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July
The London Salesforce Developers held our TrailheaDX Global Gathering. Sadly a lot of this was us explaining how we'd failed to get on to any of the pilots and talking about things rather than demoing them. We still had fun though, which is the main thing.
The EMEA cohort of Speaker Academy completed their six week course and started prepping for their graduation event where they would give a 5 minute lightning talk to a live audience. It's an interesting mixture of relief that the course is over and trepidation that they have to put what they've learnt into practice in front of a bunch of people they don't know.
The Salesforce Summer 20 release went live, and the BrightGen webinar went virtual - not a massive change, but you do miss being able to look over at your co-presenter to see if there are any problems or questions. This release included the Lightning Message Service going GA, and flows that could now be run after a record was saved, getting ever closer to parity with triggers.
Salesforce's inexorable growth continued as their market cap hit $180 billion, passing Oracle's $174 billion. Richard Socher stepped down as Salesforce Chief Scientist to start his own company.
The UK lockdown officially ended as pubs were allowed to open again!
August
The August meet of the London Salesforce Developers was a Speaker Academy takeover, as our first EMEA cohort gave their graduation talks to an appreciative audience drawn from the developer, admin and women in tech groups.
As the pandemic started to hit the US, Salesforce had pledged no layoffs for 90 days - this clearly expired in August as 1,000 jobs were cut. In the continuing story of the whole world going virtual, Salesforce replaced Exxon Mobil in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Marc Benioff also hinted at no digital Dreamforce this year, which sent the community into a bit of a tailspin.
The UK government launched "Eat Out to Help Out" - an initiative that allowed pubs and restaurant to offer discounted meals Mon-Wed. This was intended to get the economy moving and give people the confidence to mix in public again, but also had the effect of increasing infections - encouraging large numbers of people to congregate indoors was still a bad idea it appeared.
September
The London Salesforce Developers September meetup was on data factories and presented by Nikos Mitrakis - another remote presenter who would have found it more difficult to attend in person.
As I took a well earned break from Speaker Academy, a Trailhead badge that I'd written content for was released - Salesforce Skills and Experience Building
After the layoffs the previous month, Salesforce announced they were creating 4,000 jobs - hopefully giving some of those laid off a better chance of finding another position. There were also a bunch of "new product" announcements :
Salesforce Meetings - bringing the virtual meeting experience inside Salesforce while still running on third party technology.
Digital 360 - which felt rather like a repackaging of existing features with an E-Commerce slant.
Work.com for Vaccines - to help governments and healthcare organisations manage large scale vaccine rollouts (several months before it was needed, it turns out).
The UK continued to open up - I was able to go for a couple of weeks holiday in Norfolk and even go to a few pubs and tea shops. Always socially distanced, but the weather was still glorious so I was mostly walking my dogs on the beach or sat with them in pub gardens. I kept reminding myself (and others) that every other pandemic in history had a second wave, and there was no reason why this time it would be different.
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