London Salesforce Developers - Back in Person

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20th October 2021 was a momentous day for the London Salesforce Developers Trailblazer group, as we met in person for the first time since 12th February 2020 - 88 weeks later!

We've still been running our events - like most of the developers around the world we had switched to Zoom, but fatigue was hitting, and the excitement of having people join from around the world was fading fast. After the September Dreamforce viewing party event, we organisers felt that enough was enough and it was time to go out into the world and once again mingle with the three-dimensional people.

Cloud Orca were our generous hosts, in the Loading Bay event area of their Techspace offices in Shoreditch: 

Your organisers and Cloud Orca CEO Ed Rowland (right)

It was wonderful to see everyone, and very strange to be in such proximity again. Dare I say it felt like we were returning to normal, although it will take a few more of these before it starts to feel normal again. Luckily we humans are nothing if not adaptable, so I'm sure by early next year we'll have forgotten what a virtual event feels like.

One thing we were fairly sure of what that people wanted to talk to each other rather than listen to us, so we kept the presentation side of the evening short and sweet.  Amnon kicked us off minimum slides to welcome everyone back, and call out some key community news, including :

• The revamped Idea Exchange 
• Slack Frontiers on Nov 17/18 (the flagship conference - think Dreamforce but for Slack)
• Developer Advocates Ask Me Anything - Oct 27 17:00-18:00 BST
• and the Salesforce Developers Survey, open until Nov 30

then a few minutes from yours truly on the key developer features from the Winter 22 release. 

As part of my talk I gave a demo of dynamic interactions - while this wasn't recorded, you can find the code in my Winter 22 Github repository. I may write up another blog post about this, although there wasn't an awful lot more ground covered than my last post on the topic, aside from a slightly more plausible use case! It did feel good to be demoing to a live audience again - demoing virtually is fine, but you do feel somewhat removed from the audience.

Not quite Rick Wakeman - photo posted by Louise Lockie on Twitter

The RSVPs were a little lower than before the pandemic, which isn't surprising as not everyone is keen to start mixing again. Dropouts were way down though, so thus far it looks like those who sign up to come along aren't doing so lightly. 

If you are interested in coming along to our next meetup, make sure to join our Trailblazer Community Group, and if you'd like to see what we've got up to in the past and receive future recordings, follow our Youtube channel.