DevOps Diaries

Stick around until the end of the epiosde for a special message from Jack!

Tune in to the full episode for clips from some of the brilliant guests in 2026, discussing their advice for succeeding in Salesforce's AI-forward era. 

With the AI landscape changing, this is the advice for Salesforce professionals that's relevant now, and always will be.

What if the ultimate goal of a great DevOps engineer is to make yourself unnecessary? Jack sits down with Alex Louderback, Salesforce DevOps engineer and the voice behind The Developer's Developer blog, to unpack what happens when you do your job so well someone else takes it over. 

Alex and Jack dive into why mapping the human process always comes before touching a single tool, the security risks lurking when AI-generated changes skip proper governance, and Alex's hot take on flow testing. They also get into the real story of turning a Gearset skeptic into the team's number one promoter. 

Agentic change for Salesforce, from Gearset.

Jack sits down with Florence and Katharine, Commercial Operations Analysts who look after Gearset's internal Salesforce org, to talk about what's changed since they started building directly with Gearset's newly released agent, Cam. 

Florence had never touched Salesforce 12 months ago, now she's shipping changes to production within 24 hours. Katharine, who's worked on Gearset's Salesforce org from inception, digs into the process that keeps it all safe, the hidden dependencies the agent catches, and why "job to be done" thinking matters more than ever when tickets doesn't speak the whole truth.

Tune in to hear what it's really like being customer zero.

Salesforce DevOps doesn't have to be difficult. Patrick Müeller joins Jack on DevOps Diaries to discuss why.

They get into why implementing a Salesforce DevOps tool is the easy part compared to getting a whole team on board, why admins are understandably terrified of version control and Salesforce metadata, and how feature flags and smaller releases stop users from feeling overwhelmed by change. They also talk through using AI, including Gearset's org intelligence, to make sense of a Salesforce org that's a decade or more old.

Tune in to hear Patrick's refreshingly unfussy advice for anyone just starting their DevOps journey.

Claudia shares her three-step playbook for starting your Agentforce journey on solid ground.

Think Agentforce is the hard part? For most teams, it's the warm-up act. Jack sits down with Claudia McPhail, a seven-year Gearset veteran who's gone from customer support engineer to Product Manager leading Agentforce and Data 360 support, to unpack why so many rollouts stall the moment data hygiene enters the chat. 

They dig into the real economics of consumption credits, why small, shippable agents beat ten-agent moonshots, and why deploying agents straight to production is a habit worth breaking. Claudia also gets into why the pace of change (goodbye Agent Planner, hello Agent Script) is reshaping what "expertise" means.

If you've ever wondered why a project you worked incredibly hard on didn't land the way you hoped, this one's for you.

Dan's whole career has been shaped trying to solve one of the biggest challenges in the Salesforce ecosystem: organisations pour blood, sweat and tears into Salesforce implementations and change programs, and then nobody uses them. The training was great, the tech was great, but nobody took the time to treat the people going through the change like actual humans.

here are no pipeline diagrams or deployment strategies here. Instead, Dan and Jack get into the real reasons Salesforce adoption fails. Grief, identity, burnout, and the gap between what executives think they're building and what end users actually experience. 

Dan shares his heart, head and hand framework, the four Ps every leader needs to communicate before a go-live, and why the people who resist change the hardest are often your most valuable allies.

Jack sits down with Denise Carbone, two-decade Salesforce veteran, MVP, co-leader of the Chicago Admin User Group, and Director of Delivery at ImagineCRM. 

Denise has seen more of this ecosystem than almost anyone. From the pre-Trailhead days of learning through user groups, to the Lightning migration wars, to where we are now with AI reshaping what it means to work in Salesforce. Her perspective is hard-won, warm, and reassuring for anyone feeling uncertain about what comes next.

The conversation covers how to build a network with intention rather than just collecting LinkedIn connections, why domain knowledge is a bigger differentiator than most people realise, and why the business analyst mindset (process first, technology second) has never been more valuable than it is right now. 

Denise shares how her team is actually using AI in delivery work today, closes with a reflection on what corporations can learn from the mission-driven focus of the nonprofit world.

Jack sits down with Tapan Patel, Gearset DevOps Leader for 2026 and DevOps Lead for the Salesforce practice at Braze, a publicly traded omnichannel platform where every change management decision is subject to SOX audit scrutiny. 

Tapan brings a rare blend of project delivery experience, release management rigour, and genuine passion for building DevOps not just as a set of processes, but as a culture.

The episode is a masterclass in phased, people-first DevOps rollout. Tapan walks through exactly how he's taken Braze from change sets and manual deployments to a governed, audit-ready CI/CD pipeline over the past year and a half — breaking it down into four distinct phases and sharing what actually worked, what took longer than expected, and where he's headed next. Tapan shares his rounded take on AI, including where it's already adding value in the pipeline today, why agentic autonomy in prod is still a way off, and how Claude, Jira and Gearset's reporting API are becoming a powerful combination for DevOps KPI tracking.

00:01 – Intro & Meet Tapan Patel
00:40 – Tapan's Journey: From Data & Analytics to Salesforce DevOps
02:12 – What DevOps Actually Means as an Organisational Culture
04:10 – DevOps in a SOX-Audited, Publicly Traded Company
05:10 – The State of DevOps at Braze When Tapan Joined
08:14 – Shifting Mindsets From Change Sets to a DevOps Tool
10:32 – Precision Deployments: Why Page Layouts Break Everything
11:49 – Stakeholder Visibility & the Value of Issue Tracking Integration
13:36 – What Tapan Values Most About Gearset
15:53 – The Four Phases of CI/CD Rollout at Braze
19:16 – Phase Two: Stabilisation & SOX Integration
20:30 – Phase Three: Automation Layers & QA Integration
21:18 – Phase Four: Maturity & Minimal Intervention
22:55 – The Admin Learning Curve for DevOps Adoption
25:25 – Continuous Improvement as a Practice, Not a Project
28:34 – Where AI Fits Into the DevOps Pipeline Right Now
31:07 – Supplementary vs. Agentic AI: Why Tapan Is Taking It Slow
33:14 – Using Claude + Gearset Data for Sprint Analysis & KPI Tracking
36:00 – The DevOps KPIs That Matter at Braze
37:24 – Closing Advice for Anyone Starting Their DevOps Journey

Tune in to hear everything from why data projects are chronically underestimated at the exec level, to what a proper data strategy actually looks like when you strip away the buzzwords. Mike gets practical on data migrations, data cleanup, and the hidden gotchas that trip teams up when they start handing control to agentic AI. 

Before finding his way into Salesforce consulting, Mike Dickson cycled solo across Canada, studied mechanical engineering, and cut his teeth on some of the most data-rich implementations in the nonprofit space. That analytical, problem-solving mindset shapes everything he has to say about why so many organisations are sleepwalking into their AI ambitions without the data foundation to back them up.

Mike and Jack close things out with a thread about what commercial organisations can learn from the nonprofit world when it comes to relationships, relevance, and not being noisy.

00:01 Intro & Meet Mike Dickson
00:13 Why Data Is So Important in Salesforce
01:47 Mike's Background: Mechanical Engineering & Cycling Across Canada
05:12 Lessons from the Road That Still Apply Today
07:53 10 Years in the Ecosystem: The Rise of Data
08:17 Starting in the Nonprofit Space & Why Nonprofits Were Data-Rich Early Adopters
12:25 Data Migrations: Why They're Harder Than Anyone Thinks
15:58 Is the Complexity of Data Projects Misunderstood at the Exec Level?
19:01 What a Solid Data Strategy Actually Looks Like
22:08 Start With the Business Objective, Not the Data
23:13 How to Approach a Data Cleanup Project
26:49 The Hidden Gotcha: Records That Can't Be Saved Anymore
27:04 Don't Boil the Ocean — Chunk It Up
30:14 Data Migration Tips & How to Avoid Disaster
33:22 The Right Tooling for the Job
35:36 Data Doesn't Sit in a Vacuum
36:05 What Nonprofits & Commercial Orgs Can Learn From Each Other
40:15 Where to Find Mike & Speediful

With agentic AI reshaping what it means to work in Salesforce, Mike Gerholdt makes a compelling case for why the role of a Salesforce Admin isn't shrinking, but shifting. The value was never really in the buttons Salesforce admins click, but in the judgments they make.

Jack chats to Mike about everything from the principle of least privilege in an agentic world, to whether generalist or specialist skills will win out as the platform keeps expanding. 

Mike also shares why the admin who hoards their knowledge, whether that's contacts in a Rolodex or config know-how in their head, is ultimately doing their organisation and themselves a disservice. 

Plus, with TDX just around the corner at the time of recording, Mike gives a preview of what makes that event different from every other Salesforce gathering on the calendar.

00:01 Intro & Meet Mike Gerholdt
01:32 Why Admins Shouldn't Fear the AI Revolution
04:14 Decisioning is Cheap, Judgment is Expensive
06:35 What a Salesforce Org Actually Is
07:28 The Mundane Stuff vs. The Valuable Stuff
10:27 Why Admins Have an Emotional Response to AI
11:19 Identity, Expertise & the Evolving Admin Role
13:44 Security, Permissions & Principle of Least Privilege
17:14 Trust, Vibe Coding & the AI Learning Curve
19:51 Why Tools Like Gearset Still Matter
21:03 AI Won't Replace Admins — Here's Why
23:43 How Engineers Are Actually Using AI Day-to-Day
26:48 Security Guardrails in an Agentic World
31:02 User Experience as a Specialisation
32:47 Generalist vs. Specialist: Where Should You Focus?
38:26 You're Not Learning to Drive Until After You Pass Your Test
40:59 What to Look Forward to at TDX
44:22 Final Bits of Wisdom