IMHO, most Salesforce developers don’t get the big picture, the changes that are taking place at the moment in the Salesforce Ohana.
As of today (17th September 2019), I have joined the Salesforce ecosystem for ~2 years. During this time period, I have seen many drastic improvements in terms of developers’ experience.
Salesforce is a low code cloud service. This feature was one of the reasons that made the remarkable success it has today. On the flipping side, developers were considered to be outliers or second class citizenship.
Indeed, why would people care about developers if the platform aims to be a no/low code one?
In the recent two years, many cool features that developers couldn’t imagine in the past were born and evolve rapidly ever since, such as SFDX, scratch org, Lightning Web Component among many others.
Yet many developers still don’t get the big picture and keep complaining why development experience is not as good as those main-stream technology stacks.
This 10-minute talk is to compare things we have 2 years ago and today in the Salesforce ecosystem. If you want, you can watch the video version of this talk below.
Hopefully, it brings some useful information for you.
Video Version
Questions of today
Do you think what I perceived and communicated in this small talk make sense?
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Transcript
AI-generated, unedited.
[00:00] Hey everybody! This is Xi Xiao. This is yet another episode of Salesforce Way podcast. This is a special solo episode. It's an audio recording of my ten minutes talk to my colleagues back in August in twenty nineteen. I had this ten minutes talk about the big picture that I see within two years of my working period in Salesforce ecosystem. So it's about the things I see for developers. I see the changes that has happened within these two years. I hope this ten minutes quick talk could bring some good value to you, and also may get you to think about the big picture. So that's about content. If you would like to see the video version of this talk, you can also go to the show notes of this episode and click the video link of this talk. Then it will direct you to the video clip of this talk. And in addition, of course, you can also head over to my YouTube channel, which is named also Salesforce Way, and then from there you can find my this talk video clip and many other video clips as well. So, with everything out of the way, I hope you enjoy the content of this episode.
[01:22] So,
[01:33] first and foremost, I'm really Super, super humble in being here since I just joined Fluido last week. So, so everybody here is having more experience than I do, and I just want to share something. I was really doing loud in the pitch because I really want to gain you guys' attention. A lot of, I mean, I'm talking with the developer. Can, can I see how many of you are writing code again, please? Thank you guys. Thank you for coming here. I will make sure you will not regretting coming here. So this is my message. I have only one clear message I want to deliver to everybody. Okay, that's your task, please. So be happy Salesforce developer. What do I mean? So. Today in 2019, there's no reason we're not happy Salesforce developers. I really mean it. There's no reason we're not happy Salesforce developers. What do I mean by that? Please allow me to open that. So, two years ago, okay, two years ago, I joined the Salesforce ecosystem. I went to a local meet-up session with a bunch of programmers. We were there. We're doing run table introduction. So it went like this. My name is John. I'm a JavaScript developer. Very proud. My name's Python developer. I'm Lucy, and it came to me. I'm a Salesforce developer. Everybody pauses
[03:03] and stare around me. I'm I'm sorry. What what developer? You know, it's devastating in that room. Nobody knows what Salesforce developer was. It was about twenty people in the room. I was the minority from the mainstreams. And on that same day, we talked a lot about the exciting stuff. By the time it was Git version controlling, we talked about the container integration, container delivery. We talked about the Docker containers. We talk about the open source projects. You know all those like fluffy, really hot potatoes in the market. Everybody was super excited. I was excited too. I was there, part of the party. You know, but in the end, I said, you know, dudes, we don't really have any of these in Salesforce. I'm happy with you, but I just can't easily use them. People still look at me like dead in the face. They say, dude, you want to get a job? So what? That was the story. I was not even in the room, kind of like with them. I was like outside. I'm, I'm an alien to them. That was like two years ago. I want to say now, here it's 2019. I want to share the stuff we already have in the Salesforce ecosystems for developers. The first one is Salesforce CLI, or sometimes we call it SFDX. How many of us have used SFDX?
[04:34] Please. Cool, cool stuff, right? Across platform, you can use Linux, Mac OS, Windows. Same experience for all the developers, interact with the Salesforce org. That's fantastic things. And then we have Scratch org, another fantastic thing. Anybody used that? In the work, especially in the work, none. Okay, none. So. Nice, nice job. So that's the Docker container for Salesforce. It means you can spin up and tear down the Salesforce environment within seconds. You can do it like in seconds. Two years ago, you couldn't imagine we can do this. What what people do is like I spin up a developer static org. I go lunch. I come back. I pray it's ready for me. Now we're doing things in seconds. What else we have? We now have modular development. We have second generation packaging. This is much newer. Anybody use the second generation packaging? It's called unlocked package. Lock the door, unlock the door. That's unlocked package. If you haven't used it, please have the day, the company day, to check what it is. That's the cutting edge stuff. You know, that's the game changer in Salesforce for development and the release management. So, what else we got? We have Lightning Web Component, right? That was a big shout out when
[06:04] news was there in the Twitter. Everybody, all the developers are so excited because now we can write Ex6 features. We're not like the aliens who only write those old JavaScript, and now we can even use React, Angular in a much smoother way in our. You know, in our solutions, but still here about Lightning Web Component, I want to highlight one thing, one more thing. It's more important than using those JavaScript new features. Now it's called Web Components. Why do why do I mention this? Because web components part of the building feature in the browsers. Okay, we're talking about Google, Chrome, Firefox, Safari. These like the rule makers in the in the they they they're making the gains there. We're not talking about like third party libraries like React, Angular, Vue JS because those things change a lot. Five years ago, we had Angular. It was a killer, right? Everybody wants to learn Angular. Then React came out. It took everything from Angular, almost killed Angular. And two years ago, we have Vue.js. Took half of the cake out. If you really want to chase in those built-in stuff, be my guest. It's fine, but web component, it's the built-in thing. From the from the browser vendors, you know, this is a totally different thing. It
[07:34] won't change. It's a stable thing. Salesforce take a really smart action is to follow that instead of chasing, you know, those those third party. And I've talked with guys. They said we are making uh we what was it manage the packages. They shift from Angular totally to the Lightning Web Component because that's really the future. Here, they don't want every two years to change the framework. There's no, no, no thing to do that. What else? In the open source world, we have Visual Studio Code, right? Salesforce Tooling did a fantastic job. If you haven't used that, you go there to the extension. We click one button to download everything you need for the Salesforce development, including Visualforce page, Apex, whatever, Lightning component, Lightning Web component, everything. One button. I mean, people complaining, still complaining. But those guys, they really did a fantastic job. Think about those things. Two years ago, we don't have this. If you like, still use the force.com, you can do that. But Visual Studio Code or the Illuminated Cloud is really, really good.
[08:55] So, I mean, I'm a Chinese. Usually, I don't talk really emotional, but here I really want to beat this information into your head because there are too many developers. They're lousy. They're kind of whining all the time, but the foundation is there. Salesforce set a really fantastic foundation. You know, IBM couldn't do that. Oracle couldn't do that. Microsoft did a good job, but took eight years in the open source area to now they are a trillion dollar company. Eight years. We had only two years to build all these foundations. Of course, it's not perfect. So I want to share one more slides. So this is from the DX19 session. It's called the Lightning Web Component. Now can develop and test in the local environment. I maybe somebody already googled that. Basically means now at this moment, if you don't go to the preview, you have to save the file to the cloud. You have to come back to your browser, refresh that to see your changes, right? That's how it is. It took five seconds, and if you're frontend developer, you need to do it five hundred times in a project, five second each, five second each. I don't know how much time you're wasting. And now we can do it in the local. It's in preview. Everybody can go there. You can register. You can check the code. You can talk with the team, negotiate with them, give feedback. This is another breaking news. It's Lightning Web Components went
[10:25] open source. People say Lightning Web Components slow. We have the Locker service slow. So instead of whining, why not contribute back? Why not? This is the Twitter message from Wade, one of the famous technology guy in the Salesforce field. He was super excited because once the things are open sourced, people really in the community in the Ohana start to contribute. Not just about us who are using these tools; they who are providing the tools, they are happy too. That's a win-win. So I really wish everybody could understand. Now we are on a fantastic, absolute right direction.
[11:12] And we're setting the stepping stones for our developers. This is like the main message I want to deliver to you. And in the coming two years, these things you have to put in your CV if you're Salesforce developer, because these are the future we need to learn.
[11:37] I just pass here because I don't know what to say anymore. I just hope, really, I really hope. This is the big picture I saw after talking with a lot of technologists in Salesforce, and in OHA. And tell me this, I kind of think about it. Then I came up with this big picture. Nobody else told me like this is definitely the solution. But this is what I think. I, deep in my heart, I truly believe this. You know, the train is leaving. The train is leaving. Either jump on the train, enjoy this stuff together. We just beat them game over and winning.
[12:19] That's it. Thank you, guys. Hope hope it brings some information to you.
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