Being a Salesforce Developer in the Community

There are times in your life when you pause for a few seconds and think to yourself: 'How did I end up here?'

I do that quite often; while I'm commuting to and from work or while travelling from here to there on the plane... Those moments that only belong to you, when only you can hear your thoughts... I do my own retrospectives, having an insight to what my life is and how I got to be the person I am and doing what I do.

And I'm talking about this because the content of my thoughts at those moments is actually my career path, and how I ended up being a Salesforce developer.

My previous development experience had mainly been with Java, working for a big consultancy firm on the financial services sector, and then working for a small consultancy on big civil engineering projects. That's when I heard about this other small company called Desynit with a few Java projects, but with a special focus on a different technology called Salesforce. And from that moment, my life as a developer started changing, giving me skills I hadn't had the chance to develop before.

What's the Salesforce learning curve?

This is one of the questions I'm asked more frequently, and the answer to it is simple: if you're a developer with an object oriented background, then it's really quick. My experience, coming from a Java background, is that you can easily learn Apex with minimal effort.

The rest (Visualforce, Lightning, ...) depends on your front-end skills before starting with Salesforce, but I always recommend everyone to take a look at Trailhead, where they can learn all things Salesforce, from user to admin to development; hundreds of guided tutorials that you can try yourself with the free Salesforce Developer ORGs.

My experience in the Community

The Salesforce community is a huge online space where you find answers to your questions, and also very funny pictures of people having fun in their DUGs (Salesforce Developer User Groups). From Twitter to Salesforce Stack Exchange you have lots of resources and people willing to help.

And that's what I've done myself. I surf the net looking for answers to my problems, I ask my questions to my fellow developers on Twitter, where the Salesforce community is huge.


 
But one of the things that's helped me the most was running my local Salesforce Developer User Group in Sevilla. Meeting people in your local area who work on your same industry is a key factor to motivate yourself. Since then, I've been able to show Salesforce to people who didn't know anything about Salesforce, and also discuss more advanced topics with other Salesforce professionals.

Since then I've given a few presentations and overcome one of my biggest fears in the past, public speaking. Having attended a few Salesforce events over the world, it was something I really wanted to be able to do. I started giving a few presentations as part of our DUG meetings, and managed to do a couple more with a bigger audience at Madrid Essentials.

And now I'm looking forward to the next one!


These are just a few things that make me appreciate to be part of the Salesforce community. It's been a long time since I've complained about work, so that must be a sign that some things are working well...

But if there's one thing that I can say is always true and constant in the Salesforce world, that is definitely LEARNING. There's always something new to learn. LEARN! LEARN! LEARN!

So keep your eyes peeled!