Meetups in London this week have had a rough ride due to the planned Tube strikes… thankfully for me these worked out in my favour and it meant that I was able to get a spot at the London Salesforce Devs meetup at the very last minute.
There was a new venue for this outing of the devs – The Financial Times offices by the Thames. The venue had everything we needed, along with (too many?!?!) pizzas and beer. I was hoping to carb-load for my morning run the next day, and this provided the perfect opportunity.
There were two talks scheduled but we ended up with three… sounding good already, right?
In fact the dev group was honoured to welcome Jodi Wagner and other #girlygeeks to the group. Some who I’ve seen at previous meetups but were in attendance to specifically kick off a new London GirlyGeeks meetup. Jodi pointed out that the meetups won’t be entirely technical, and are all are welcome to attend… more news on this can expected post-Dreamforce.
Anyhoo… onto the talks;
CSS Flexbox – MakePositive
Kim Hellbom who was down for this talk was sadly unwell, but thankfully Mohammed Haseeb from MakePositive filled in with just 30 minutes notice. The talk was a whistle-stop tour of the CSS Flexbox implementation and how it can be used to gain control over some tricky responsive layouts.
Included in the talk were the some of the pitfalls of other layouts techniques and some examples. Here’s a codepen demonstrating Flexbox in use.
See the Pen Flebox example 1 by kim hellbom (@kimhell) on CodePen.
The Flexbox display property is a fairly deep topic… and I recommend this great article on css-tricks for a good overview and as an initial starting point on the subject.
We were teased with the idea of a Minecraft demo… but were left without one… I’ll chase down the folk at MakePositive to see if they have a link to it.
Salesforce at The FT : Gareth Park
Gareth gave bonus talk on how The FT have used Salesforce internally. The FT have 2k+ users, 10 developers and 2 admins and currently use (possibly among others) the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and multiple apps on Force.com. These cover both B2C and B2B scenarios.
One particular case that Gareth took us through was that of their Corporate Fulfilment application. Prior to powering this with Salesforce they had multiple systems on their architecture, which lent itself to complexity and a slow flow between the different systems. This meant that a fairly simple use-case could actually be a complicated process that took many hours.
With a Salesforce solution they used Salesforce as their key platform (so single sign-on for users) and this consumed micro-services hosted on platforms such as Heroku and AWS. These micro-services were bridged via a Kafka messaging queue and bespoke Salesforce event bridge.
The result of this migration was a dramatic reduction in time-to-complete for transactions, as well as a simple, single platform for end users to interact with.
We were also told how splunk was used as a big store, allowing for complex searching, filtering and handling of events.
Building Video Apps on Salesforce – Francesco Iervolino
As a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect Francesco is certainly a voice of knowledge. And in this case he talked us through some of the details of how MakePositive have used video in their Salesforce apps. He mentioned that in today’s world that the technology needed to deliver such functionality was cost-effective and as such enriched apps were now more readily available. A couple of apps that show a real benefit of this technology are TutorHub and BeMyEyes. If you’ve not heard of either of these then I definitely recommend you take a quick gander.
Francesco’s talk and demos used the WebRTC standard technology and he told us that in one of their projects their R&D into this topic came out with several options. The one they settled on though was a solution called OpenTok. There were a few reasons for this choice but a key one was the archiving feature that they needed. OpenTok, who are owned by Telefonica, supplies a comprehensive set of standard features, as well as some extensions that really make their offering fairly strong.
We were then shown a few demonstration apps that Francesco had put together, ranging from a very basic Visualforce implementation, through to a video conference calling app. The hunger in the room for such an app (based upon the quality of Hangouts, the pain of GTM, etc) was huge… and it seems that MakePositive might release this on the AppExchange.
Francesco’s slides can be found here.
Wrap-up
As well as the usual chat (and beer and pizza) with the fellow attendees the key highlight of this month’s meetup was the Video talk. It was confidently delivered and covered a topic that really got people thinking and talking… oh how I’d love to never have to use <INSERT VID CONF TOOL OF YOUR CHOICE> again.
Thanks, of course, must go to the organisers for once again putting on a great meetup. And to to The FT for hosting and feeding us all.