TL; DR;
Łukasz Sochowki shares how he works and what tools he likes to use to be productive. Chrome extensions stand out a little, but after all it’s all down to being curious.
Intro
Hi, I’m Łukasz Sochowski.
I’ve been working with Salesforce for over 9 years as a developer. Now I am working as a Senior Developer/Architect. I excel at LWC and community areas of Salesforce.
Books
Which “professional” books have you read that you liked or would recommend others to read. Great if they are Salesforce (Developer) related but they don’t necessarily have to be.
Tough questions. Haven’t read a good programming-oriented book in a long time. About Salesforce there is one book about advanced programming, but not sure if I would recommend it. The only one I would for sure recommend for every developer is the Clean Code.
Courses & Events
Did you follow any online (or in person) courses? Are there any that you would recommend? Do you participate in Meetups or organised User Groups?
I was participating in pre-COVID times in the Warsaw Salesforce Developer Group, but remote work loosened things a bit and there was no meeting in a very long time. I usually take certification-oriented courses when preparing for the certifications on focus-on-force. I usually go through all the questions they have to assess what areas of specialisation I am missing knowledge in.
Blogs
Give a shout out to any (Salesforce) Blogs that you follow are are fan of. You don’t need to be a regular reader, or maybe even just one post that may have got your attention.
Salesforce Ben for quick release notes overview, I also sometimes take a look at the articles here when something seems particularly interesting for me.
Forums and Discussion Channels
Where do you look for help or answers to problems you can’t solve yourself? Do you spend time answering other peoples’ questions? Where?
Well, obviously Stack Overflow and the Salesforce-oriented version of it. I try to help and improve answers whenever I see something wrong there. Also I asked a couple of questions there that in the end I needed to answer myself after the long research.
Trailblazers Community is sometimes helpful, especially when you are testing freshly released or pilot features – there is a higher chance to meet somebody with relevant experience or even from the product team itself.
GitHub
Do you use GitHub as a social platform? Or maybe follow some open-source repos that are interesting and relevant?
I do not have my personal, public GitHub. Sometimes I use public repos to check other people’s solutions for inspiration. I was thinking multiple times to put some of my LWC components for the broader public, but there’s always something more important :(…
IDE and Extensions
What’s your setup? Specifically when doing Salesforce Development work. Any features or extensions you would recommend.
Nowadays I switched fully to VS Code both for SFDX- and sandbox-based development. Previously I used the ForceCode plugin for sandboxes, but it became obsolete due to the constant SFDX CLI development.
When it comes to the components, omitting the obvious, SF-related ones, I use prettier and GitLens – the latter one is great to quickly check the author of the specific line, quickly browse the file history, etc. Definitely a must-have on bigger projects!
Other Tools
Any other software that you can’t do without?
KeePass – who would remember all these passwords to all the instances?
WinMerge – The best tool to compare files and folders. I do it surprisingly often in my everyday work. Tip: ignoring the whitespace is very useful!
Git in the terminal – call me old-fashioned, but it’s almost always quicker with the keyboard
Notepad++ – keeping my notes, universal copy-paste holder
Extensions for Chrome:
Salesforce inspector – obviously, the Salesforce Developer swiss army knife.
Salesforce Colored Favicons – gives every instance a different favicon so you can easily work on multiple orgs in one browser
Salesforce ORGanizer – I use mostly the quick jump to feature
Salesforce LWC Editor – To quickly read/edit the Aura/LWC on any org. Especially useful when you are not sure which version of the code is there
Anything Else
Anything else you wanna add that doesn’t fit above? What else do you do or use to be a good Salesforce Developer?
Well, this is actually the most interesting part I think. Tools make you more productive and information sources are only the information sources. I think in our profession it is not important how deep your knowledge is but how quickly you can create a solution that will meet all the requirements. We are living in an information age where it is impossible to memorise everything!
This is why I don’t try to memorise all the stuff like what’s exactly the syntax of some feature or where in the setup can I find some feature – I can quickly get back to it using google. I try to remember how something works and even more important – whenever I find issues I need to understand why something does not work. Curiosity, attention to detail – this is IMHO what makes a good developer.
Tabs of Spaces
For a bit of light entertainment, my favourite “controversial” topic. What’s your preference? Do you care? I love to pretend to care more than I do, though I am genuinely looking for someone to convince me my choice is wrong.
Nowadays when you have multiple options to automatically replace tabs with the spaces it is not such a big deal as 10 years ago. Also it never was a big deal outside of Python where it really matters ;-).
For me it has always been tabs – they are wider so you don’t have to decide if there should be 2, 3 or 4 spaces per indent, you press the Tab only one time and they were especially designed for indentation.