up there, talk about how they're using Rock, different ideas, different things that they had, lesson learns. A lot of people are working on custom packages and custom plugins. We'd love to have that be demoed. But as we get closer, we think of more and more things that we want to talk about. And we have some really cool announcements that we wanna make at the conference this year. And it's hard not to even wanna talk about them now. But we're not going to. We're not going to, right. But there's some really cool things and some cool technologies, cool directions, cool innovations that I think you guys are really going to love to see. And we can't wait to show them at Rock Rx twenty sixteen. I almost said '15. I'm still living in 2015. So, yeah, so it's going be an exciting conference. Don't miss it. Nick, we had an interesting situation come up this week, right? We had a question submitted that we want to just create a whole new segment around. Yeah. We're gonna start something called ask the architects. So if you have a question that you'd to ask the architects, go ahead and drop it into the core weekly question on the Slack channel. So this week, this question was about the design of well, let me just read it. It says currently for every person in the database, there are four additional records created, a known relationship group and a group member record with the person as the owner. There's also an implied relationship group with the group member record with the person as the owner. In fact, there's another set that isn't mentioned here. It's the family. A family group is created with the person in there as well. So they were asking about after they imported 250,000 records, there were a million records total. So we thought we would cover that today. John, do you wanna Yeah. Explain that? Question was, , , why create them when you don't need them? Why not create them as you need them? And actually, in Rocket, if you don't make those, it will actually create them for you on the person profile page. But there's a lot of other pages that assume that those models exist and may not consider that they don't exist. So there's really two schools of thoughts. One is create them as you need them. The other is just create them ahead of time. And we've chosen to create them ahead of time. There's some performance reasons for that. It's a little faster. But it's really the other reason, which is we don't want to have to always be checking in every single place that assumes they're created, that they actually exist. Especially if you consider if you're a SQL person and maybe you're trying to put in some implied relationships or known relationships, it would be a real pain to every time you're trying to do an insert to have to assume that, do I need to check if that group exists? If it isn't there, create it. From a SQL perspective, that would be pretty tricky. But we also have to consider every other plug in developer, module developer out there that are they gonna know to do that? Some of that we could abstract into the service layer. But at the same time, we don't always know what they're going to do. I think that's what really makes Rock tricky is that not only do we have to program in this for what is best and easiest for us, but we also have to consider every other developer out there and their needs, their skill set, and what do we even have to document for them. Sometimes we'll do things a little bit harder for us, but we're , yeah, we'll never have to document that, though. , it'll just automagically work, and they don't have to worry about that teeny tiny detail. So there's a lot that goes in to Rock. It certainly would be much easier to write this if it was for one church on one server, and we never had to worry about migrations and That would be the easy button. Right. Or even some of the hosted solutions. They get to have to worry about a lot of details that they only they need to know. But we don't have that luxury. We have to write everything that there could be hundreds of developers on thousands of servers who knows what they've done to their database, some things probably good and expected and a lot of things not good and not expected that we have to still jump through hoops on. But I think that's a good question. Think it kind of goes down to, there's two different ways. Why is it this way versus another way? I realize it probably seems somewhat inefficient in terms of database use because we've created a million records that perhaps would think over time, though, those records would be needed. And I think if you have a database where you are putting 250,000 people, to create a few of these little text records, mean, it's literally a couple probably mad in the grand scheme of things. It's probably not, , trade off is probably not that bad. But it's a good question. I mean, if you wanna be pure and efficient, I could see why that would seem somewhat inefficient. And because we don't have time to answer these sorts of questions all the time, we'll try to collapse them into these podcasts. Yeah, I think it's a great opportunity. I mean, I think what people don't realize is a number of channels that we get these types of questions on a weekly basis, even on a daily basis. I mean, there's Slack. There's a lot of private Slack messaging going on back and forth with questions this. And sometimes it gets very overwhelming because we wanna be responsive, we wanna explain and help, but at the same time, we literally have two jobs. We have the job of helping the core and the community and the job of paying the bills and doing the consulting. And not that we're trying to, , get out of either, but there's some days where it just feels very overwhelming. We're rarely sitting around twiddling our thumbs. Yeah. My thumbs are very out of shape right now because they've not been twiddled in many years. But I hope to get back to that someday. Maybe in retirement, I'll get back to. Thumb twiddling. Yeah. Yeah. They're they're kinda lean thumbs. They need to get extra meat to them. So anyway, if you want to submit a question to get, considered for the podcast, do that through the core weekly question, on the Slack channel. And then we will pull them from there. John will with his thumbs. Yeah. I'm thinking about some kind of thigh master for the thumbnail. It's , how can we market this? Maybe there's a YouTube video. John has a third job now. That's right. Just inquiring minds want to know. Suzanne Somers might need another job. Good. What about the next release of Rock or Patch? We'll let David handle that one. That would be version 4.6. That will probably go to alpha end of next week or around that time frame. And it's primarily made up of issues that have been reported in GitHub. One of them being group security, and there's a little bit of discussion about that in Slack. So there's a fix to that. And then it's really the rest of it is just issues that have been reported. So that should go to alpha next week and probably debate a week or so after that. I think that that group discussion was a really positive and and great discussion. I mean, love that part of the community where we can get input on I mean, that turned out to be part bug, part architectural clarification. , I think we even clarified a few little things in that, but it just makes the product so much better when there's that kind of collaboration innovating. Right, there was quite the whiteboard discussion here in the office and going back and forth. So it's not just something that was lightly thrown out there. Yeah, that was, I mean, just from the dialogue, I hope we didn't feel we weren't being super jump on that, but we were trying to figure it out and look at, okay, A, it looks there's a bug, we had to figure that out. B, we had to look back to , why did we make those decisions and try to relearn why it was that way. And once we got that, then we thought, well, that's actually pretty much right, except A, there was a little bit of a bug and B, there's minor tweaks to some of the considerations now that we've had a little bit more time in actual practical use. But it's great that we can have those conversations, that we can work together with a larger set of community involvement, and that only makes the product better. So that was actually kind of a fun thing, I thought. And speaking of the community working together, what are some other ways that we can help move Rock Forward as a community? Yeah, this came up in our little group at Central where we've seen we're all dealing with this right now. We'll have a church contact us. Somehow they found out we're using Rock and they are looking for assistance. So I know John, you've fielded some of these questions from your local churches. Oh, yeah. I mean, we do this all the time. That's part of the other things that people probably don't see is that we are helping in a lot of ways that probably isn't publicly known, not because we don't want to be public, but they come to us in a private way. So we just take care of it in a private way. Right. And so when these churches approach you guys, we also encourage you to definitely take an extra step and lend them a hand and , answer their questions. Don't don't hard sell Rock. But if if they're asking about help to move to Rock, definitely point them to the right resources or actually go and help them. And I would just to point out Derek is a community member doing that for several other churches in our area down in the East Side Of The Valley. Yeah. And sometimes that's in person, and a lot of times that's in Slack, and a lot of times it's on the Q and A. I mean, there there's a couple of guys that's really hitting out of the park on the Q and A site, , Jim Michaels and David Lay. I mean, I can imagine not having them doing what they're doing in the Q and A. It's such a relief to go through the digest real quick and just say, okay, who? There's people taking care of these folks because I'd probably crack if I had to also do that. And I know we've talked in the past that there is a tidal wave coming and it is coming. We're really close to having a few emails go out to church networks of literally tens of thousands of people that are gonna be talking about Rock. And as a community, if we're not ready for that, we will topple over. And we have some strategies before those emails go to more podcasts and a couple blog posts on things we actively need from the community when those go out. And we have some strategies about how we can work together to kind of help that and be very strategic and effective and efficient on how we do that. So we're working on some plans there and we'll be sharing those as we get closer to seeing those emails. But it also this whole conversation reminds me of a podcast I was listening to this week and probably several people out there probably listened to the same podcast. But it was talking about this guy who had crazy enough, he decided he's very rich. Let me start with that. He's very rich and he decided that he wanted to have a Navy SEAL come live with him for, I think, thirty days in his house. And he met this guy who's so impressed with him. He thought, Hey, I'm gonna get this guy to come live with me for thirty days because I want to amp up my game. And this is a guy who's already a high performer. he's a self made millionaire and thought, I'm gonna do this. So the first day, he has the guy say, Well, if you want to amp up your game, we're gonna go do some pull ups. And this guy, he's pretty good shape. He runs marathons. So he goes down into those little workout room and he does eight good pull ups, which doesn't sound a lot, but if you do pull ups, that's not bad. Most people can't even do one. So he does eight and he says, Okay, that's all I can do. And the Navy SEAL tells him, We're not leaving this room until you do 100 pull ups. The guy's , We're never gonna leave this room. Literally, we're never gonna leave this room. He's , Well, I'm sorry, you're not gonna leave this room until you do 100 pull ups. And so he just kind of keeps going and one and two at a time, sometimes they weren't very great ones, but in two hours, he did 100 pull ups. Wow. Basically, the lesson that he learned, and it's actually backed up by a lot of behavioral science studies, is our mind is really sensitive to uncomfort. And basically, our mind will kick in and say, We can't do this. We're tired. It's too hard. We don't know enough. It's beyond our capabilities way before we have actually met capacity. In fact, the studies show that we usually stop doing something or give up doing something only when we hit about 40% capacity. And this Navy SEAL had learned that. He's basically, I can do anything. I just need to keep doing it and stop listening to my mind. In fact, this Navy SEAL ran, in fact, that's how they met, a twenty four hour running race. Wow. The millionaire was running it as a tag team with a group of four or five other people. The Navy SEAL ran it all by himself. He ran nonstop for twenty four hours. Partway through the race, actually broke his foot and kept running. I think he pretty much collapsed at the end, but still the point is our mind says, I'm tired mentally. I'm tired physically, but we still have a lot more in us. And you guys know, there's days you just get a lot of stuff done and you're , just push through, just get done, keep working, go, go. And you get a lot of stuff done. I think this is more about how do we do that? We have goals. We all know how many blog posts we have in our minds for Shoulder the Boulder or what plugins we want to publish in the store. But we also know that there's mental barriers that we need to jump over to get those done that we need to read that package documentation one more time and just do it and then submit it. And then we need a graphic for it, cause we need to put in the Rock. Just do it. Just get it in there. We just need to push through and do it. Or the shoulder of the border blogs that we just need to do it. , I know we want to say tomorrow. Now I'm signing this to Shia LaBeouf. I was gonna say I could play that video for you. But Just just do it. , don't do it tomorrow. Do it today. , you might even be listening to this. It's a Friday. You maybe you're driving home, just do it. You can go home and have your Friday date night and then go home and finish the blog post or package it, set the goal and do it. And I think that just reminded me how much more I can get done too. I mean, I was using that even last night. I had my goal of what I wanted to get done after the kids went to bed and I got that done. I got three other things done. And part of me was , I'm tired. I'll finish doing the documentation for this module that we're trying to get in the store. , I can probably finish up this weekend. I'm , I'm just doing it I'm just going to get it done. And then I'll , Okay, it's done. I'll PDF it and I'll put it up into the store, FTP and put up in the store this week. Know I'm going to do it. And I just kept going. And I wasn't up all night, but it didn't really take that much time. Was just more about just continuing and doing it. And so I thought that was a good lesson. It kind of tied in with to what Nick was saying about just getting out there and helping people. And it kind of helps you too, because now that's not hanging out in the back of your brain or hitting your to do list every day. You start feeling guilty about that. It starts hanging over your head. It's just one of those drags. It's a good feeling to get that just done. Yeah. And they say that actually the best thing you can do when you wake up in the morning is make your bed because you've actually accomplished something. And having that small accomplishment has now set your day up for more accomplishments. But when you don't have an early accomplishment in the day, it's sometimes harder to have that accomplishment mentality through the rest of the day. So make your bed. I sound your mom. See what you'd miss if you didn't listen to the podcast, John's Thumbs Bed Making. Navy Seals with Broken Feet. Yeah. What other awkward things can we talk about? We won't go there. Yeah. Well, that's probably enough today. I've had enough. Wait. We're only at 40% capacity. We this podcast is actually 40% done. I thought we were gonna have a short one this week. It's probably best to make it short. Alright. Well, let's wrap up with a prayer. Sounds good. Do we know the status on RealLife Ministries? I know there was a A delay on launch a little bit. Yeah. Mean, Nick's son out Not sure right now. Okay. So just general prayers for him as I do that. Anything else you wanna add to the prayer? Otherwise, I'm going off the board. I think overall, , continued vision on the on the on the project. Okay. So I was thinking through the the kind of topic list for today. , one thing I I forgot to put on the list, but I was thinking about was just, , giving and not to spark, but just giving in general for churches and some of the interesting conversations, , we've had. , there's more opportunities this week to actually partner with some more giving vendors where they wanted us to take a piece of the giving. It was really hard to say no, but we did. I think that's kind of a point for celebration is that sometimes I think through this process, get not tempted in a bad way, because it's not the giving vendor, they're not doing anything wrong. I wanna make sure I'm clear about that, but we have the opportunity to , I say break our core values, but stretch them. Yeah, rename them. Yeah, rename them was it Semantics, right? Right, but I feel proud as a team that we didn't do that. , we know we need the funding, but we're not gonna do that. , we're not gonna give in. Which remind me of another conversation I had yesterday with another giving partner who actually saved a church. They're going to save that church $200,000 in giving and transaction fees every year. Wow. 200,000. I was , blown away. I'm , that's a couple pastors you can purchase now to make real life, life eternity changing things because that vendors help save them money in transactions. , that's what it's all about. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess that's I think the continued prayer that when these things come up, we kind of keep on the right road. Definitely. I think that's why it's nice to have a team because if either one of any one of us had to make those decisions, it'd easier than them. As a team, it's we help remind each other. Cool. Well, I'm gonna do that. Let's do it right now. Father, I just thank you again for the strength that you've made with this team and letting us kinda get through that temptation and hold out for you and the funding that you're bringing to this project. We just wanna be faithful to everything we've said. Lord, for, we just really appreciate real life ministries and how they put a person and their family first above the implementation of a of the system. So we wanna honor and respect that, and we just ask for the blessings on that church. And then for all the other churches up here that I'm looking at that are in implementation phase, Lord, we just ask that you would bless their time and give them the wisdom and energy to get through the hurdles of implementation if they have any. And, otherwise, we just ask that you just bless that church and their desire to bring in a system Rock to save money and allow them to innovate in ways that they just couldn't do otherwise. We just thank you again for all that you've given us and in your son's name. Amen. 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.