The Importance of Community and Why You Deserve to Find It!

Invisible Community Make VisibleI’ve been thinking a lot recently about the importance of community when you’re trying something new. I’ve always felt a little alone at work. Not that people weren’t welcoming—they certainly were. I work with some truly awesome, passionate, smart, talented and just plain nice people. The problem for me is that none of them do technology work. For them, there’s generally someone to brainstorm with, to collaborate with on a project, and to bounce ideas off. Not so much for me. Continue Reading

Never give up! Never Surrender! (or how perseverance is important in Apex [or any] coding)

Fabulous New Salesforce Trailhead Badges!I am totally and utterly thrilled to announce that I have written Apex and it worked! It actually did what I meant it to do! Thanks to Salesforce Trailhead, I have achieved a major goal and written my first Apex trigger. Phew! What I high I have.

I have to say, that the biggest lesson from my experience with CFML coding (ColdFusion Markup Language), is to persevere and never give up on finding the answer.  It’s such a huge deal in my mind, and an absolute must for anybody wanting to get into coding (which is so darn picky about every little keystroke), that I wanted to blog about it. Continue Reading

How “The Other Side of Diversity” Gave Me Chills – Women in Technology

“We know how lack of diversity can adversely affect a business. This is how lack of workplace diversity has adversely affected me”–Erica Joy

Rainbow diversity handsI just read “The Other Side of Diversity” on Medium by Erica Joy, and recommend you do too. It’s about her experience as a black woman in tech workplaces, and it gave me some chills. As a gay woman in tech I related to what she was saying. I haven’t felt it as directly as she has, but it’s certainly there. (I’m just noticing that I almost didn’t put the word “gay” in, because I didn’t want to alienate people. I didn’t want to appear to “other” or confrontational. How sad is that!) Continue Reading

Lessons from the Trailhead – Workflow Rules and Visual Workflow

Workflow automation on Salesforce TrailheadAt events like Dreamforce I never feel more keenly that it would so super awesome to have a clone or two that I could attend all the sessions my little Salesforce junkie heart desires. I spend waaaay too much time before DF shopping for the optimal collection of sessions. At least I do that beforehand…during DF I tend to wing things and change sessions up on instinct. Continue Reading

How I moved a leaf on Trailhead, or “now that’s what I call customer-focused service!”

Leaf blowing across Salesforce TrailheadI officially get to brag that I’ve made a very small impact on Salesforce Trailhead and I can’t tell you how chuffed that makes me feel. (Chuffed for those who didn’t grow up in New Zealand as I did, means “proud.”)

I know that Trailhead is in Beta, and if it’s like any Beta product that I’ve ever put out for review, there are bound to be some issues here and there. That’s what Beta means in my mind…good enough, but not perfect. I didn’t find any issues with the functionality, but I did find a few (very minor) pieces of content that didn’t jive with my understanding of the Salesforce data model. Nothing major, and to be honest, I thought that I could be wrong, and I wanted to know. So like any good beta tester, yesterday I submitted some feedback. And guess what! I got a response back today from the Salesforce Developer Marketing team! (Shout out to Sandeep, Pavi and Jacob for a fabulous job on all this!). Continue Reading

Blazing my own path on Salesforce Trailhead

Salesforce Trailhead!I’ve always been into puzzles and word games. I guess that’s one of the things that I like about the coding that I’ve done in the past. I have about 10 years (on and off…mostly off these days) experience with CFML and SQL, so code logic isnt’ new to me, even if Object Oriented Programming is. So when shortly after Dreamforce, Salesforce announced Trailhead I was thrilled! I just now finished my first trail and thought I’d write a wee post to tell you all about it. Continue Reading

Happy Happy! Data Cleanup Day

T is for Terrific ToolsCleaning up data makes me sooo very happy. It’s one of the things that I secretly love most about being a Salesforce Admin. I love running reports and finding problems and fixing them. Not just with fantastic tools like DemandTools (by CRMFusion– what the heck would I do without this tool!) but also data cleanup tools within Salesforce, like Workflows. So I’m even more excited that I’ll soon be able to do even more with Apex. Continue Reading

What is Apex?

A is for ApexFirst let me say that I LOVE Salesforce and in addition, sometimes they don’t make it easy for a newbie to understand what the heck they’re talking about! This is the first sentence of the Salesforce ,What is Apex

Apex is a strongly typed, object-oriented programming language that allows developers to execute flow and transaction control statements on the Force.com platform server in conjunction with calls to the Force.com API. Continue Reading