The coffee is flowing, the swag-pile is growing and I’m back at a heaving Brewery events centre for the 10th anniversary of London’s Calling. With a whopping 900 attendees, over 30 sponsors and 68 sessions, this is – by some way – the largest Salesforce community event anywhere, and there is a palpable buzz of anticipation and excitement throughout the day.
Google’s Gemini assistant couldn’t tell how many London’s Calling events I’ve attended in my time as a Salesforce Developer for Desynit, but a manual search confirms that I presented in-person in 2017, virtually in the 2020 lockdown, and visited in 2018, 2022, 2023 and was back for 2025. It’s a real gathering of the tribes for Salesforce people in the UK; I’m one of 7 attendees from Desynit this year, and almost every notable partner and consultant I know is in attendance.
After an energetic introduction from the 5 main organisers (Francis Pindar, Kerry Townsend, Todd Halfpenny, Louise Lockie and Jade Hawken – all familiar faces from Salesforce groups and events around the capital), the audience was propelled straight into a raucous and highly competitive Demo Jam.
The Demo Jams at London’s Calling have evolved since the early days, with contestants ditching dry demos and statistics in favour of comedy skits and audience participation (full marks to the speaker from RocketPhone.ai who delivered a full 3 minute presentation from an imitation space suit, and appeared to have used up their oxygen supply by half way through).
Alongside major ISVs like GearSet and Copado, several newer products were showcased. Vinton and RocketPhone’s apps both generated transcripts, insights and structured data from a video call in real time, and looked impressive, although in such a short demo the use cases were very basic. I could see this kind of functionality becoming very popular if it can handle real-world complexity though.
One pitch that stood out for me was Cloud Protection from WithSecure. While other presenters focussed on the benefits of AI in their presentations, they argued convincingly that the use of LLMs has created many more vulnerabilities, such as the ability to insert malicious URLs, phishing links and corrupted files into conversations with AI Agents. The Cloud Protection app offers real-time analysis and threat detection and looks pretty impressive.
Cloud Analogy won the day and got a huge crowd response for their gambit of hiring an actual MC to rap the whole presentation for their MC Utility app. Whether this was entirely justified I’m not sure, as nobody I spoke to afterwards could remember what the app actually did. I’ll be available with my double bass next year if anybody wants to do a jazzy beat poetry pitch though!
After this it was straight into the morning sessions. I broke my own golden rule of not attending a session in every slot because there was so much I wanted to check out. I’m not going to cover everything I went to (or you’ll be here all day), but here are some of the highlights:
Keir Bowden (aka Bob Buzzard) has been a major figure in the dev community for as long as anybody can remember, and it would be a surprise if he wasn’t presenting here today. In this session Kier distilled “17 years of hitting limits” into a decent set of recommendations for staying inside Salesforce’s arbitrary transaction limits, and made a convincing argument for building processes to monitor limits as our data and usage scales over time.
Some of the examples he gave of how poorly written Apex can hit limits exponentially as its usage increases were pretty hard-hitting, and made me wonder how many time bombs are hidden out there…
I’ve lumped these two sessions (by Michael Verner and David Fernandez Rivero respectively) together because they cover similar territory, namely the growing movement to apply methodologies from the wider world of software engineering to Salesforce development, which is sadly littered with examples of bad practice.
Both presenters made a good case for bringing some of the tried-and-tested lessons from decades of progress in the craft of development into the Salesforce ecosystem, and lamented that this is not sufficiently promoted in Trailhead and other training platforms.
This is something that we wholeheartedly support at Desynit, as many of us began our careers on other platforms and have strong opinions about code quality and mindful design. Judging by the enthusiasm and agreement I heard during these two presentations there are many out there who feel the same way.
My last session was by Fabien Taillon, another familiar face known for presenting on new and experimental features (I covered his talk about the GraphQL Wire Adaptor in my blog from dreamOlé). After introducing himself and cheekily suggesting that French Touch Dreaming (which he helps to organise) was “maybe even better” than London’s Calling, Fabien dug into the non-Salesforce ecosystem of Web Components with gusto.
A new feature in the Summer 2025 release, we now have the ability to upload third-party web components from other platforms and use them inside Salesforce apps, which opens up a whole world of possibilities. Fabien demonstrated this by importing a QR code generator from Google and running it on a Salesforce lightning page, which was pretty impressive.
I noted that this feature is only in beta in the next release, and also that it will only run in orgs that have updated to the newer Lightning Web Security framework. Moreover, the same restrictions against running unsafe JavaScript in Lightning Experience will still apply, so not every component you find out there will work in Salesforce. Still, it’s definitely something to experiment with, and we might find existing components that could save us development time.
All in all, it was a triumphant 10th anniversary for London Calling in 2025. It’s a conference with a fantastic atmosphere and a wide variety of sessions with something for everybody (that observation applies to the food on offer too; anybody who walked out hungry must have been restraining themselves).
If I had to pick anything to improve, I’d say there were times when it felt a little overcrowded – not Glastonbury level crushes, but enough to make people uncomfortable trying to get between sessions; a new venue might be required before long. Also, after a side-splitting turn from comedian Mark Watson in 2023, I found the improv comedy troupe that were this year’s secret headliners pretty underwhelming – that kind of thing is very difficult to pull off, and maybe we weren’t the right audience for it? Still, the party that kicked off afterwards was a riot of food, drink and music and made me wish I’d booked a later train home.
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