Dreamforce 18 Recap! Educational, inspirational and fun!

Hi everyone!! I'm back with some notes about my Dreamforce '18 experience!!

We always plan our event attendance for the year at Desynit so we all have a chance to attend a couple of them. We are aware of how important this is to keep up with all things Salesforce, so we always plan them well in advance. I'd like to thank Desynit for giving me the opportunity to go to San Francisco and live this great experience of Dreamforce again.

The beginning

It all begun with a plane selfie, Kerry Townsend asked everyone to take a selfie with their Community Event T-shirt, so I joined her with my own selfie just as I got on the plane on my way to #SanFran! Please note that Community Events are now Community Conferences, this is one of my DF18 takeaways, the Trailblazer Community team stressed this every time they could, and because we're responsible students, we took note and are getting used to the new naming conventions ;)

This is when it really started feeling like Dreamforce!

Getting to San Francisco a couple of days ahead of the biggest IT conference in the world is always good. You need time to get over the jet lag and adjust your body to the new time zone.

Being a DF speaker

This is the second year I've been lucky enough to have been chosen to be a DF speaker and share my experience with a broad audience. I talked to my friend Laura Díaz to submit a talk that we could both give and we made a really good Title and Abstract.

We knew that Mulesoft had recently joined the Salesforce family by acquisition, and we both had experience with Salesforce integrations and Data Integration, so we thought this was a great moment to show everyone what you can do with the API-led connectivity that Mulesoft offers, both for on-premise and cloud-based environments.

We prepared a couple of demo's to show live, as we wanted to show the power and flexibility of the platform, and we had just 20 minutes to do it! So we kept it simple in slides and focused on demo-ing as much as we could.

We had a good attendance, taking into account that this was an early morning session the day after Dreamfest... People really understood the point of our talk and we had a few questions after we finished. The session feedback was also quite good, so we were happy with our performance.

Check out the recording of our session for a quick demo of what you can do with Mulesoft:

We had a really good session owner, Ernie Maldonado, that guided us through the whole process of building our slides, providing feedback after our dry-runs and helping us with everything. It was also great meeting him in person once in San Francisco.
I have to say that Salesforce has really improved the coaching this year, with a big focus on providing good and timely feedback and making it all as transparent as possible.

Networking with partners, clients and friends

We live in a connected world and it's great to be able to work globally with a team spread all over the world, that's what we do and it's really easy when you work in the Cloud. But it's also great to get to meet people in person, mainly when it's for the first time!

Being in San Francisco, I took the opportunity to visit one of our clients at Desynit. They were just around the corner from the Dreamforce National Park, so it was really handy to pop in for a catch up. We took the opportunity to go through an introduction of the broader team, enjoy the views from their offices and also discuss the progress and plans for the project we're working on at the moment.

It was also very nice to talk to the Validity guys at their booth (They are the former DemandTools people). We have worked with them in the past, and it's good to discuss our experience with them and to know their vision for the future.

The Skuid guys had a really nice and lovely space just opposite Moscone West, the Skuid Lagoon, with comfy areas to relax and have nice private conversations. It was also very good to catch up with them and take a break from the hectic Dreamforce National Park for a few minutes and get an energy top up!

Bumping into people you know from other years and also people you only know from Twitter is great! You feel like you're home being so far away! Hanging out with former colleagues, Spanish friends, British friends, French friends, the Latinoforce community, locals to SF and many more places... it feels like a UN summit, and that is great! I love the international community and sharing with everyone.

It was also the first time I had the chance to visit the Salesforce Tower, which is now the highest building in San Francisco. Very impressive!


Having some fun and meeting new people

But Dreamforce is not only about learning, networking and getting inspired, it's also about having fun!

Being an #Admineloper, as I consider myself both a developer and an admin, it's with great pride that I'm sharing this entry in the Awesome Admin Moments from Dreamforce '18 blog post, take a look at the runner ups of the #DF18 #AwesomeAdmin Lip Sync battle!

It was great sharing this experience with my friend Laura Díaz, who is a natural star herself! But it was also great to connect with a new Trailblazer for me, Zarina Varley. It was great to meet her and share very interesting ideas for future gatherings!! Good luck with the organisation of True North Conference next year in Canada!! Please get in touch if you need anything ;)

And the lovely Trailhead pictures are really good fun!! I still keep looking at this mesmerising GIF every now and then...