London Salesforce Developer Meetup – July Review

Last month’s London Salesforce DUG meetup was an odd one. It was a viewing party for the keynote(s) of the TrailheaDX – the annual Salesforce Developer conference. As interesting, and enjoyable, as it was, I was pleased this month’s agenda was back to the “couple of talks and then chat”.

But before all that, Keir Bowden kicked off with a short community message… “we want more speakers”. So if you have a passion for something that you think the Salesforce Developer community might like, or a demo of something cool, then please, please get in touch with the group.

“We want more speakers, get in touch”
– London Salesforce DUG Organisers

The Welkin Suite IDE – Rustam Nurgudin

Starting off the talks was Rustam, CEO of The Welkin Suite, the company behind the IDE that is really impressing Salesforce devs. He told us how their IDE was born of frustration with the existing tools that were available. As with other great products, they saw a problem and – in my eyes at least – have made some incredible dents in it.

The Welkin Suite logo

The amount of features and tools in the suite just seems boggling. The core editor has everything and more that you’d expect in an editor… and then some;

  • Code completion
  • Syntax highlighting (apex and Lightning, I believe)
  • Mini-map (with magnified preview and error highlighting)
  • Snippets
  • Unit test statuses and actions available in the margin
  • And probably others – Rustam was demoing faster than I can take notes!

Other parts of the IDE included Unit Test (code coverage, jump from logs to source, retrospective debugs and more), a Profiler, class libraries and project inspector. The latter includes the neat support of specifying your own folder hierarchy that can be shared with other members of your team. Oh, and I almost forgot their WAVE PREVIEW FEATURE!

For the time being it’s free and is available on Windows, with a Mac version coming soon. Rustam believes that in future there’ll be a monthly subscription for use… but to be honest talking to the other devs who were at the meet it seems the features of the IDE are well worth a small recurring fee.

I chatted to Rustam following the meet and he’s very keen to get developers outside of their business using it, and is openly requesting feedback… so what are you waiting for, download The Welkin Suite now and let him know what you think!

Road to Becoming a CTA – Sunny Matharu

Up next was Sunny Matharu, of Deloitte. He told us how they’ve recently been discussing the updates to the types of architects that will (or do, now) exist in the Salesforce ecosystem. The talk title seemed to be a bit link-bate-esq, but I’ll forgive him, as it was a really good open talk and discussion on the new state of certifications relating to Salesforce architects.

What we actually covered was the new certifications that are ( and will be, maybe) available, and how they all fit together and what they will (probably) mean for the dreaded final CTA review board exam.

“Sometimes I wonder if Salesforce make more money from licenses or certifications”
– Anonymous

So this is all a little confusing and still new – and/or not yet out finalised- so please take what follows with a pinch of Safe-Harbour-salt. Salesforce have introduced 3 new Domain Specialist certifications and are going to introduce 2 new Domain Architect certifications.

Salesforce Architect Certifications Hireachy

The Domain Specialist certs are made up of;

Looking into the study guide of the Mobile Solutions Architecture Designer certificate it seems to cover a lot of what we undertake every day at MobileCaddy. Be it designing solutions to support secure mobile Salesforce applications across multiple devices on multiple OSs. Or understanding and explaining the suitability, strengths and limitations of the different options an organisation might face when undertaking a mobile transformation project. The materials already available to support those wanting to gain this accreditation appears to be pretty thorough… I just hope that a mention of MobileCaddy in an exam would get the participant extra credit :)

As for the two Domain Architects certs it’s believed that they will be as below… but at time of writing the closest I could find online was a note on the Architect Academy to say they’re “Coming Soon”.

  • Application Architect
  • System Architect

Sunny went on to say that the idea behind these extra certifications was that it would hopefully reduce the failure rate of the CTA final review board, by breaking down areas of expertise into individual chunks and exams. I wanted to find out more about how he’d got all this info, but I missed him after the talks, but from what I gathered he, through Deloitte, had been chatting to EMEA CTA expert at Salesforce.

“The number of Salesforce certs on a project team can affect how they are won”
– Sunny Matharu

I really enjoyed the open discussion of this session, and Sunny came across as a very knowledgable and personable chap, and one I hope we hear more from at the DUG.

Wrap Up

As I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed the make-up of this month’s DUG; both talks were full of knowledge and passion and I think everyone in the audience took at least a few items of interest from them.

As usual, the chats following the meet were entertaining and thought provoking, and definitely worth sticking around for. It’s was good catching up with folks I’d met before as well as new faces… including one chap I’d spoken to many times on conference calls but not actually met before.

Of course no write-up would be complete with a nod to all the sponsors (CapGemini, MobileCaddy) and organisers.

Recordings of the talks should be available on the London Salesforce DUG YouTube channel in the near future, make sure you follow MobileCaddy Devs on twitter to get notified once they’re up.