Ride the Lightning with Trailhead

Ride the Lightning with Trailhead

There’s a Badge for that

LightingX, or Lightning Experience, the new Salesforce front end was launched on August 25th 2015 to great fanfare. 

When major new features or products come out there’s a requirement for skilling up existing administrators, developers, consultants and partners, as well as the huge number of users of Salesforce. Previously this has involved watching videos that were more often than not produced for internal Salesforce use or particularly focused on an upcoming event, such as Dreamforce. For Lightning X, Salesforce have chosen to use the incredibly popular training tool that is Trailhead to get everyone up to speed.

There are four new LightningX trails:

• Admin Trail - Migrating to Lightning Experience
  for admins who will be enabling LightingX on the org they manage
• Admin Trail - Starting with Lightning Experience
  learn how to administer LightningX
• Developer Trail - Lightning Experience
  for developers to learn how to build apps for LightningX using Lightning Components or Visualforce
• Sales Rep Trail - Using Lightning Experience
  for users starting with LightningX

These trails are proving hugely popular - at the Q&A with Parker Harris on August 26th 2015, one fact bomb that was dropped was that a LightningX badge was being earned every 15 seconds, which is pretty impressive.

Now obviously I’ve done all of the trails, as I can’t help myself when new badges come online. but as a career developer the developer trail was the most interesting and the one I’m going to look at in a little more detail.

Developer Trail - Lightning Experience

This is one of the longer trails - with suggested timing of 10 hours 35 minutes its not something you’ll be able to knock out over a lunch hour, but is a better candidate for a quiet Saturday or Sunday in the run up to Dreamforce. Don’t be put off by a longer time - that means that you’ll be learning chapter and verse rather than just skimming the surface, which is exactly what you need if you are going to be selling clients on the benefits of LightningX. It also doesn’t matter if you are looking to continue developing in Visualforce or moving on to Lightning components, as both of these are supported by LightningX and covered in depth in the trail.

The trail not only takes you through the technology, but also provides guidance as to whether you should be jumping in to develop with LightningX or if you should be holding off until things are a little more mature - crucial for those organisations that are debating if they should switch to the new UI. There are also steps for ISV partners and changes to existing development tools, so really something for everyone.

As well as Lightning Components and Visualforce, the trail also introduces the Lightning Design System (LDS) - kind of  a huge deal for those of us that have been trying to build apps that look like Salesforce without trying ourselves into scraped CSS files and the like. Once you’ve earned the badge you can get hands on with the LDS through my blog post on Lightning Design System - Edit Parent and Child Records. 

There are 5 badges available for this trail, and we all know that Badgier = Better, which brings me on to ...

Badgier - A Perfectly Cromulent Word

In the last blog post that I wrote on Trailhead, I used the word ‘badgier’, which generated more than a little interest online. I’ve been racking my brains to come up with another, equally cromulent, word to embiggen this post.

One of my favourite German words is ‘schadenfreude', often translated as ‘shameful pride’, which is taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Based on this I am coining the term ‘badgenfreude’, aka badge pride, which means taking rightful pleasure in your hard earned Trailhead badges. So give yourself a well-deserved dose of badgenfreude and get your LightningX badges with minimal delay.

Related Posts

• Lightning Design System - Edit Parent and Child Records
• Trailhead - Bigger, Better, Badgier

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