Salesforce Developer Podcast

We are back with part two of our interview with Marisa Hambleton. In part one, we discussed entrepreneurship, its pros and cons, and how the pandemic created new challenges for her.

In part two, we get into the beginning days of Cactusforce and how it organically grew from a group of developers at Happy Hour to a conference with hundreds of participants in just a few short years. She also discusses how their conference had to pivot from in-person to virtual in 2021 and how they were able to allow participants to interact with the speakers and be involved.

If you missed part one, go back to episode 178 and start there. Otherwise, enjoy part two!

Show Highlights:

• How Happy Hour amongst developers turned into a conference
• How people may not be dedicated to one technology
• The content Marisa curated at Cactusforce conferences
• How to solve dense problems and get advanced developers on stage
• How Cactusforce has grown since 2020 and managed virtual conferences in 2021

Links:

• Twitter account: https://twitter.com/marisahambleton
• LinkedIn account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marisahambleton/
• Cactusforce: https://www.cactusforce.com/
• Shirts: https://www.cactusforce.com/products
• Marisa’s company, MH2X: https://www.mh2x.com/
• More about Marisa: https://www.marisaforce.com/

In this episode, we have a conversation with Marisa Hambleton, owner of MH2X, which helps companies achieve their strategic goals through technology by building solutions and providing consulting services. Although presented with the opportunity to work for a corporate firm, Marisa chose the entrepreneurial route.

This episode is part one of a two-part interview. In part one, we discuss Marisa’s early years and how she was introduced to Salesforce. We also talk about why she chose to own her own company and the pros and cons of entrepreneurship.

Get to know Marisa in this episode, and don’t miss part two in episode 179!

Show Highlights:

• How Marisa was introduced to Salesforce
• The incentive to stay in a world of entrepreneurship
• Marisa’s advice for others who want to branch out on their own
• Sticking with entrepreneurship and knowing when it’s not working
• How the pandemic has created new challenges and solutions for her

Links:

• Twitter account: https://twitter.com/marisahambleton
• LinkedIn account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marisahambleton/
• Cactusforce: https://www.cactusforce.com/
• Shirts: https://www.cactusforce.com/products
• Marisa’s company, MH2X: https://www.mh2x.com/
• More about Marisa: https://www.marisaforce.com/

In this episode, we have a conversation with Alicia Teo about Custom Property Editors and how you can use them to create powerful user interfaces to configure your web components. Alicia started as an intern at Commerce Cloud while pursuing her MBA and is now a Product Manager for Experience Builder here at Salesforce.

On the Experience Builder team, Alicia makes creating websites quicker and easier for admins. Custom Property Editors enable developers to create components that are even easier to use than Experience Builder, leading to fewer user errors and fewer complaints.

Enjoy!

Show Highlights:

• What custom properties are
• The problem Custom Property Editor is meant to solve
• The new lightning property types and their benefits
• How to override the date time picker with a new more robust one
• What needs to be done to a lightning web component to make it a Custom Property Editor
• The possibility of reusing the code

Links:

• Alicia’s Twitter Account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicia-teo/
• Custom Property Editor Docs: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/component-library/documentation/en/lwc/lwc.use_flow_custom_property_editor_lwc_example

Ananya Jha is a Product Manager working on the IDE experience here at Salesforce. This means she gets to dive into all the cool new features that Salesforce releases in its extensions and eventually serves you through VSCode and Code Builder.

In this episode, we talk about the current state of Code Builder, the Salesforce IDE, and some of its great tools that can benefit you. We also discuss the advantages of using a repository as a source of truth when using Code Builder or Salesforce IDE, PMD’s relationship with IDE, and the Apex Replay Debugger.

Show Highlights:

• The core desktop experience with Salesforce IDE
• What the Code Builder technology looks like and how it can be accessed today
• Other tools inside the IDE Ananya recommends for people to track conflicts and changes
• Ananya’s favorite extensions and tools
• Query Builder and how it works within the IDE
• How the Apex Replay Debugger Works

Links:

• Ananya on LinkedIn
• Ananya on Twitter
• Article on the Org Colors Plugin

Andrea Guzman is a Product Manager for External Services here at Salesforce. In this episode, we get an overview of the current state of External Services, which allows you to easily wrap API calls for both Flow and Apex. We learn how Andrea became involved with Salesforce and product management, the advantages of Flow versus Apex and vice versa, internal use cases, and more.

We hope you enjoy this conversation!

Show Highlights:

• What the day-to-day looks like as a Product Manager at Salesforce
• The elevator pitch for External Services
• What is the Open API spec and how it plays into External Services
• The structure for a developer and an admin to register these services
• How Named Credentials work
• What happens to your code if Twilio changes their API

Links:

• Andrea on Twitter
• Linkedin Account
• Salesforce Help Documentation
• External Services Group: Trailblazer Community
• TDX23 Session: Simplify API Integration with External Services
• Apex Developer Guide
• UnofficialSF Website
• Salesforce Architects Blog: Data Integration Guide

Pablo Gonzalez is a Salesforce Architect at Salto, a small Israel-based start-up that does DevOps for business applications like NetSuite, Zendesk, JIRA, Workato, and of course, Salesforce. Pablo is involved in all discussions of decision-making at Salto regarding Salesforce. Whether marketing, blog posts, product features, engineering, how we solve certain problems, the API, or anything that has to do with Salesforce, he has a say in it.

In this episode, we talk with Pablo about his project, happysoup.io, and another of his projects, Not Another CI (NACI), and other topics for continuous delivery and integration.

Show Highlights:

• How Pablo became self-trained in engineering.
• What is happysoup.io, and where the idea came from.
• What deployment boundaries are and how happysoup.io works with them.
• What the deployment options \
• Pablo's other project, Not Another CI (NACI)
• Things to think about before building out pipelines when designing for CI

Links:

• Twitter account
• LinkedIn account
• GitHub account
• HappySoup.io
• NaCI
• Blog on CI
• Blog on CI/CD checklist

In this episode, we have a conversation with Tyson Read, a Product Manager here at Salesforce, on the impact that administrators' and developers' implementations are having on the environment. We discuss his project and how he is sharing this information through dashboards and guides.

Salesforce is a net zero company, so we are already offsetting all our emissions due to our data centers. In this discussion, our goal is to spread awareness as to what kind of cost there is so that others can understand what they can do about it.

If you’d like to learn more, feel free to reach out to Tyson on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Show Highlights:

• Salesforce’s overall efforts in sustainability so far.
• How to make small changes to fix our carbon footprint.
• The equation between the cost of doing business and implementation.
• The numbers developers will see if they start tracking carbon with a code.
• How are carbon dashboard might work
• The roadmap to sustainability at Salesforce.

Links:

• Follow Tyson on Twitter
• Follow Tyson on LinkedIn

Greg Whitworth is a Senior Director of Product Management here at Salesforce. Greg started with Standards Committees in 2011 before getting involved in web platform testing and CSS Working Group, then Open UI. Today, Greg focuses his efforts on MWC, LWR Node, and standard web platform browser engagement.

In today’s episode, we talk with Greg about some distinctions between our old component framework Aura and our new, modern framework, Lightning Web Components (LWC). We dive into how the evolution of web standards at Salesforce is driven, the different styling of LWC, Aura’s file structure compared to LWC, and much more!

Show Highlights:

• Aura in relation to the rest of the Salesforce frameworks.
• Greg’s experience with JavaScript.
• How Aura’s eventing compares to LWC.
• What GraphQL is and how it compares to other API endpoints.
• Strategies to start moving an org into an LWC.
• How the language is continuing to evolve and improve the developer experience.
• What is on the roadmap.

Links:

• Greg on LinkedIn

• Greg on Twitter

• Greg on Github

• Greg’s blog

Raj Advani is the Senior Director of Product Management here at Salesforce. Raj has held a variety of different roles at the company, beginning with an Engagement Manager when he started 17 years ago. He now owns many of the event driven architectures for Salesforce, including Change Data Capture and Platform Events.

In this episode, we have a conversation with Raj about various integration solutions on the platform. We discuss what Change Data Capture and Platform Events are, the advantages of a Pub/Sub API, and more!

Show Highlights:

• Some of the internal features using Platform Events.
• Moving toward a bus centric world in Platform Events.
• The filtering conditions in Change Data Capture.
• The benefits of event driven architecture.
• The options for a distinct integrations from Salesforce.
• How Pub/Sub API plays into the event architecture.

Links:

• Raj on Twitter
• Raj on LinkedIn
• Architecture Decision Guides
• Episode 115: Event Relays with Tyson Read
• Episode 93: Pub/Sub with Emmett Chan-Ran

Kevin Poorman is a Salesforce Architect over at Chief. He is joining us in this episode to talk about one of his newest projects, Apex Kit. Apex Kit is a library of tools that all help developers do repeated actions accurately and securely.

In our conversation, Kevin and I talk about his backstory and some of his career history. We also dive deeper into Apex Kit and get a full understanding of it. Enjoy this intriguing conversation with Kevin Poorman!

Show Highlights:

• Where the idea for Apex Kit came from.
• How Apex Kit works.
• The connection between Apex Recipes and Apex Kit.
• What promises in code are.
• How promises get built into Apex.
• What polyfills are and how they work within Apex Kit.
• The function of Ouroboros in Apex Kit.
• The difference between a ULID and a UUID and a use case for a ULID.

Links:

• Twitter account - @Codefriar
• Linkedin account https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinpoorman/
• Github account https://github.com/codefriar/
• Apex Kit: https://github.com/codefriar/ApexKit