Mentz - The Mentee Workflow

This post was updated on 03/08/2019 to remove the concept of separate mentoring and solutions chatter groups for a single challenge - this turned out to be confusing so we now have a single chatter group per challenge.

Introduction

Mentz has been around for a couple of weeks now and we’ve had our first solutions published from Jesse Twum-Boafo that received some great mentoring from Clara Perez. The one key thing that this tells me is that the process works - up until now it was only me that had been through this so I had no idea if it would work on anyone else’s setup. Now that I know it does I’ll start adding the rest of those people that have registered an interest in being a Mentor or Mentee, so if you have registered, look out for an email.

I’m also getting rid of the ask that anybody registering be in the same timezone. I originally added this because I had some weird idea that people could only register for a single Mentz login, but I’ve since realised that this is bonkers - there’s no reason why someone can’t cut their teeth in my instance and then start/join another instance to leverage that experience. There’s also no reason why someone couldn’t have a login to every Mentz instance there is, although I’d be rather suprised if that was the case as Mentz is aimed at those that don’t necessarily have a huge amount of time. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Mentees

One area I don’t think I’ve done a fantastic job on so far is explaining the Mentee process, so a blog post dedicated to this seemed an appropriate next step.

Mentz Login

The first thing a Mentee needs is a login to a Mentz instance. Without one of these you are still free to work on the challenges, but you won’t be able to publish your solutions and receive mentoring. To sign up for a login, visit the Candidate Signup page. (I’ve also not been very consistent about what to call Mentees, but I hope to improve upon that!).

Git and Github

The Mentz challenges are hosted on Github and you need to use Git to create your local copy. If you haven’t used Git before, complete the Git and Github Basics Trailhead module.

Salesforce CLI Plugin

The next thing a Mentee needs to do is install the Mentz Salesforce CLI Plugin. This provides the solution publishing capability, ensuring that the solution is published to the correct chatter group in the appropriate format.

If you don’t have the Salesforce CLI installed, head over to the Home Page and follow the instructions.

Once the CLI is in place, install the Mentz plugin by executing the following command:

sfdx plugins:install mentz

You can verify that the installation was successful by executing:

sfdx mentz -h

and confirming that you see the following output:

Mentz commands

USAGE
  $ sfdx mentz:COMMAND

COMMANDS
  mentz:publish publishes a solution, optionally asking for mentor feedback

Finally, authorise the Salesforce CLI to use your Mentz login:

sfdx force:auth:web:login -a MENTZ

when the browser opens, login using your Mentz instance credentials. The ‘-a MENTZ’ switch creates a shortcut alias of ‘MENTZ’ which you can use when submitting challenges - use anything you like here, but remember to replace any instances of ‘MENTZ’ in the examples below with your chosen alias.

And that’s it - you are now all set to take on a challenge.

Challenges

All Mentz challenges live at the mentzbb organisation on Github - each challenge has a brief description of what it covers:

Click into a challenge to see the underlying details and code. If you want to take a challenge you need to clone the repository and change some of the code. For the purposes of this post I’ll be using the SimpleConditional challenge as an example, but all challenges follow the same pattern.

First step is to clone the repository - there’s a helpful button on the challenge main page to steer you in the right direction

Click the ‘Clone or Download’ dropdown button and you can copy the URL you need to clone.

I use Git from the command line, so from my home directory I execute:

$ git clone https://github.com/mentzbb/SimpleConditional1.git

which does its thing and produces the following output:

Cloning into 'SimpleConditional1'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 25, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (25/25), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
remote: Total 25 (delta 7), reused 19 (delta 4), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (25/25), done.

The contents of the repository are as follows:

Where:

CHALLENGE is a file that the Salesforce CLI plugin uses to determine which challenge this is.
force-app contains the source format version of the challenge.
README.md is the home page for the challenge repository on Github.
src contains the metadata format of the challenge.

Completing a Challenge

To complete a challenge, you build out the sample class so that all the tests in the associated test class pass.

In the case of the SimpleConditional1 challenge, the sample class to be built out is SimpleConditional1.cls, and the tests from SimpleConditional1_Test.cls need to pass to complete the challenge. It doesn’t matter which of the source or metadata format classes you build out, and you only need to build out one of them.

Each method in the sample class has a comment that explains what processing it needs to carry out, e.g.

public static Boolean IsPositive(Integer num)
{
    // change this method to return true when
    // the number is greater than zero and false otherwise
    return null;
}

In order to run the unit tests, you need to send the code to a Salesforce instance. There are several ways of doing this, detailed in the following sections.

Scratch Org Development

If you want to develop against a scratch org, you’ll work on the source format code. Edit the code under the force-app directory and send to the scratch org using the command:

sfdx force:source:push

You can execute the tests in the org using the developer console, or the Salesforce CLI command:

sfdx force:apex:test:run -t SimpleConditional1_Test

Once you are happy with your code, you can request mentoring using the command:

sfdx mentz:publish -c "<comment>" -u MENTZ -m
     -f ./force-app/main/default/classes/SimpleConditional1.cls

Where ‘<comment>’ is anything you wish to say to draw the mentor’s attention too.

Developer Edition Development

If you want to work against a developer edition, you’ll work on the metadata format code. You will need to authenticate the Salesforce CLI against the developer edition instance using the same approach as you did to authenticate against Mentz - don’t forget to set up a different alias!

Edit the code under the src directory and deploy to the developer edition using the command:

sfdx force:mdapi:deploy -d src -w 10 -u <username>

Where <username> is the alias for this org.

You can execute the tests in the org using the developer console, or the Salesforce CLI command:

sfdx force:apex:test:run -t SimpleConditional1_Test -u <username>

If you don’t want to actually deploy the code anywhere, but just run the tests, you can add the -c switch and ask the deploy command to run the tests using the following command:

sfdx force:mdapi:deploy -d src -w 10 -u <username> -c
     -t SimpleConditional1_Test

Once you are happy with your code, you can request mentoring using the command:

sfdx mentz:publish -c "<comment>" -u MENTZ -m
     -f ./src/classes/SimpleConditional1.cls

Where ‘<comment>’ is anything you wish to say to draw the mentor’s attention too.

Using the Developer Console

If you don’t want to deploy the code, you can use the developer console as follows:

Open the developer console
Click the File menu and select New -> Apex Class
Name the Apex class SimpleConditional1
Copy the contents of the force-app/main/default/classes/SimpleConditional1.cls and paste this into the new apex class.
Save the class
Click the File menu and select New -> Apex Class
Name the Apex class SimpleConditional1_Test
Copy the contents of the force-app/main/default/classes/SimpleConditional1_Test.cls and paste this into the new apex class.
Save the class
Work on the SimpleConditional1 apex class as you usually would until all the tests in SimpleConditional1_Test pass.
Copy the contents of the SimpleConditional1 class from the developer console and paste this into force-app/main/default/classes/SimpleConditional1.cls in your local filesystem.

You can then publish a solution, optionally requesting mentoring using the command:

sfdx mentz:publish -c "<comment>" -u MENTZ -m
     -f ./force-app/main/default/classes/SimpleConditional1.cls

Where ‘<comment>’ is anything you wish to draw the mentor’s attention to and the ‘-m’ switch adds a comment requesting mentoring.

Discussion

Once you have published your solution, a Mentor will pick this up when one is available. As the idea behind Mentz is that people dip in when they have time, it may take a few days before anyone responds. It will be worth the wait. The discussion takes place in a chatter group dedicated to the specific challenge, so you just login with your Mentz credentials and start talking.

Still in Beta

Mentz is still in beta, so things are likely to change, for example:

Now that Summer 19 is live and deployment from source format to non-scratch orgs is GA, the metadata format version of the challenges will be going away
Separate commands and chatter groups for mentoring and publishing solutions may be merged.

Introducing Mentz - Salesforce Developer Mentoring

Follow @bob_buzzard

Bob Buzzard Blog

Sunday, 23 June 2019