Joshua Birk, who joins to talk about Trailhead Year One, is a Senior Director, Developer evangelist, godfather of Trailhead, the host of the Salesforce Developer Podcast.
Main Points
- What is Josh’s job in the Salesforce
- The story about the Medals tool Josh created
- The Learning Paths project that predated Trailhead
- Where did the name Trailhead come from
- When did Josh think the Trailhead project take off
- What is the future of the Trailhead
Links
- Josh’s LinkedIn
- Josh’s Twitter
- The 100th episode (Trailhead Engineering with Jeff Douglas) in the Salesforce developer podcast
Video Teaser
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Transcript
AI-generated, unedited.
[00:14] Hey everybody! This is Xi Xiao. This is yet a new episode of Salesforce Way podcast. Today I have a really wonderful guest with me, Josh Birk. Hello, Josh. It's it's great to be here. Yeah. So so just brief introduction about you. You're a senior director in Salesforce, developer evangelist there as well. You're the godfather of Trailhead. I think a lot of people know this. And also you're the host of Salesforce Developer Podcast. That is a that's a pretty good rundown. Yeah, do you have something else? Salesforce. Well, I've been with Salesforce for about ten years. I think the the the hidden agenda there that I've been a part of is I have also I have a huge role in when it comes to developing out our tier one events in the form of Trailhead, Dreamforce, and so I was also I inherited the IoT zone from my good friend Reed Carlberg, which. Putting putting together an event that's got a Lego Smart City in the middle of a huge table is definitely a a moment of time for a career. So it's getting getting multiple IoT projects into the same area can be a little bit of a challenge sometimes. So these days I just well I used to try to put people on stage. Now I guess in front of cameras, sort of thing. So we're still trying to kind of get that kind of you know sort it out. You know, as to how to get content in front of people. Are you now more on the management area, where you still a hands-on developer?
[01:45] Yeah, so I'm much less of a hands-on developer, and I coordinate with hands-on developers. Is I think a good way to put it. I am currently helping run the developer marketing side of things. That's kind of a Just kind of a managerial, trying to help a department out. Sort of, I don't really know how long that's going to last. So my focus is mostly on the the the production and staging of content for Salesforce. And how much time? Let's say how much percentage of the time is the Salesforce Developer Podcast cost you? Yeah, so that changes a lot. For instance, if it's like right now in the normal times, we would be post Dreamforce, and so post Dreamforce, what I would be trying to do. Is get enough material together for the podcast in order to make it through the holidays, kind of thing. I trained under the great Julian Bruce to learn who hosts co-hosts the Salesforce Admin podcast with Mike Gerhold, and you know she's like, if you're going to do something that's weekly, it's all about the backlog. It's all about having enough inventory behind you that you you have control over your calendar, kind of thing. And so, during Dreamforce, that would all be about reviewing show flows and reviewing.
[03:15] Cam, you know, reviewing video and doing dry runs and all of that kind of stuff, and it's it's strange because this Dreamforce. I effectively staged four episodes for live broadcast, and it was effectively about as much work as staging three hundred people to go on stage over three days. Like it's it's interesting how you know that math kind of plays out. So so like like normally right now it'd be a lot of podcasts. I actually I I did I think I did three interviews last week. I did I think it was two interviews last Friday, kind of thing. You know just to just to kind of keep that backlog alive. Wow. Yeah, because I know that you hit a hundred episode milestone, so that's a big achievement. We just talked a little bit about it before starting recording. Yeah, you know, I started like three years ago. It's just up and down. So of course, sometimes the fast pace, sometimes it's slow. But I'm still less than ninety episodes. So. I I will hit the hundred one day. You're getting there. Yeah, I'm getting there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, besides all these things we talked about, I think there's a huge halo still. That's the godfather of Trailhead. I think that's that's the thing we want to talk about in this in this show here. Yeah. Yeah, so I I I try to balance this whole tale because I I get shy I guess a little bit about saying
[04:45] I'm the guy who created Trailhead. I I I'm okay almost with invented maybe. It's I'm not sure what the right verb is, but. If we if if we want to go back to the origin story, the origin story goes back to my previous role as the person who is who is kind of putting together the material, for our workshop. So I used to do one day in live workshops. It was called Elevate. And that the core purpose was effectively to get people, you know, a lot of the way we a lot of the ways we acquire developers is your company just bought Salesforce and it's now going to be part of your business solution. Maybe you're a Java developer, you've never even heard of Apex before. You you need to go learn about the CRM stuff and how Salesforce does its platform. So we did a one day shop, which was basically like, here are the basics of the platform and kind of what you need to know. I used to describe it as like these are the things I wish I knew when I first started, you know, developing on the platform kind of thing. So we played with trying to do intermediate and advanced material, but it was really kind of a when we got the the the ability to do so the the the real. Core was one hundred one material. It was really beginner material. When was that? At what year? Oh God, this would be twenty ten to twenty fourteen. More or less, okay. All right, yeah, yeah. So early days of, you know, the the at this point the platform is fairly well established. We've got Visual Force, we've got
[06:15] Apex, we've got you know some automation tools. We've got the declarative side. We have the the kind of like core premise of of of the work of the the platform, but the problem was. I kept doing workshops that are very, very basic. You know, a lot of what I would talk about was even like what is programming, like what are variables, like what are functions. Like the people I have in the room, some of them are developers, some of them maybe not. Right? So it's like, like some of it's like maybe even explaining object orientation and things like that. So, so really, really basic stuff. But since Salesforce is coming to your town, I kept getting people who just wanted to come talk to Salesforce. So I would have somebody sitting at a table who has maybe limited understanding of programming itself, next to somebody who might be a five-year veteran of Apex, like they've been they've been playing with Apex since it since it launched, kind of thing. Yeah, you know, some of these people have had complicate. They would come because they had. Complicated production issues. So they're already they're already out there and they're doing stuff, and. I had this moment where what I would do like trivia things, right? Like at the end of the day, I'd be like, "So how long did you drive to get to this workshop?" And I had one, and some guy had driven like four hours. It's an eight-hour workshop. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, okay, you invested that much time. You basically invested the same amount of time
[07:45] to get here and go home. That you're going to invest in the day, but you're an advanced developer, and I I wanted people to learn things, and I was like, I it felt wrong for somebody to drive to my workshop, spend the day with me, and come home not having learned anything new about the platform, and so I started kind of talking to colleagues about it. And my my good my my friend and coworker Peter Chidham, who's currently running Developer Evangelism, we started talking about like like how do developers learn things kind of things, and we started we had this concept called extra credit, and so like you don't have to do the main stuff, go do the extra credit basically. And extra credit was code up on GitHub that was broken, and so the whole idea was like you want to learn how Apex REST works. Here's here's a GitHub repo. We'll describe Apex REST to you. We'll describe the problem, and then you get the code working. And if you can get the code working, then you've learned how Apex REST works. And and it was just this kind of like giving you a like almost like a stack exchange experience, right? Like here's here's a problem scenario and some code, but you have to go tinker with it a little bit in order to get it up and running. But that sounded already a little bit the trailhead origins, right? Right, right. So so online, you can take it on your own. Basically, I can point you into two paths. I can point you to the beginner stuff,
[09:15] and then I can put a link down there. It's like if you already know this stuff, go try this extra credit thing, and and a little bit of an interactive challenge. And so I rolled that, started rolling that out in workshops, and it and it worked like gangbusters. Like it was, it just I had. You know the the goal achieved, right? Because the problem is not every developer in their job gets challenged to go use Apex REST. They they don't have that scenario. That teases them into that corner to actually try the code out. So here's here's a we'll give you the excuse. We'll give you the excuse to go learn this new thing, kind of thing. And so it worked really well. I got good feedback on it. I had people taking it, you know, seriously and getting the the thing done. And then I was like, well, how do we scale that? Like if we really wanted to make this something, because with the workshops we've got the workbooks and they've got all these exercises and the exercises have code in them and you kind of go step by step by step with the code. You know, and so it's a it is a lot of content, and that was all stuff that was coming from our our our documentation team. And like, well, the evangelism team wanted to ramp up extra credit to something more on that scale. What what would what would that look like in a way that would you know would be easy to maintain kind of thing? And so I started tinker around with a Node application that would have basically some of the same things. So the GitHub's great, but it's like
[10:45] it's not intended to do the things that we were we were trying to do. And I wanted I wanted something that was very like. Purpose, like the purpose, was to deliver this kind of content. So it had to had to be able to do a few things. It had to be, you know, something you could search. It had to be able to find the content. It had to have some kind of, uh, like the ability to use Markdown to describe the the code that we're trying to give you. It had to have, you know, a code syntax that you could go in and easily copy and paste into Developer Console. And I started working through all these things, kind of mirroring all the things that were in Action Credit, and then. It was actually towards the end that it occurred to me. I have all of these working bins. And I have the ability to access somebody's org, and so if we can access your org through the REST API, and the original version was a was a was a canvas application. So you're in your developer edition, pull in your canvas application. I I already know I already have access to your developer edition at that point. So why don't I go? See, basically, did you do the did you do the code correctly? Instead of having the instructor come by and be like, yeah, that's that you, you know, you get a gold star, congratulations, pupil, you you have done the thing correctly. Like, can the machine ask the org, did you do this correctly? And so I changed extra credit into a prototype that was called medals. And
[12:16] metals has, I like to say that metal. You know, it's like it's boots. It was bootstrap with the Salesforce CSS, like thrown on top of it. Like extremely, extremely simple. had had a single search bar. Like that's how you that's how you found your challenges. Like you'd have to put in Apex, and then Apex challenges would come in. I think the thing that sold it was the. Little modal that was like, Bing! You have you have completed the challenge. Yeah, that's the gamification thing, right? Exactly. I I called it the the Pac Man moment because I always remembered. An article I'd read about the how intent the intent of Pacman with the waka waka and the sounds and all of this kind of stuff is the intention of that is to keep the player playing, right? Like it's this little audible you know loop to keep you doing this. And I'm like, well, what's our what's our loop? And our and the loop was you get a medal, right? You you you you get this medal, and so. I was I was talking to it with again my good friend and now multiple times previously my boss Reed Karlberg and he and I kept talking about it in terms of like let's roll this out for the workshops and things like that and I kept working on the prototype and I finally got the prototype where it was effectively. Real, like it did. It did the things, and I still remember this day. I was in Reed's basement. I think actually, I think he was tinkering with a three D printer at the time, and I was showing him the stuff. And I'm like, I don't, you know,
[13:46] let's talk to executive leadership about this. You know, I'll put together some slides. You know, some stuff, and he's like, You should put together a video. Like, like you, people should see that loop. They should see doing the interactive thing, doing the challenge, and then getting the medal. He's like, that—that's the thing. And I honestly think that notion. Like that moment might be one of the reasons we have Trailhead because because he was one hundred percent right. Like this is this was this was a good way to sell this. And and I did the video. I sent it out. Re and Reid sent it up the ladder. And and Adam Slegman was relatively sold on day one. And then he started putting together what I would refer to as as Project Trailhead or Trailhead Year One. And Project Trailhead was run by Santi Bonat, and that was a a multi Department effort because the the the side story here is while I'm doing all this stuff and and I'm not the only like there were other projects that were kind of thinking about things like this while I'm doing this the Docs team is ongoing a project called Learning Paths and the goal of Learning Paths was to get out of the concept of workbooks and workbooks were very much like here's this project go build it now you're done Learning Paths was. Here's your point zero. You don't know anything. We're going to take you down a path,
[15:16] and eventually you start learning more advanced things. And it was this again. The like the intent was to give somebody, and I'll just go ahead and spoil it. Like give somebody the trail. So, learning paths is what really brought the concept of trails and modules and units and this this construction of how to portray the gamification and like and like metals added the gamification layer to that sort of thing. So Trailhead is really the byproduct of of those two efforts, and that's why I'm like, well, people like, oh, Josh created Trailhead. I'm like, a lot of people create a Trailhead. Like this was this was this was a group effort, you know, by by far. I'm very proud of the contribution that I've made, and and how it is still like you know I go to Trailhead now, and and even though I think there's literally zero lines of code that that mimic with my early stuff, the similarity is still so real right in front of me that I'm just like it gives me little little tingles. But you know, project you know Trailhead year one, I. I would have to go back to my slides to to check, but you know, we took my little Node.js prototype. We took the learning paths concept, which had very little actual content to it. It was Adam Purkus and a and a bunch of people over in in what would become Trailhead Engineering.
[16:46] They took my Node.js prototype. They did not want to use Node because why not? We we were contracting with developers for support, and we did not contract with anybody who is a Node developer. So we so everything we were doing on the web at that time was all Ruby, and so the the decision was made to convert my prototype over to Ruby, which is easily the longest amount of time I've ever spent developing anything in Ruby. was was was basically I created a little CLI. Process that worked more or less the same that my Node.js operations did, and you could just run it, run it on the command line, and then Adam and company took that and turned it into a real Ruby on Rails process that would work in production. And then, and we launched Trailhead and that that Dreamforce, and it was I want to say it was like nine, like it was a ninety day delivery cycle. Like it was, it was so. Sandeep and I kept joking like we're never going to make Dreamforce. Like, like we keep telling people we're going to launch a Dreamforce, but how crazy do we think? Yeah, this is actually going to launch a Dreamforce, and it actually launched a Dreamforce, and it actually had you know full trails and all that kind of stuff, which kind of astonishes me to to. This day, so for the Node.js application you created at the early days, it's called Medal, right? Yeah, medals. Medals. Okay. It was it was a it was an intentional riff off of like PlayStation trophies or I can't remember what Xbox uses, but that was that achievements that you
[18:17] know as a gamer. I I know that that's that's a whole like oh I'm gonna go do this one extra thing because if I do it I get an achievement and it's just this like little virtual like kidding that that you know rewards you for going that extra mile. You said you also talk with your boss, your colleagues back and forth. Was it more on your own interests? Did you like even work after working hours to to get it down? It was more like engineering spirit in your heart. Yeah, yeah, I. Anybody I've ever interviewed for an evangelist role, now and we're trying to evangelist slash advocate role. I have told many people that if if you think this is a nine to five job, it's probably not the job for you. Advocate, developer advocacy, developer evangelism. You know, there's definitely a workday aspect to it, but. You also, you know, I also joke. There's no no better deadline than one in front of a live studio audience. So if you're if you're developing material to go in front of 200 people and present it to, then you know expect to be in your hotel room the night before. And double checking your slides, right? And it's like you're you're gonna have travel that's gonna disrupt your time, and you're gonna have these side projects and that's gonna disrupt your time. So, you know, I think at that time I'm trying to I you know was pre Dreamforce. So again, our tier one events have a tendency to sort of have their own gravitational pull. It's pre Dreamforce. I think in the prototype days, I had the luxury
[19:47] to work, you know, during work hours to a certain extent, but but not not all the time for sure. Okay. And you also mentioned the medals plus this learning path documentation. So you combine them together to form the Trailhead project, right? So you have the two things together. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And I'm also responsible for the name, which. When we got when metals started getting traction, and people like Adam Slegman and Mark Rosenbaum are talking, Rosenbaum are talking about it. I was like, metals is going to have. It's got this gym feel to it. Like it feels like you have to go, really work for something. And very early on, we knew the like the other layer of the gamification we wanted. We wanted to be fun. Like this is supposed to be fun. And the whole like keep Trailhead weird thing, like that kind of started in the early days. And so this is a very little known fact of Trailhead. Trailhead, the name is actually a nod. To its gamification roots, because one of the things I've always wanted to put together is is something called an alternate reality game, and alternate reality games had their heyday for a while, and if anybody wants to see like kind of the. Classic example of it. There's, there, there. Microsoft did a thing called I Love Bees,
[21:17] and it was a it was a campaign to to promote Halo. And I love the concept of an ARG. Is that there's this little alternate reality that people can communicate with through messages and websites and audio files and all these kind of things, and they're basically puzzles. And you put together the puzzles, and each puzzle leads you down a breadcrumb. Down another another route, right? And eventually, you get to the end of the puzzle, and and like the campaign is sort of you know premiered for you, sort of thing. The way args are started is through a trailhead, and a trailhead was a physical thing that they would send out to people in the community to be like you know play this cassette tape or put the CD into your thing, and like this is gonna this is gonna kick off you know the campaign kind of thing, and then like. I'm like, this is perfect because we've got learning paths, which are trails, and we have Trailhead, which is this little-known, you know, game reference kind of thing. And going on a hike and exploring the wilderness sounds a lot more fun than going and earning a medal, right? So it's like it like fixes all these marketing things about the original name, the original concept. And I pitched it to Sandeep and I pitched it to Reed, and it it kind of became like the. Like the the internal name at first, and it was just, and that's why I was like Project Trailhead is is, but it wasn't minted. And Sandeep kept telling me like, don't you know
[22:48] you know how branding works at Salesforce? Don't assume you know that this this name you've come up with is going to actually be the thing. And I remember him at one point coming back to me and saying, Yeah, I was talking to Slegman, and I kept saying like Trailhead or you know whatever we're going to call it. And Adam was basically like, Why wouldn't we call it Trailhead? And he just minted it like at that point, like that was the decision that was made. He was just like, "That's that's that's what it's going to be." Okay. So tell me about the timeline when the Trailhead project was started.
[23:22] Yeah, I want to say twenty seventeen. But it might no, it must have been earlier than that, because we did the first Dreamforce, and it was basically a slide, right? Like it was a slide during I think Mark's keynote presentation. Okay. And I I remember that trail that Dreamforce we I kept going around and asking people like like did you hear about Trailhead have you seen Trailhead you know are you doing Trailhead and everybody's like what are you talking about and it was just kind of like there's like almost no air in the atmosphere to really talk about it and. Then the, like the next Dreamforce, the Trailhead, the the the developer area, is all Trailhead themed. Okay, and it's like, and it was very surreal for me because I'm like, oh gosh, like this little thing has sort of started to to take off. Um, and that was, and that might have been 27 because I I did do a session, and if people want to get into more of the details, especially from the learning path side, there's a recording of a session that I did that was called the Making of Trailhead, and it was me and somebody from. From the Docs team, talking about both the Metals project and then and then the Learning Paths project. It only it was only after one year. It's only after one. It's like the first Dreamforce. There was only one slide talking about nobody really know what Trailhead is, and the next year, in the Dreamforce,
[24:52] all the developers even know that. It had hit the ground running. It had hit the ground running, and I still remember Jen Lee coming up to me and saying, "Somebody told me you created a trailhead." I'm like, "I wrote the prototype," and she's like, "I have all the badges," which at that time was an amazingly kind of achievement. So that that was the moment you knew it took off already. I mean, I just want to know when exactly do you know? Ah, this project will definitely go succeed. I have a picture, and I have this memory of Adam Slegman in a ranger outfit, standing next to Parker Harris, standing next to who was then Cody the Bear. And Cody the Bear started as just a bear, just a normal bear costume with maybe a ranger shirt, right? And it was that. If I wasn't sold before, I was sold that because we got Adam into a ranger outfit. Parker Harris is sitting there smiling, you know, wide, and you know, and we have a mascot like already, and it's just like I'm like. I don't like I I like I think this thing I keep joking with Sand like every time I see Sandeep I'm like you know I think this Trailhead thing might be more than a fad like I think we I think it might have legs at this point I didn't at that point suspect because the other note here is I always say Trailhead Trailhead is for the Trailblazers
[26:22] and Trailhead is is like from the Trailblazers because.
[26:28] the The feedback loop we've gotten is the community embracing Trailhead and and embracing that trailblazer persona, and if it wasn't for that. Core, I don't think the engine would have as much fuel as it has right now, because it's that that loop of we putting us putting out fun content and the trailblazers. You know, consuming it and loving it, and then also like, actually using it to go get new jobs and go get new opportunities and go get you know new careers, and and that was really like Jen saying I've got all the badges right. Like at that point, I would have expected nobody to have like all the badges kind of thing. And and it was that momentum that I think then brought it to like Mark Benioff's attention, bring it to more of a. Corporate level, Salesforce is embracing this like wholeheartedly, and and it and it actually becoming part of the culture. And a lot of that has to work. A lot of that has to do with the work of people like Dominic Let and Lauren Grow and the people in our community program, and our design program, and you know the crafting of the mascots, and you know giving that kind of. That experience side of it, and you know, then that was you know that Dreamforce where everything's decked out in Trailhead and Trailblazers. That's the first time I really saw, I think, the full spectrum of what Trailhead
[27:58] could be. Okay, are you now still working with the Trailhead or not anymore? Not anymore because it has it became its own department. I mean, Sandeep took it, and you know, it basically. I mean, I think they have more staff than Developer Relations does right now. Yeah, you know, it's a huge content there already. Yeah, huge content, and and that's the thing. Like, if you go back to the early days. And how much content we were putting out? Well, you know, it's okay for a ragtag bunch of people to, you know, be doing pull requests and pushing stuff out, but, but it's so diverse and broad now. That you know, it's got its own content department, editorial department, engineering department. I would point people to the episode that I did with Jeff Douglas, which was which was our one hundredth episode. You know, talking about you know Trail Boss and and all of these things that have been created. Just to kind of keep Trailhead, you know, production worthy at this point. You know, keeping keeping it moving forward. I'll put that link in our show notes for the hundred episode. Yeah. So, do you have any idea what's the future of Trailhead? Is that also in your mind?
[29:14] Yeah, I mean, I
[29:18] it it has so much momentum at this point that you know where it is right now has a lot of inertia. I do think you know technology is an always changing art form, and you know, like like I said, my original code doesn't really exist in Trailhead at this point. So you know, if we looked five years, ten years from now. You know what does the challenge engine look like? You know what does the interaction layer look like? Like I, you know, it's possible that we would look back five years from now and be like that. The challenge engine and the interactive layer is very very different. We maybe you know if we would add new things or, you know, put a different kind of challenge in front of developers that kind of thing. I think there's options out there, but you know it kind of feels like its its future's fairly firm at this point. Excellent. Thanks, Josh. Please keep doing the Salesforce Developer Podcast. We we definitely love that. I'll I'll try to get to episode what two hundred. Okay. All right. See you, Josh. All right. Thanks, C. Cheers.
