Abhinav Gupta, who joins to talk about Future of Development on Salesforce 360 Platform, is a Salesforce Architect and Salesforce MVP, the Founder of Concretio Apps Company.
Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by Copado.
Copado is the first Salesforce Delivery Management solution and the #1 native DevOps platform for Salesforce.
Copado DevOps 360 is the first Salesforce Delivery Management application, enabling you to measure the performance of your Salesforce implementation.
Main Points
- Abhinav’s self-introduction
- The first-ever Virtual Dreamin’ event
- Discuss the Salesforce platform megatrend – low code
- The growing Salesforce marketplace for declarative tools, such as flows
- Salesforce customer 360 platform – more new Salesforce clouds are launching
- Discussion on the developer’s career path
- How do developers learn declarative tools?
- Developer’s business mindset
- Code v.s. Low code balance challenge
Links
- Abhinav’s Twitter
- Concretio Apps company site
- Flow solutions section in AppExchange Marketplace
- Keir Bowden’s blog post – Before Save Flows and Apex Triggers
Video Teaser on Salesforce 360 Platform
Contact Me
If you enjoy this podcast, please reach me out to let me know your thoughts or simply say Hello. My (Xi’s) contact info:
Take care, until next time :)!
Transcript
AI-generated, unedited.
[00:00] This episode sponsored by Capado. Capado is the first Salesforce delivery management solution and the number one native DevOps platform for Salesforce. Capado makes the jobs of Salesforce admins and developers fun and easy, even in the largest, most complex works. Plan and collaborate on work, then track your changes right on the user story with an admin-friendly Git interface. Automate developments and testing, and track metrics so that you can target improvements. Capato DevOps 360 brings advanced analytics such as value stream mapping, executive summaries, and rich interactive dashboards. These insights help you find inefficiencies and delight your users by delivering innovation faster than ever. Take the pain out of the Salesforce development process and make Salesforce development fun again with Capato.
[01:12] Hey everybody! This is Xi Xiao. This is yet another new episode of Salesforce Way podcast. Today, I am sitting with a new guest with me. His name is Abhinav Gupta. Hello. Hey, how are you? And good and good. We're both locking down in our cities, so.
[01:31] Yeah, interesting times, man. Yeah. So, Abhinav, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, hello everyone. I'm Abhinav Gupta. I'm from India, and I'm originally a Java J2 guy. Java was my first love, and worked on it for four five years, and then working on Salesforce platform for roughly above a decade since two thousand nine. I'm a Salesforce MVP first run from India for last eight years. Now in Hall of Fame, and I'm also having my own consulting firm called Concrete UI Apps based out in India. Thank you. Hmm, that's cool. I see you have a lot of experience, and even you are the advisor for the virtual dreaming. Yeah, ones. Am I right? That's an interesting event. That's a really interesting one, and it's having the really perfect timing now. Right, it's coming in May. I know. Right, right. You know, it's very interesting because initially we were thinking that we will do virtual Dreamin as a first virtual event in Salesforce, and that time there was no Corona or COVID nineteen, and then suddenly everything started getting virtual. So we felt so strange, and I mean, amused by it. Like, what is going on? Yeah, it's like like you win the the lottery, and everybody now really go to the virtual room in there. Yeah. It's in May, right? Some of our listeners didn't really know it. Then please check the virtual dreamin page. I'll put down to our show
[03:02] notes of this episode for you to check. It's free to everybody. Go there online, twenty four seven. Yeah, we're trying to running twenty four hours so that we overlap at least all the time zones in the world, and nobody is left out. Well, we are really looking forward to that. Thank you. Yeah, so Abhinav, I understand that you run the company with like more than fifty employees, and you need to see the big picture about the Salesforce world. What's what's happening? What's the mega trend? The one of the things you have been thinking a lot is still this low code, no code, or more code. This kind of combinations, right? So, and you wanted to talk about this topic. Right, totally. Yeah, that's very interesting and close to heart. Yeah, because I'm a developer. You are the developer originally, right? So we love write code. And in the past, I talked with one of my guests, is Fabrice, and he is also in favor of like the low code. We always start with the process builder, flow, the developer tools before jump right away into writing code. And what is your takeings here on this point? Sure, sure. By the way, I can still code, despite being a CEO. Okay, okay, yeah. I think on that note, see, we have to see the history of the platform why it become popular originally. So I was coming from
[04:32] a Java background, and I think you have a diverse background also. You worked in Node JS and other stuff. Yeah, I was a little bit from Microsoft as well. Okay, so I think then we both can relate to a typical cycle. Like even if we forget about process builder and flows, what's the release cycle? You develop, let's say, a database table for developing a feature. You deploy it in a database server. You write a code. You deploy it in a its own server. Then you have to make sure that it can correctly deploy it. The patches are available. It scales up and high. The typical cloud things, which are not mostly there with the classic languages. So Salesforce was a leader there because it came up with cloud computing. It was easy. You just write code in browser. You don't have to worry about my database connection file, how the database server will scale, how the web server will scale, and all those I mean headaches which we have gone through. Right with anything, so that was a thing which they called sort of as a no software thing. No software was also related to series and discs also or floppies, in which softwares are shipped. Now software is in the browser, so that made the platform successful because, like in Java, I don't have to spend months to go live. I can go live in Salesforce with new features and solutions within weeks or sometimes within days also. So. What I truly feel is that speed is the beauty of this platform.
[06:02] You can deliver solutions at a rocket fast speed and go live really fast. And that's I think what all customers want. They are highly competitive. They want to outpace the competition. Release. I mean, whatever thing is it's for sales, IT, or any department, service department. They want things to go live soon. Hmm. I think nowadays these kind of cloud service and the speed, DevOps, that's already like a hot keywords in the market. But back in 21 years ago, when Salesforce was founded, that's really a new thing. Nobody really even trust that could be done, right? Right, right. I mean, yeah, that's the time they're really innovating it, and I think I was even having a discussion with somebody that now people have Lambda functions. But Apex was sort of one of the original Lambda functions, which is actually invoked dynamically. It's not always live on your server. Hmm, that's a good analogy. Yeah, yeah. I never thought about that. Yeah, and even Salesforce was never marketed like that—that it's a original serverless thing. Hmm. Indeed, indeed. But. For a developer, because I spend a lot of time writing code, it's really hard for me to really to see the big picture. Even when people say that, okay, you should pay attention to the other side, but I don't have the skill. Most of time, the project is in the
[07:33] restrict the time frames, so I tend to really write code as much as possible. It's easier for me to control, but of course, I understand the company needs to pay a developer more than an admin or business consultant. Right, right. See, ah, that's a typical thing. Even in my company, people at times say that, oh, why should I write a flow or process builder? I can easily write a trigger for this. Or I can do it in code very quickly, but the general mindset which I'm seeing is, Process Builder in general is very flexible code. In most of the cases, becomes liability over the time, especially if it is not written in a proper way. And then, if you don't have a lot of developers, which is always a shortage in Salesforce ecosystem, then if you have something like Process Builder or Flow, which looks like a flowchart, you can easily drag drop things. You can click, and there is a human readable thing that you can okay understand. Yeah, it is doing something of that sort. It is loading a record. It's updating something. So that opens up the communication channel between the business user, admin, and the developer. And that's I think where the platform is heading now. If you see the last few releases, there's more and more coming into process builder and flows, and they are becoming very powerful. Could you give some examples? Yeah, I mean for me, the big thing is flow is now getting close to what trigger can do.
[09:04] Flow is having its own AppExchange kind of marketplace. Same is for, I mean, Process Builder. So it started, I think, with the different things like Lightning components in past, which have their own marketplace, so that people will get a freedom from code. They can get a pre-built component, and again, if you see, it's a low-code kind of platform to boost up the. I mean, you can say integration between a business user and a developer, or an admin and a developer. So they started with Lightning components. Now there is a marketplace for flow components. So what I think platform is hinting you is okay. You are a good developer, or you have a solution. You list it out on marketplace as a reusable piece in which. If we think from a developer's mindset, developer always thinks, yeah, what are the design patterns? How I can reuse my code? So now it's a feature, or I will say, solution reusability, or something more abstract, which is in form of Lightning component, flow, which then any admin can reuse. So when you say marketplace, you mean the AppExchange marketplace. Yes, I didn't know there's a Flow region in the marketplace. You can download. It's like a paid service, or is it? You can list out your Flow related solutions out there, and then admins can basically go and download them into their org. Ah. Can I also put a
[10:34] a price tag there as well if I want? Yeah, definitely. I mean, this free is always an option, and you can. I mean, that's my original idea with Lightning components. I think what four years or three years back when they actually had a component marketplace. Okay, I didn't know that. I always go there to check. It's more like this manage package. That's mainly that I know. Yeah. So while I'm talking, I'm on AppExchange now. So if you go to a tab called Solutions by Type, they have apps, Bolt solutions, Flow solutions, Lightning Data solutions, and components. Components is Lightning components. Ah, okay. I'll put that link to our show notes. Just for people who don't know, just like me, I never really check that details. Right. Hmm. But speaking of the new features, I paid a bit of attention recently to the new releases. I know that like wizard process builder start to really can you can write the SOQL queries in the. Either flow process builder, one of them. So in the past, you can't really do the SOQL queries as dynamic as you know what you do in the SOQL. But now, you can really invoke the SOQL queries there. And I also know there's another feature which is called before trigger in the flow. Yeah, that that is the beauty. It's even more efficient. Yeah, yeah. I don't
[12:04] remember, but I think there is a blog where they compared the performance of Flow with the and there's a Bob Buzzard blog also which did a further comparison. So it's getting interesting. Hmm. Yeah. So it really means the flow process builder and maybe some other delivery tools are really get to more attention, and that Salesforce internal teams are improve the efficiencies of those tools. Right. Right. But I also see there's another. Like a mega trend in Salesforce is that it has this Customer Three Hundred and Sixty platform, and it has so many more clouds are announced, like the industry cloud, which is the manufacturing industry cloud, right? And we have the CPQ cloud and the. And also, Velocity was acquired recently by Microsoft by Salesforce. Yeah, yeah. So it seems to me there are more of these kind of clouds that really specialize the industry. Right. What's your opinion on this point? Right. I think it's going both ways. So previously they were ISVs like Velocity, Viva, who have very optimized industry specific solutions, and now with the widespread of Salesforce, especially if I talk about India, it's very pleasing to see that there are many brands which we use,
[13:34] like Redvers and others, which are now using Salesforce for their service and different things. So, what I think Salesforce seeing is a need is to have a ready-made template for various industries, which can be extended like the Salesforce platform as well. So this is, I think, a right step and right direction to go. But from a technical guy's perspective, that's a challenge as well. With every new cloud, there is a new certification, and then there is a new depth of knowledge as well, which comes with the industry. So, let's see. In Finland, there are. Couple of big brand as the manufacturing companies, if they start to use the Salesforce now, I'd assume they will definitely check this manufacturing cloud to see what kind of out-of-box features they can get. So, because I know for those big enterprise companies, they pay millions per year just to maintain the Salesforce solutions. Right. So, if they can save those time. They spend to the developers for the customized solutions. Why? Why would they? You know, the want switch the out of box features. That's true, and I think that's what industry is looking for. As we're talking before, that they have less time. Money is not the biggest commodity. Time is the biggest commodity, which they are trying to save now. So, that's where Salesforce is heading in all ways: this flow, process builder, and industry-specific solutions.
[15:05] So that means in the future, Salesforce developers we may have more narrow to specialize the developers. I would say I'm a front end developer who is specialized in JavaScript, you know, Lightning Web Component. And then we have a backend which is CPQ related, which is like manufacturing related. Right. Maybe that's the trained. Yeah, you know that's a very good point because I was having a recent conversation in a meetup as well. That now you can be at the breadth of Salesforce services and solutions, but you can't be expert. Like if I talk about CPQ itself, that's a huge area of its own. Like financial services cloud, it's a different world of its own. Same goes for field service lightning, it's having its own depth and learnings and industry knowledge, product knowledge. So rather than a person chasing everything, I would say, depending on the country you are and the company you are in the market, you should try to focus on a. Expert play in one area at least, like okay, I am seeing a lot of financial services movement in my country or my market, so I will be a financial services expert. That I think is a vertical direction we should take in Salesforce. Now it's not just the platform anymore; it's Sales and Service Cloud. Is this the suggestions that you give to your employees in your company? I know you have a lot of developers as well. Right.
[16:36] What we are trying to do is split the team of fifty into small, small teams. Like one team is taking care of Microsoft-related stuff. They are focusing on integration only, and they don't need to worry about CPQ and anything. Then CPQ is more of an admin or config heavy kind of tool. It's not very much into coding, so we have analysts and admins. So we told them that if you are getting CPQ related work, keep focus on CPQ as a product only and be an expert there, and same is for FSL and other things also. Okay, that sounds like a really good strategy. For the developers, I see there's another big news is the Evergreen platform. So what's what's your ideas about the Evergreen? Yeah, I think Evergreen and Lightning Web Components—they are a very, very good and positive move. And the reason I'm saying is, I'm running a company, so acquiring new Salesforce talent is very tough. So if we hire a Java JavaScript guy and he see Lightning Web Components, it's something familiar to what he might be doing outside of Salesforce world in its in his own JavaScript arena. So that's a familiarity and comfort level which he gets immediately after joining the company and working on any Salesforce projects. And same is going to happen with Evergreen. Right now, we hire a lot of Java and .NET guys. We train them into Salesforce.
[18:06] So there is a two-three months of training cycle, then they have to be gradually ramped up. But if there is an evergreen, and they can be slightly more productive, instead of learning Apex, they can just write in Node.js or whatever it supports. That will definitely help. Okay, so Evergreen is definitely one of the things I really look forward. And a lot of my Salesforce friends, they are kind of like stretching their knowledge to JavaScript, to the AWS, the Heroku, you know, all those cloud services. So they kind of prepare themselves in advance at the moment. So that's also something I'd like to do in the future. Right. There's a big challenge. Still, I talked a lot with people, but nobody really give me a perfect answer. Is we love low code, but how to keep the balance? That's a really tough thing. For example, I know people who are creating managed packages. They really spend a lot of focus on if we put the process builder into the managed package, what are the efficiencies? Do we get some bottleneck issues there on the performance or not? So they spend a lot of time analyze that. I think it applies to the same enterprise developers for a single customer. I see a lot of customers that switch them back and forth. You know, because of the CPU limits, they can't afford
[19:37] to use the declarative tools to spend too much time on the CPU. So, yeah, that's always a challenge for me to understand. So, what's your opinion on this? Yeah, that's always tricky. But if you just generally talk about this low code and thing, what I'm telling my developers is, ah.
[20:00] I think eventually, after two, three, or four years of development, you will either be moving towards an architect route, or you will be a project manager or a client team lead kind of person who is talking to customer, and again, not as an architect, but at least gathering requirements, suggesting things. So the thing is, I think the Salesforce Admin certification. I will go back to total basic in the first thing, is a foundation stone which many people ignore, and what we have done in our company is we tell everyone that don't go for Dev One first, but first at least understand how and what platform has as an admin. And if you see any developer who knows coding, he will always be excited to learn about the coding parts of the platform. But whenever you tell them to do the config part, they will find it boring and no, it's easy. It's not that fun. But if you see the evolution of that person after one or two or three years, when he knows the admin part, his confidence level when he's talking to customers is really high. He says, no, no, no. On this lead, there's a lead assignment rule which you can use for duplication. There is a dedupe rule already in place. So that thing on what platform already has on top of what I really have to code. That really have to code situation. If the person starts knowing, then he is graduating towards the architect path because that's where a good architect or a leader will make a decision.
[21:32] Hmm. I still think I'm immature. Developer in Salesforce ecosystem, and when I work in a project with the architect, they always give me suggestions, like different options. Rather than you start writing a batch, you start writing the Apex, everything here. So that's the learning point I'm having, you know, to gain more experience by time. Because I can't do eight hours a day to learn the declarative tools, I'm more on the other side. But I try as much as possible, and getting the certificates definitely will help you. I talked with the architects. This is one of the advices they gave me. Okay, do you think for the developers, what else do we still need to consider? Right, I think in general, if we come to a developer side and in platform, I will say everybody should be a consultant also. So if think of what customer wants to see, like many times it happens that some client gave you a requirement, and what people do is they just put a dump of the object fields on the screen. So that is where I say that you think like a consultant because you have to think like this business user, what he is really trying to do with that screen, how much time in a day he will spend on that screen. Like if you go to sometimes in a store,
[23:03] grocery store, or a any computer IT department, people are typing like crazy. They don't have time to click here and there. So what is the way they are approaching your solution? Not as a developer, but as an end user. So, if we start developing that mindset, so that will make your solution more functional. Configure side, code aside, whatever you use. That's a really good point. I recently created a Lightning Web Component for one of my customers. It's really simple one. Basically, what it does is on the account record page. You can check the related user. So this is a personal account. It has associated user. So you don't need to click to the user record page. You just on the account, you can see the user. That's it. As simple as that. But it's a huge benefit to the users who are using the page. They don't need to jump between. So technically, simple solution, but it gain a lot of benefit from business point of view. Yeah, the usability and the value it for the end user. And again, what I feel is like there is lot of good things happening around with Gmail. If especially if you use an iPhone, I'm giving a very weird example, but I usually love the way they play with colors. Like Gmail, they have a very sharp red button or blue button at times. Or some small plus button at the right bottom that you know that okay you have to hit that to compose. There is a prominent color here and there in all iOS apps. They are
[24:33] doing a gorgeous work with how you should perceive the data. So that's I think my live tutorial everywhere which I try to inspire from. Thanks a lot, Abhinav. I think that's all I wanted to ask you today. I don't know before we close the session, do you still have something else you want to talk about? Ah, no, all good. It's really good catching up. And those who are still juggling whether being a developer or how much low code, no code. I would say be a good consultant, be a business user friendly person. Your client will love you, and probably your company will love you as well. Thanks a lot, and talk to you next time. For sure. Thanks a lot for time.
