I worked in children's ministry. Not as a developer. Not even close. My entire relationship with Rock RMS at the time was knowing which buttons to press on check-in Sunday so the right label printed and the right kid went home with the right family. That was the job. That was the whole thing.
I was good at it. Showed up early, kept the line moving, didn't panic when the printer jammed. Very normal staff stuff.
The label incident
Then I moved over to the membership department, and Rock stopped being a check-in screen and started being everything. Every workflow we touched, every report we ran, every list we pulled — Rock. So I started spending more time in it.
Somewhere in that transition I made a mistake with a label template. I don't remember the exact details of what I changed, but the result was labels printing wrong — wrong layout, wrong fields in the wrong places. Something was off in the ZPL and I had caused it.
The sensible thing would have been to flag it and let someone else fix it. I did not do the sensible thing. I decided I was going to fix it myself.
I knew nothing about ZPL. I had never heard of ZPL. ZPL is the programming language Zebra label printers use, and it is not something you just pick up in an afternoon. But I sat down with it anyway, started reading, started trying things. Most of them didn't work. I tried more things. Eight hours later I had fixed the label.
Eight hours. For a label template. I was not going to let it beat me.
That's the thing about those moments — you don't realize they're turning points while they're happening. You just think you're being stubborn about a printer problem.
One week, fully sucked in
What those eight hours actually taught me had nothing to do with ZPL. The point was that I discovered something about how I work: I will chase an "aha" moment for an unreasonable amount of time, and it doesn't feel like work. It feels like a puzzle. Something that can be solved if I just keep going.
That was on a Monday. By the following Monday I had read the entire Rock admin hero guide, watched every Master Class video I could find, mapped half of the data model in my head, and was writing my first Lava templates. I have no other way to describe that week except that I got sucked in. Every time I learned one thing, three other things I didn't know about poked their heads up to be learned next.
Master Class lit the fire. I had no business going that deep that fast — I wasn't even on the IT team — but the way the material was structured made the whole stack feel knowable instead of intimidating. Lava, then SQL, then workflow actions, then Pre-HTML, then theme zones, then check-in configuration. I was making notes in margins. I was running test queries against a sandbox at midnight.
Accidentally crashing a Rock Star meeting
Then I went to RX. If you don't know what RX is — it's the annual Rock conference, the gathering of everyone who builds on or works in Rock. I went the first year I was eligible, mostly to soak it in.
And I ended up in a Rock Star meeting by accident.
I want to be transparent: I did not know it was a Rock Star meeting. I walked in. The door was open. People were sitting around. I sat down. And then I realized everyone in the room had earned the Rock Star title and I had not.
The polite thing would have been to slip out. I did try. I made what I think was a reasonable effort to leave and was, very kindly, told to stay. So I stayed.
What I heard in that room was an entire room of people who had built things in Rock that I didn't even know were possible. Plugins, integrations, gnarly migrations, custom blocks, crazy theme work. They were trading war stories and asking each other for help on problems I couldn't yet describe, let alone solve.
I left that meeting with one thought: I'm coming back next year and I'm earning that title for real.
What I learned the year after
Reader, I earned it.
The year between that accidentally-crashed meeting and the next RX was the most concentrated year of learning I've ever had. Started writing real Lava. Wrote my first SQL reports that actually held up. Started contributing recipes to the community. Got into Obsidian. Built things. Broke things. Fixed the things I broke. The Rock community point system kicked in around month three and that's a whole other post.
The gap between "power user" and "developer" is smaller than it looks from the outside. Rock is a good place to close that gap because you can do genuinely useful things at every level — Lava templates, SQL reports, workflow actions — before you ever have to write a line of C#. By the time I started on actual plugins, I already understood enough of the system that the C# wasn't the scary part. The scary part was deploying to production on a Sunday morning. Still is, if I'm honest.
No CS degree. No formal background. Just a label that printed wrong, a week of getting sucked in, a meeting I shouldn't have walked into, and enough late nights to eventually figure out what I was doing. Stubbornness dressed up as curiosity. It's served me pretty well.