Saturday 29 June 2013

Meetups and More

Meetup with Apex Product Managers

On 20th June the London Salesforce Developers welcomed Apex Product Managers Andrew Waite and Josh Kaplan to our Meetup at SkillsMatter. There was a real buzz of anticipation for this event and it didn't disappoint.  After a short run through of some of the Apex specific enhancements for the Summer 13 release, and a sneak peek at a pre-release version of the chatter mobile app, we then entered a no-holds barred Q&A session.  One issue with this sort of informal session is that it can descend into a forum to air grievances and bad experiences - although we flirted with this, in general we managed to maintain the positive vibe that we all had at the start of the meeting. Something I always enjoy when I have a chance to speak to the product managers is finding out which enhancements that I view as simple and can't understand why they aren't complete already are actually incredibly hard to do and require a complete overhaul of a section of the platform. 

After the event Andrew and Josh joined us for our traditional post-meetup drinks, where we were able to continue pitching our ideas, as well as shooting the breeze about Apex, Force.com and Salesforce in particular.

The session was recorded by the good folks at SkillsMatter and is available to watch here.

If you aren't already a member of the Salesforce London Developers Meetup group, you can join via the meetup site.

Second Introduction to Force.com Workshop

After the success of the first Introduction to Force.com workshop in April, we ran another one of these on 25th June, led by myself with hosting and assistance from John Stevenson (@jr0cket), one of the Salesforce Developer Evangelists here in the UK.

The format was broadly the same as before - get a group of people keen to learn about Force.com together at Salesforce offices and go through the Force.com workbook as a group, with hopefully useful tips and advice from the hosts as the evening progresses.  April Nassi, Developer Program Manager at Salesforce, sent us through a pack of hardcopy workbooks and cheat sheets which were a useful addition - not only does it give the attendees something to take away, it meant that those who were struggling a little could catch up at their own pace by following the instructions in the book when we took a break at the end of each chapter. April also sent through some schwag so some of the attendees went away with new Force.com wear.

We'll be running more of these workshops in the future, so keep an eye on the meetup group for the next one - if you'd like to help out or host one, let us know.