If you are interested in knowing a bit more about the changes about to be unleashed in terms of Salesforce platform developments, Simon and Dorian have done all the hard work for you: They selflessly travelled to the West Coast of America last week to attend Salesforce’s TrailheaDX last week and were genuinely quite stunned by what they heard and saw. Interested? Read on….
Our Salesforce team was a little bit quieter last week, with Simon Lawrence, our Senior Salesforce Developer and MVP and developer colleague Dorian Sutton both out at TrailheaDX, Salesforce’s exclusively developer and admin focused conference in San Francisco. They arrived back on Monday, a little bit crumpled, pretty jet-lagged and extremely busy catching up on their client projects.
However, despite all of that, the verdict is that the conference was the best yet and 100% worth their time out of the office in terms of learning opportunities. I caught up with them on the conference highlights.
Networking with other developers
“Everyone there was just like us. They were genuinely interested in the Salesforce platform. They really wanted to be there.”
TrailheaDX brought together developers from diverse teams, and it was an opportunity to meet and get to know people from all around the world. It’s not everyday that you get invited to contribute to a podcast in Atlanta, but that’s the kind of connections that this conference enabled
The emphasis on Equality (with a capital E) was another key element of the event. TrailheaDX kicked off with the Salesforce Equality party and set the tone for the two days to follow. This was a very inclusive event (they even had inclusive bathroom arrangements. San Francisco is SO ahead of the curve)
Access to experts
“What made the conference so interesting was that we were speaking directly to the people actually writing the platform. No middleman, no marketing gloss, this was a chance to speak to experts and really understand what they were building and how they were doing it.”
Dorian and Simon agreed that the advanced level of technical content was unlike anything they had previously experienced and gave them an opportunity to learn more in two days than they could ever have imagined possible. Which leads me to the next (and most substantial point yet..)
An inside track on what’s coming up next
This was the real crux of the event: a chance to see the future first.
First of all, the guys got a very detailed look at Salesforce Lightning, and a great picture of what was coming up in the next 2 to 3 releases. Knowing what will be built in by Winter 18 for example, can save time spent on ‘extravagant workarounds’ today (in Dorian’s words).
Over on Trailhead, the guys were interested to discover that soon it will be possible to build proprietary Trailhead modules. This is very significant for organisations building Apps on the platform, as they will be able to release their own Trailhead learning experience on their own product. You can also expect to see some Salesforce certs moving over to the Trailhead platform too.
Big announcements too for Salesforce Einstein: Their natural language processing technology (current working titles are ‘Intent’ and ‘Sentiment’) are able to search and analyse text not only for references, but also for sentiment, and take appropriate action. The example Simon gave me was a user case of a tent manufacturer searching for all terms relating to their products and then assigning the case to the correct service unit e.g “I can’t pitch my new Vango’ is routed straight to the customer support team.
However, saving perhaps the biggest announcement til last, this conference also saw the unveiling of Salesforce DX, the new developer experience. While the product is currently in beta, it’s already looking a lot like a major paradigm shift in the way that Salesforce developers work, behind the scenes.
‘It won’t change the way people use or experience the platform,’ explained Simon, ‘but with new approaches to version control and to continuous integration, it will change how we do things as developers at a fundamental level.’
Finally, the goodie bags
Apparently the goodie bags were awesome. We are yet to see the contents back in the office.
So there, you go: two days and two minds completely blown. Would they recommend TrailheaDX? Oh yes, but ONLY to people just ‘like’ them e.g. super smart Salesforce devs (or admins). Anyone else.. never mind, there’s still Dreamforce 🙂
I am happy to know “Big announcements too for Salesforce Einstein: Their natural language processing technology (current working titles are ‘Intent’ and ‘Sentiment’) are able to search and analyse text not only for references”