Tweet

Dreamforce 2019

Updated 01/12/2019 to add that Evergreen is in closed developer preview in Spring 20.

It’s now over a week since Dreamforce 2019 officially finished, the jet lag is starting to fade and those afflicted by show fever are coming to terms with the fact that a lot of what they saw isn’t going to be available for a while.

Keynote

Marc Benioff’s keynote was somewhat different from previous years, reflecting the sheer breadth of the Salesforce product set. Instead of lengthy demonstrations of specific clouds, we got quick snippets and pointed at the keynote for the cloud in question. How long before it’s just a page of short links that we read through together?

There was an additional demonstration, when a protestor stood up and started reading a speech that only those around him could hear.

This was clearly expected, as Benioff didn’t miss a beat and told him he had 30 seconds and a timer appeared on screen. This would have been the time to grab the mike and make a few killer points, but the plucky protestor simply continued reading from his script without amplification in a room that holds around 15,000 people. Definitely a missed opportunity in my opinion.

Developers

There are some cool features on their way, especially for developers, and below are three that really caught my attention.

1. Evergreen

The coolest announcement was Evergreen. (As is traditional for Salesforce, this term has already been in use for a while, originally denoting a CPQ subscription with no end date).From a developer perspective, it now means serverless functions, written in open programming languages, invoked from Apex, /Flows or triggered by Events. This kind of thing has always been possible (and Mick Wheeler's talk on Microservices inside Salesforce with Platform Events and Change Data Capture demonstrated exactly this) but the secret sauce for Evergreen is (per the Salesforce blog post) :

Evergreen is a seamless part of the Salesforce platform and no extra authentication or networking setup is required. 

The demo that I was given in the Trailhead zone made it look very simple (no surprise there), with Node microservice code in a subdirectory of the force-app/main/default directory, everything configured through Salesforce setup, and the deployment handled by Salesforce tooling. A fair few questions were met with the response “we haven’t decided exactly how that will be done yet”, but as an early preview it was quite impressive. Evergreen goes into closed developer preview in Spring 20. Pre-release orgs should be available in a couple of weeks, but often these don’t have all features enabled from the word go, so we might end up having to wait until the release lands around February. UPDATE 01/12/2019 - I’ve been informed by product management that Evergreen will be in closed developer preview in Spring 20, which means you’d have to be nominated to take part - contact Salesforce if you think you have a good use case, and if you don’t, get used to waiting!

Evergreen feels to me like an admission that the Salesforce platform has been taken about as far as it can be. Those of us working with large and complex implementations have found ourselves spending more of our time battling governor limits (particularly CPU time) and while going asynchronous can certainly help, that usually requires a degree of orchestration and also brings limits of it’s own. By making Evergreen a seamless part of Salesforce, where developers really don’t have to care that much about exactly where their code runs, it sounds like the product team have given us a good mechanism to scale. Of course we haven’t seen the pricing yet, and there’s probably an element of smoke and mirrors about the demo, but so far it looks very good.

Andy Fawcett’s influence was clearly making itself felt here, as these functions will also be packageable by ISVs!

2. Data Mask

As part of the ongoing privacy wars, Salesforce will soon have native protection of data copied from production when a sandbox is refreshed, via Data Mask. This provides three options for data protection:

1. Anonymization (which we used to call scrambling), where the data is converted to meaningless values.
2. Pseudonymization, where the field is left with a readable, indicative value, but unrelated to the original value. For example, if the field is a phone number, the real data will be replaced with something that looks very much like a valid phone number, but isn’t. 
3. Deletion, where the contents of the field are removed.

This is another area where we’ve been able to do this kind of thing for a while, but never completely. For example, we could easily run an apex class after refresh to protect the data, but if field history tracking is enabled then we’d still end up being able to view the original values. We can turn off field history tracking via the metadata API, but then the original data is unprotected for a short while, which means we have to stop everyone logging in until we’ve taken care of all this, which is another brick in the wall. Something that takes care of all this under the hood is a great improvement.

According to the Salesforce Developers blog post, Data Mask will be generally available “next month” which at the time of writing means December 2019.

3. Open Source Lightning Base Components

50 odd of the Lightning Base Components have been open sourced, with more to come. Initially this will be interesting to understand the implementation details and see if we are anywhere near the standard approach. The Github repo makes it clear that contributions are not welcome right now, but I’m sure in the fullness of time they’ll open up the firehose and have to deal with a torrent of pull requests.

If you don’t see your favourite component in the repo, that means it isn’t open sourced yet. Don’t panic, it’s a work in progress.

There’s  a Trailhead for that

In the continuing story of Trailhead eating the world, the developer and admin keynotes had a call to action in the form of a trailmix:

• Developer Keynote
• Admin Keynote

One More Thing

The theatre sessions weren’t recorded this year, just the breakout sessions in Moscone West, so if you presented a theatre session, you can replay it for your local developer group without too many people having a sense of deja vu. 

Related Posts

• Salesforce Developers Blog Post on Evergreen
• Salesforce Developers Blog Post on Data Mask
• Lightning Base Components Repo
• Slide deck from my theatre session on UI testing with Selenium and NodeJS

 Follow @bob_buzzard

Tweet

Dreamforce - It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

At the time of writing (Nov 7th 2019) Dreamforce is 12 days away. This year will be my 10th consecutive year attending, which doesn’t seem possible but here we are. In spite of my best efforts, I have learned a few things over the years which may be of use to those heading for their first event.

Packing List

Comfortable Shoes

While this feelst like a hackneyed trope, it really is one of the best pieces of advice, especially if you are exhibiting. You’ll be on your feet a huge amount of time, especially once you factor in breakfast sessions and parties, so make sure you aren’t in agony from a couple of hours in. If you need to put on smart shoes (to present, for example), pack them in your rucksack and switch into them only for as long as you need them.

Battery Charger

While you might think your phone has plenty of charge, Dreamforce days are long days. Yes there are charging points, but do you really want to stand there for 45 minutes just charging your phone. It’s also a great way to make new friends if you have some charge to spare!

Space in your Case

You will pick up swag, water bottles and your Dreamforce backpack. Make sure you have enough room to get them home. Also, remember that when picking up your Dreamforce backpack, you may now have two backpacks to manhandle. This is surprisingly easy to forget and it gets real old real quick fighting your luggage all the time.

Exhibiting is Tough

The first year I went to Dreamforce was, like so much of my career, just dumb luck. BrightGen had decided to take a stand, and one of the sales team who was due work the stand took up an offer elsewhere. So a couple of weeks out I was suddenly going to Dreamforce, but on a Booth Staff ticket. This ticket allows you entry to the expo and keynote broadcast rooms and that’s about it, so any ideas I had about attending sessions were not to be. Not that I would have had any spare time anyway, as for some reason everyone was really interested in talking to us about service management contracts even though we were the other side of the world with an 8 hour time difference.

Working a stand is a hard job at Dreamforce, as it’s a multi-day event. Early starts and late finishes are the norm and you have to make sure you are ready to pitch your wares at a moments notice. Don’t underestimate the cumulative effect of four long days on your feet, typically followed by Salesforce or customer events, so you’re still on duty. This is one trip I really wouldn’t want to recreate.

Fitting in Sessions is Tough

One piece of advice I always give to those attending for the first time - don’t sign up for too many sessions, as you won’t get to them. However many you think you’ll be able to make, it will be less, for a variety of reasons including the following.

Moving Buildings Takes Time

Even if it seems like they are really close to each other, such as moving from Moscone West to the Hilton, which as the crow flies is about 50 yards. However, you have to get out of your breakout room, which will take a couple of minutes, longer if you have questions for the presenter. Then you’ll have to get down one or two escalators - if multiple sessions or a keynote have kicked out at this time, you’ll be queuing there for a while. Getting out onto the street from ground level is a snip, but then you have to cross the road. If it’s anything other than early in the morning you’ll find a few thousand people with the same idea, so you’ll have to wait a while.Then you’ll funnel in to the Hilton, figure out where the room is and if you are early enough, join the queue of registered attendees. If you haven’t allowed enough time you’ll find that general admission has been opened up and there are no seats left. Suddenly your planned-to-the-second agenda is blown to pieces and it’s just after lunch on the first day.

If the buildings are a long way apart (Rincon Center to Moscone, for example) it has taken me 30 minutes to get between them around lunchtime. Don’t forget that you are in the middle of a big city, so you have all the standard delays that come with that plus Dreamforce traffic on top.

You Will See People You Know

Even if everything else goes to plan, you’ll bump into someone you know, either in person or online, and stop to chat with them. When you finish chatting you’ll realise it is now 10 minutes into your next session, which is in a different building to the one you’ve been chatting in. This happens to me all the time.

Keynotes Are Busy

Marc Benioff’s keynote is crazy busy, and if you are planning to attend that in person then you really don’t want have anything else to do for at least an hour before. The queues will be huge, and the metal detectors won’t help.

Anything involving American politics will be popular - Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama both generated queues around the block, which made any kind of movement, towards or away from the keynote, very difficult. I expect Barack Obama to be like this but multiplied several times.

Getting out of the main keynote rooms takes ages, as there are usually 5,000-15,000 people trying to funnel through 4 doors onto a few escalators. If you want to get anywhere quickly, either leave a few minutes early or wait 10-15 minutes.

The Trailhead Zone is Awesome

Once you get in there you won’t want to leave. But you’ll need to, in order to go to the next session that you’ve tried to cram in. So leave yourself some time to explore. I spend a lot of my time here.

Get to the Trailhead Zone Early

Most of the hands-on areas fill up really quickly, so if you don’t want to spend more time queueing, get there as soon as it opens. It also means that there will be plenty of swag once you’ve completed your challenge/trail/quest/whatever it is called this year. The lines for things like spinning the admin wheel of fortune, headshots, t-shirts etc are usually short or empty, so if you move quickly you can cover a lot of attractions in a short time.

And Stay There

As I mentioned earlier, I spend a lot of my time here. Not particularly for the hands on side of things, but for the theatre sessions. I usually prefer these to the full on breakout sessions as they are more bite sized and I can get a quick introduction to something I haven’t worked on before and if it piques my interest, I’ll then go off somewhere and learn more about it. There’s always a talk going on somewhere and you can just pitch up and start listening if something takes your fancy.

Don’t Forget your Badge and Lanyard

10 years ago you could get around with just the badge in your wallet, especially for the after parties. That’s no longer the case and you typically need the whole thing everywhere. Remember that you don’t have to wear it all the time on the street to advertise the fact that you are a tourist. 

You aren’t out with your Friends

By this I don’t mean that people are unfriendly or unhelpful, quite the reverse given the well-publicised Ohana community spirit. What I mean is that you aren’t out on the lash with a bunch of mates who will think it hilarious if you get smashed and cause a scene. You’ll be among colleagues, customers and partners who will expect you to behave in a professional manner. It’s very easy to undo a huge amount of work and hard-won goodwill with a single drunken episode, so always remember you need to stay in control.  Even if you don’t care about the effects on your own reputation and career, nobody else is there to watch you make an idiot of yourself.

It’s a Marathon not a Sprint

Dreamforce is four days, so don’t kill yourself trying to do everything on day one. This goes double for the parties - you won’t get much return on the investment for your trip if you are hungover all the time, and this will definitely reduce the sessions you can make it to (or stick around in!). If the lines are long in the Trailhead zone, get an early night and turn up first thing the the next morning - you’ll be glad you did.

Don’t feel bad about taking a time out whenever you need to. While there are mindfulness/quiet zones at the event, getting away from it all for a little while can be a nice change of pace. I usually walk down to the Embarcadero area and spend a few minutes looking at the bridges, boats and water.

Above all, have fun - don’t get so hung up on trying to do everything that you don’t enjoy the experience.

Don’t Miss Sessions

• Mine
  I’m on at the Developer Theatre at 3:45 on Wednesday 19th, taking about UI Testing with Selenium and NodeJS.
  
  
• Marc Benioff’s Keynote
  All the big announcements come at this keynote - there are plenty of overflow rooms if you can’t get there in person, and it will be streamed live.
  
  
• Developer Keynote
  If you are a developer you’ll definitely want to see this one. Arrive early for decent seats.
  
  
• Trailhead Keynote
  Always a riot and one of the loudest keynotes you’ll come across. Sit down the front to be deafened by excited MVPs! 

 

 Follow @bob_buzzard