TL; DR;
Ton useful tips and links to tools and repos from a seasoned freelancer Michal Verner.
Intro
I’m a Salesforce developer based in Prague, Czechia. I’ve been working with Salesforce for almost 10 years. I started my career as a Java developer and got into a Salesforce ecosystem almost by coincidence. There was a new project coming in the company I used to work for. Some new cloud technology – Salesforce? What’s that? So we built a team, learned Salesforce, did some certifications and started working on it. It went quite well and since then I stayed in the Salesforce world. I lived and worked in London for almost 4 years. I started in the consultancy business, but now I mostly work for Salesforce customers directly.
Currently, I work remotely as a contractor for a small startup in London.
I like to write clean and scalable code (which doesn’t always happen). I’m a big fan of DX, LWC and javascript. And I guess like most devs I’m quite lazy, so always trying to automate as many things as I can think of.
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.
Honestly, I don’t remember reading any book about programming. I think those books were and are on my list, but so far I’ve always cherry-picked what I needed and just read some bits and pieces.
Some great Salesforce unrelated books I recently read:
- Black Box Thinking: a great book about how mistakes are important. As a bit of a perfectionist, I really enjoyed it and I hope I improved a little bit my attitude to making mistakes and not being overly afraid of doing them.
- No Rules Rules: another great book about how to run a business without any rules in place and how it can elevate a business when it has only the top employees on the market.
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’m trying to attend all of the Prague SF User Group events. I spoke at one of the meetups last year. I went to CzechDreamin and London’s Calling this year. Both conferences were great and I think it was definitely worth going as it left me with lots of thoughts and things to try.
I didn’t attend this year, but also Salesforce World Tours are quite nice events, less technical, but quite good for networking and seeing some familiar faces.
Dreamforce is on my bucket list, so hopefully, one day as an attendee or speaker if I have some interesting topic, let’s see.
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.
Well of course Pragmatic Bear. Then I read sometimes Salesforce Ben, but that doesn’t have much dev content. Then Blog Martina Humpolce, a nice summary of what’s going on in Salesforce. Trailhead – finally got to a Ranger rank, something long overdue.
I’m trying to keep up with Developer Blog | Salesforce Developers. Also recently I found Architects | Salesforce where you can find more about Salesforce architecture and how Salesforce works under the hood. Similar Salesforce Engineering Blog goes into detail about what is behind the Salesforce platform.
Other than that I land quite often on some blog when searching for something or through Twitter or LinkedIn post, but I’m not really good at bookmarking the blog and following it later, something to improve.
Socials
Do you use Social Media for your work or personal development? Which ones, how and why? Any creators that you would recommend others follow/check out?
I use LinkedIn quite often. As I have quite a lot of recruiters there the content is a little bit mixed, but still, it keeps me entertained and there is interesting content from fellow Salesforce devs.
Recently I’m experimenting with Twitter and looks quite promising, when I changed my list of people to follow to be mostly Salesforce related, then the content is relevant and good.
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?
Salesforce Stack Exchange is my preferred tool for finding answers or asking questions. I’m trying to answer questions when I have time, but still a bit of a newbie there.
I think I’ve almost never found much on the Salesforce Developer Forums. For some reason at least I have a feeling the quality of answers in comparison with StackExchange is several levels lower. Maybe it’s because of the StackExchange reputation system as it motivates people to give more thought to the answers.
I’ve joined the Salesforce Ohana Slack in the past, but it felt really overwhelming. I think it might be a good time to try again at some point.
GitHub
Do you use GitHub as a social platform? Or maybe follow some open-source repos that are interesting and relevant?
Not really using it as a social platform, but using it every day for work. Repos I’d like to give a try or currently following:
- GitHub – scolladon/sfdx-git-delta: Generate the sfdx content in source format from two git commits: Would like to give it a try and replace custom bash scripts for running the delta deployment on the current projected developed over the years
- Apex Enterprise Patterns Open Source · GitHub: Something on my mind since this year’s CzechDreamin, it will happen, one day
- Salesforce Platform · GitHub: Following for example for CLI updates or any reported issues
- Amoss – Apex Mock Objects, Spies and Stubs – A Simple Mocking framework for Apex (Salesforce): Mocking framework, which looks quite easy to use. Might give it a try at some point.
And probably many more I just don’t remember and can’t think of now. Anyway, GitHub is great!
IDE and Extensions
What’s your setup? Specifically when doing Salesforce Development work. Any features or extensions you would recommend.
VS Code with Salesforce Extensions (Monokai theme). I used to use the Illuminated cloud but migrated to VS code as there was finally some modern Salesforce IDE officially supported for Salesforce devs.
I was part of the GitHub Copilot trial, sometimes the suggestions were way off, but sometimes especially for similar code, it was scary good. Unfortunately, this has expired now for me and not sure it was adding that much value to start paying for that. Still definitely worth trying out, sometime it’s really like, how do they know? 😀
Other Tools
Any other software that you can’t do without?
I’m using Z shell and Oh My ZSH! (spaceship theme). It shows configurable prompts on the command line – I’m using it to see the current directory name, git branch, node version and executed time of command. I’m using git, sfdx, zsh-autosuggestions plugins. Overall it’s like a command line on steroids, great!
SoqlXplorer – as the names suggest it’s for running SOQL queries
Slack – just a great tool for team communication, still waiting to add some Salesforce integration to it, but it’s on the list
1Password – I mean how can really any company live without a proper password manager in place?
Insomnia – great for testing GraphQL API
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?
Peer reviews – I think that’s the best invention ever and something every team of devs should do
Plug Yourself
Would you like to share your profiles and websites? Any public repos or project/work that you wanna share?
My site Michal Verner. Not much in there now, but maybe it’s never too late to start a blog.
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.
Spaces of course. With prettier or any other formatting tool I think it really doesn’t matter nowadays anymore.