London Salesforce Developers Want Your Spring 21 Favourites

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Since the UK went into first lockdown in March 2020, the London Salesforce Developers have met virtually over zoom. This works fine from the perspective of the talks and Q&A, but one area that is a real challenge to replicate is the casual conversations. Sometimes this is just general catch ups to talk about what we've been working on recently, which is something we can just about manage without. More problematic is that we aren't sharing the cool new features that we've just learned about, and that just isn't acceptable.

For that reason, our March 2021 event will be nothing but our members sharing their favourite feature from the Spring 21 release of Salesforce - we want to hear what you are excited about, and why!

So if you've spotted a hidden gem, sign up for our session on March 10th 2021 and tell us all about it. Don't delay - if someone else gets in before you, they'll get to talk about it!

You can sign up for the event here - once registered you'll need to fill in another form with details of what you want to talk about. You can also put in a backup choice or two, in case someone got in early and grabbed your favourite.

The event takes place on March 10th from 18:00 to 20:00 GMT - we'd love to hear from some internationals, so if you can make the timing work then please join us.

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Lightning Strikes the Trails

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Just in time for Lightning Developer Week around the globe, new Lightning modules were released for Trailhead including one for Lighting Components. Up until now, most of the content on Trailhead has been subjects that i’m very familiar with (although that hasn’t stopped me dropping points through not reading the challenges properly :) 

The Lightning Components was a different experience - as these have not long made it into beta, and more importantly still don’t play nicely with canvas apps, I’d been dabbling at best, mainly around follow along tutorials where I didn’t have to concentrate too hard.  The Trailhead challenges get you to write real code against a set of requirements and then automatically validates whether you’ve succeeded.

We’re not in Kansas any more

This is really useful as Lightning Components present a different programming challenge to the Apex/Visualforce paradigm we’ve used in the past:

• The majority of the code is in JavaScript. This will no doubt scare a few old school developers who think anything not related to presentation should be handled by the server, but its the future - of that I have no doubt.
• The Apex that you do use is stateless - if you don’t send information from the front end as a parameter, the controller won’t have access to it.
• Communication between components is via JavaScript events.  This is awesome.  Previously to communicate between Visualforce components you had to pass instances of a parent page or component controller around so that they could know there was something there to communicate with. Where this is really powerful is in the Lightning App Builder, as I demonstrated at the London Lightning Developer week by dropping two components into the app builder which were able to communicate with each other without any further wiring up. 

The Lighting module has a guide time of four hours, which is a pretty good estimate.  This isn’t something you’ll want to dip into for 5 minutes here and there. Its also a good idea to have the Lighting Components Developer’s Guide open while you are working it, so that you can read more around the various concepts.

Debugging JavaScript - oh the humanity

There are currently 9 steps in the Lightning Components module. In addition to the steps that cover the points I’ve made above, there’s one that I’d like to particularly draw attention to: Debugging Your Components - this will stand you in good stead when you apply the learning from the module to build your own components when they inevitably don’t work.

Douglas Crockford described browsers as “the most hostile software development environment imaginable” and he should know!  Knowing the tools that are available and how to use them will make things a little easier on you.

So what’s keeping you?

As Columbo would say, just one more thing: if you haven’t tried Trailhead yet,consider how much content is now available and hazard a guess at how much you’d have to pay for that sort of training elsewhere. If that isn’t a reason to get started straight away I don’t know what is.

Related Posts

• Trailhead - Interactive Force.com Developer Training
• Musings of a Trailheader
• Head for the New Trails

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London Salesforce Developers - Certified Technical Architect Panel

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Certified Technical Architect Panel

The November meetup of the London Salesforce Developers had a different format to usual, when a panel of Salesforce Certified Technical Architects convened to answer questions from the community about the Technical Architect certification process.

The meetup was hosted at Cloud Sherpas and MC’d by Francis Pindar, with most of the organisation coming (as usual) from Anup Jahdav.  The panel consisted of 6 CTAs - Luke Emberton, Wes Nolte, Andy Mahood, Seb Wagner, Francesco Iervolino and myself - Keir Bowden.

Appearing at these events always requires a balancing act as the review board is subject to NDAs both from a candidate and judge perspective, so we aren’t able to go into any details of the board and have to make sure that we talk at a level that is useful but protects the certification - having worked so hard to achieve the credential the last thing any of us want is to devalue it.

We weren’t entirely sure how much interest there would be in an event of this nature, given that TA is the highest level of certification and not necessarily something everyone would have in their career plan.  As it turned out, this event had one of the best turnouts I can remember, as this shot from the back of the room shows.

The key points from the panel with regard to preparation for the board were:

• Identify the key areas from the study guide and try to get yourself on projects that have requirements of this nature - e.g. integration, complex security and sharing, single sign on
• Its an intense experience to remember to take a step back and breathe from time to time
• This isn’t something that you can prepare for simply by studying - you need real world experience
• Pre-sales work is useful preparation for being peppered with questions on a solution you have just thought of!

Related Posts

• Certified Salesforce Technical Architect
• London SFDC User Group Technical Architect Talk
• Technical Architect Certification home page

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London Salesforce Developers September Meetup

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The September gathering of the London Salesforce Developers took place on September 24th at the Make Positive offices on the south side of the River Thames.  The talk this month was a continuation of the previous month’s integration theme on Multi Org Collaborative Architecture, by Richard Clark.

I’m not going to give too much away about this talk, as it was a dry run for Dreamforce. If you aren’t going to Dreamforce you’ll be able to view the slide deck and probably a recording of the talk as most dev zone sessions are recorded.

What I will say is that there is some good, generic single versus multi-org content which anyone considering the two strategies will find useful, followed by a deeper dive into the challenges and solutions around cross-org collaboration.

As usual this was followed by a trip to a local hostelry for some further discussion and networking (and the usual delays on my train home, as my twitter followers know only too well!).

The inaugural meetup of the London Salesforce Admins takes place on Thursday October 2nd - I’m attending this so stay tuned for a write up after the event.

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London Salesforce Developers August Meetup

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The August meetup of the London Salesforce Developers took place on Wednesday 27th, kindly sponsored by Make Positive.

This month our main organiser, Anup Jadhav, stepped away from the organisational side of the group and into the spotlight to present a talk on integration - building a messaging framework based on the Message Queue concept: 

This is clearly a topic that a lot of people are interested in - the talk took in excess of 50 minutes and generated more questions than any talk I can remember. As this was a dry run of Anup’s Dreamforce talk, the slide deck won’t be available until after Dreamforce, although the good news is that isn’t that far away now.

If you are a Salesforce Developer in the London area and you aren’t attending these meetups, you should join us.  Its a great way to spend an evening - you’ll eat some pizza, drink some beer and learn something - what’s not to like.

If you are a Salesforce Admin in the London area, you should join the new London Salesforce Admins meetup group, organised by Matt Morris. 

In fact, if you are a Salesforce Admin or Developer in the London area, you should join both.  There’s plenty that everyone can learn from each other, and developers/admins will get closer at Dreamforce with the new Admin Zone in the heart of the Dev Zone at Moscone West. 

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London Salesforce Developers - June Meetups

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No, the title isn’t a typo - in June the London Salesforce Developers had no less than three events.

Unfortunately I missed the first one - this took place on 11th June while I was taking a few days holiday in San Francisco after the MVP Summit. The venue was Tquila’s offices in Smithfield and the subject was "Getting Up Close and Personal with Heroku”.  It doesn’t look like anyone has written this up in a blog post, but if I find one I’ll add it here. If you know of one, let me know in the comments. In the meantime, here’s a photo of Tod Nielsen, CEO of Heroku, presenting to the group:

 

The second meetup, on “Integrating Clouds & Humans with Wearable Apps", took place on June 17th. This was a late breaking event, as it followed hot on the heels of the official announcement by Salesforce, and was in doubt for a while due to most of the organisers being on holiday or out of the country and no venue being available.  Luckily Joshua Hoskins and Appirio stepped in and saved the day. I’m pretty sure that none of us knew much about this topic prior to the event, so it was a good learning exercise for everyone - I didn’t realise that the wearable was tied to a smartphone for example.  One of the downsides to seeing this cutting edge technology is the realisation that it won’t be available in the UK for quite some time - Google Glass has only just gone on sale, for example, 2 years after it was available in the US.  Here’s Joshua introducing Developer Evangelist James Ward :

The final event of the month was our regular 4th Wednesday meetup, which took place on June 25th at Make Positive’s offices.  The theme was Tooling and David Helmer of Mavens Consulting gave a talk on Mavens Mate:

The numbers were excellent considering we were running at an event a week, even for the wearables event where the attendees only had a few days notice.

At times like these, those of us that are organisers of the group have to remind ourselves how lucky we are. It seems like every time an evangelist/product manager/executive is in the country they want to come and present to us - a lot of groups would kill for the calibre of guest that we get and we are always grateful that they take the time out of their busy schedules to fit us in.  The wearable tech, for example, was the first one in the world as far as I’m aware, and we just got asked if James could come and give a talk as he was in the country.  Three events in as many weeks is a lot of effort from everyone concerned, but they are first world problems for sure.

The next meetup is scheduled for July 23rd - whether this turns out the be the next one the way things are going is anyone’s guess. To keep up with the latest information, look out for the hash tag #LonDevSFDC on twitter.

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London Calling - Salesforce1 Developer Week

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Salesforce1 Developer Week is series of events taking place around the world between 27th April and 3rd May 2014. The London Salesforce Developer Group are hosting an event on 30th April from 5:30pm:

Right Side of the Tracks

In a groundbreaking move, we’ll be running two tracks for this event, both with a hands-on focus:

• Beginner Track
  If you’ve never developed against the Salesforce1 platform before, attend beginner track. This covers the basics of creating an application via drag and drop; adding process automation, all without writing a single line of code.
  Having run a few “Introduction to Force.com” workshops, the most common feedback from attendees is they are amazed how quickly you can build applications when most of the heavy lifting is done by the platform.
  
  
• Intermediate Track
  The intermediate track will introduce use of Visualforce in Salesforce1, among other items. This is the track for the “clicks not code” developer who is interested in taking the next step, as well as experienced developers from outside the Salesforce ecosystem who have covered the basics through attending an introductory workshop or completed the Force.com Workbook. Experienced developers should prepare themselves to write much less code than they are used to when creating custom applications – in Salesforce1 code is written to extend the existing platform functionality rather than building from the ground up.

Salesforce1 Team, Assemble

We’ve put a crack team of presenters and helpers for this event, including MVPs and a couple of Salesforce Certified Technical Architects, so regardless of your level of experience with Force.com (if any) there will be someone on hand who can help if you get stuck. This also gives rise to some excellent networking opportunities during and after the event.

There’s no Such Thing as a Free Lunch

But there is such a thing as a free event - all you need to bring is yourself and your laptop. There are also exclusive event T-shirts (while stocks last) and Salesforce1 books (again while stocks last). 

Its Five O’Clock Somewhere

Its actually 5:30 at Tquila HQ - its an early start to allow as much development time as possible.  Register for this event here. I look forward to seeing you.

Update 25/04/2013: the time has been moved to 6pm.

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London SFDG March Meetup

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On 26th March the London Salesforce Developer Group once again congregated at Make Positive’s offices just south of the River Thames for our monthly meetup. It was great to see a few new faces who had tried Salesforce at the Elevate London Workshop and had come back for more.

Over the last couple of months we’ve moved to themed events, where all talks relate to a specific topic.  February’s theme was Salesforce1, and March built on the knowledge gained there and covered Mobile Access to APIs.

Laurent Delcambre of Tquila was on first, talking about extending Salesforce1 functionality through the analytics API to bring in reporting functionality.

 

Next Alessio Valentini, also of Tquila, gave a talk on developing a mobile application where the functionality lives on-device and all Salesforce data is accessed via APIs.

We had a great turnout again this month - the meetup really seems to have taken off this year.

Beer, pizza and networking filled the time before the talks, while beer and networking continued on later into the night, moving to a local hostelry once we’d emptied the Make Positive fridge.

If you are based in or around London, work with or are interested in Salesforce, and aren’t a member of this group you should join - just signup at http://www.meetup.com/LondonSalesforceDevelopers/

The next meetup takes place towards the end of April - I hope to see you there.

One more thing - we also have a new hashtag - #LonDevSFDC - search us on twitter for news and updates about the group.

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London Salesforce Developers February Meetup

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Along with a few others (Bay Area, Sydney) this week saw the February meetup of the London Salesforce Developer Group, kindly hosted by Make Positive at their London offices. Like our last meeting in January, this was a themed event and the theme was Salesforce1 - a hot topic at the moment in the Salesforce world, as evidenced by the 92 people that registered to attend.

First up we had Carolina Ruiz from Financial Force:

Carolina’s talk covered:

• Using Publisher Actions in SF1 - micro moments - main features, overview, how do they fit in SF1
• Notifications world in SF1
• Other features of SF1
• Mobile cards
• Flexipages

Financial Force were involved in the beta for Salesforce1, so Carolina was able to share some insights into her experience developing against an early release of Salesforce1 and how it has evolved since then.  You can find the slides for this talk on slideshare here.

Next was me, on the topic of Salesforce1 for Visualforce developers.  

This was mainly about what doesn’t work and what not to do when adding Visualforce apps/pages to Salesforce1, and how to workaround problems that might be encountered.  The slide deck from my talk is on slideshare here. I’m planning a blog post to cover the topics in the slides with a little more explanation, so stay tuned.

The Developer Group next meets at Make Positive on March 26th 2014. If you are interested in joining us, you can join our meetup group at : 

http://www.meetup.com/LondonSalesforceDevelopers/

to find out more and be notified of upcoming events.

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London Salesforce Developers January Meetup

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After a December break, the London Salesforce Developers returned with a vengeance in January.  Around 50 attendees descended on Make Positive’s offices for pizza, beer and talks on Salesforce security. We also had a couple of newly minted MVPs visiting - Chris Lewis and Phil Walton - and I’m sure a few people took the opportunity to find out more about how they’d managed to achieve this accolade.

First up was Wes Nolte on Sharing Rules - the unsung hero of Salesforce security.  

Sharing is an extremely important topic, especially for consultants who are expected to understand all of the possible sharing options, be comfortable explaining these to clients and recommending the most appropriate option for a client implementation. Sharing also comes up in all certification exams from Administrator through to Technical Architect, where candidates are expected to be able to design a solution to a complex sharing model that doesn’t put too much of a strain on the system administrators or the platform.  You can find the slide deck from this talk here.

Next up was James Melville talking about OpenID.

OpenID is something that most of us have seen at some point in time - think “Sign in with Google Account” options to sign in to a web site - but probably not many of us have thought about what goes on under the hood or set up on Salesforce. You can find the slide deck from this talk here.

Thanks to everyone that came along, especially those that travelled up from the South West or down from the North, and thanks to Make Positive for sponsoring (even if the pizza had run out when I got there :) If you are a Salesforce Developer, Administrator, Architect or Consultant (or other!) based in or near London and you aren’t a member of this meetup group, you should be!  You can find more details and sign up at:

http://www.meetup.com/LondonSalesforceDevelopers/

Meetups and More

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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.

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Community Service

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This has been a busy few weeks in the Salesforce developer community; mobile dev week arrived at short notice and a week later it's the Salesforce Customer Company Tour with the attendant Dev Zone, which is the main attraction of the event if you are a developer.  As I've been or am getting involved in a number of these events, I thought I'd write a short blog about them.

Intro to Force.com

This took place on 11th April at the Salesforce offices in Tower 42.  Lead by Frances Pindar (@radnip) with assistance from myself, it was a couple of hours or so session to introduce the next wave of Force.com developers to the platform, working through the exercises in the Developerforce Force.com workbook in a group environment. The advantage to using the workbook is that the attendees are then able to continue with the exercises once the session is finished, given that it isn't feasible to get through the whole thing in the time allowed.

Here's a picture of everyone hard at work:

I'm planning on running another one of these sessions in the next few months, so if you're near London and are interested in learning more about the Force.com platform, stay tuned.

Mobile Developer Week Meetup

As part of Salesforce Mobile Developer week, the London Salesforce Developer's Group had a meetup at the new T'Quila offices above Smithfields.

Rob Woodward of Salesforce gave us an overview of the new Mobile Packs and demonstrated a todo list application based on the Angular JavaScript framework.

I was up next, and demonstrated a couple of applications that I'd built using the Salesforce mobile SDK and Apache Cordova under the heading of "Ticket to Ride".  These consist of a ticketing application, that allows users to pull down tickets that they have purchased onto their mobile device, stores them in the Salesforce smart store and allows offline access to the ticket details and a QR code.  The companion application is a driver app that scans the ticket, confirms it is being presented for the correct service and updates the ticket with a used indicator and timestamp.  Force.com provides the object storage and the applications access this via the Rest API.

The powerpoint presentation for this talk can be downloaded here. If you'd like to see it in action, come to the BrightGen stand at the Salesforce Customer Company Tour and I'll be happy to show you.

Just to prove I'm not making it up, here's a photo from the event courtesy of @Anup:

Salesforce Customer Company Tour

On 2nd May the Salesforce Customer Company Tour comes to London. My company, BrightGen are a Platinum Sponsor this year, so we'll have a big stand and plenty of people to man it.  This event incorporates a Dev Zone and I'll be giving a Developer Theatre session on Building a mobile web app with HTML5 and JQueryMobile, from 4:15 to 4:45 - hopefully I'll see some of you there. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so here.

London Salesforce Developers Meetup

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The London Force.com Developers group is now on meetup.com and has a new name - London Salesforce Developers. The inaugural meeting of this new look group took place on 10th October 2012 at a new location - the London Offices of 10 Gen.  A further change is that Wes Nolte now has some Salesforce assistance to organise these events, in the shape of Developer Evangelist John Stevenson.  

The subject for the meetup was a "Teardown of what happened at DFX", attempting to bring some of the excitement of Dreamforce 2012 to those who were unfortunately unable to attend, via a panel guided discussion session.  Although I'd volunteered for the panel, I hadn't actually participated in one of these before so wasn't 100% sure what to expect.

This also featured a special guest from Salesforce.com - Adam Seligman, Vice President of Developer Relations for Salesforce.com and Heroku.  If you've seen the Developer Keynote from Dreamforce 2012, Adam was the speaker opening and closing it.  There was an additional, unexpected guest from Salesforce.com - Peter Coffee - which I'm pretty sure is the first time we've had someone with their own wikipedia page at one of these events. The fact that we are seeing some of the senior executives from the US attending these events shows how important these meetups are.

The evening was compered by Wes Nolte and the panel consisted of myself, Andy Mahood, John Stevenson and Adam Seligman - here we are in all our glory:

I now know that a session of this nature consists of the panel arranged in front of the audience, each responding to questions posed by the audience.  Imagine Question Time with and for geeks :)

The first question was put by Wes to get the ball rolling, and asked what inspired us most about DFX.  Predictably there was plenty of reference to the Dev Zone, as this had an incredible amount of attendance, excitement and energy around it.  The questions were then opened up to the audience where, after a slightly slow start the questions came thick and fast.

Another advantage to Salesforce involvement is increased levels of schwag, including the ever popular Force.com baseball caps and copies of Dan Appleman's Advanced Apex Programming book.  Some of the goodies were handed out for the best questions during the Q&A, while the rest were handed to the panel to award for the correct answers to trivia questions.  As many of my readers will know, I've been building an online testing system in Force.com  and had recently released a workflow test, so unsurprisingly my question was on workflow actions.  

That concluded the organised part of the evening, so we then made our way to The Fox to continue the networking and discussions late into the night.

For those that couldn't attend, there's a highlights reel available on youtube courtesy of @Sarah_tquila - make sure you get yourself along to the next one!

 

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Thoughts on Dreamforce 2012

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Dreamforce is Huge!

In fact it was huge in 2011, I really need a new word for 2012.  Over 90,000 registrants and I've heard numbers between 50 and 80,000 actually turned up.  As well as the Moscone Center (that's North, South and West), Dreamforce now includes 34 hotels.  It feels like there's a tipping point approaching - just how much bigger can it and stay in its current location.  We all know Marc Benioff loves San Francisco so I imagine it would be hard for him to move it to somewhere like Las Vegas.  Another idea I heard was to split it by functionality into multiple weeks - personally I think that would lose some of the sense of occasion - a drip feed of small conferences rather than one mega-event.  I'd also imagine that would put quite a lot more stress on the SFDC employees - having to organise and staff multiple events, trying to get prospects, customers and partners to attend each of these in equal measure - that sounds like it would bring as many problems as it would solve.  All I know so far is that the Moscone Center is booked for November 18^th-22^nd 2013, so it looks like its staying put for a while.

Salesforce Values Its MVPs

If you are an MVP you get treated rather well at Dreamforce - thanks mainly to the the amazing Erica Kuhl.  This year included a tour of One Market, a bowling event, a shoutout at the Community Keynote, Force.com MVP lunch (thanks Dana Le and Nick Tran), VIP seating for the keynotes and much more.  

Get To The Community Lounge

The Community Lounge is a great innovation. Its the place to find an MVP outside of their sessions and there were daily presentations on hot community topics.  Aside from that, the wifi was solid and there were comfortable seats and beanbags.  When I needed to work during the event, or relax and eat lunch, this was my preferred location.

Keynotes Are Popular And Run Long

If you want to hear the keynotes in person, you need to be up with the lark.  The rooms aren't big enough to hold everyone that wants to attend, so you need to get in line early, especially if you want a good view.  I always enjoy Dan Darcy's involvement in these - there's a real frisson of excitement when the screens switch over to him and his team.

Keynotes always overrun, but this year it was pretty much a full hour over.  Something to bear in mind when reserving your spots at sessions immediately after - I had nothing scheduled until 12 but still didn't make it.  Being in the VIP seats a few rows from the front does make up for it though.

Don't Stress About Your Agenda

There are so many sessions on at any one time, you are never going to be able to fit in all of those that you want to attend. Add to that keynotes running long, unexpected networking opportunities, meetings with or entertaining customers, distances between venues being larger than expected and simply being tired, and you'll find you can't even keep up with those that you added to your agenda. Don't sweat it, most sessions aside from roadmap are recorded and made available on the Dreamforce Youtube Channel so you can always catch up afterwards.  Once you realise that you are missing most of the sessions anyway, due to their being only one of you, its easier to relax about it.  Get to as many sessions as you can, but don't get so hung up that you miss out on the rest of the conference.

Dev Zone Is Awesome

Bigger and better than ever this year.  Unconference, mini-hacks, community common, developer theatre, touch stadium and more sessions than you could hope to get to.  The Workbooks and Salesforce Touch Platform books were very popular - by the second day these were being rationed and handed out from a counter rather than the free-for-all of the first day, which presumably depleted stocks to a worrying level. Throw in video games, code consults, t-shirt printing and a mini-expo and what more could you want.

Developer Keynote Is Unmissable

Okay so as a developer I'm biased, but this was the first year with a Developer Keynote, which included exciting announcements, entertaining demos (even, dare I say especially, those that didn't work) and a free copy of Advanced Apex Programming for everyone that attended (including those that were in line but couldn't get in). Next year this needs to be in the big room and last 3 hours like Marc Benioff's keynote!

You Don't Have to Stay in a Hotel

The hotels fill up quickly around Dreamforce time - the amount of people staying at the airport or over in Oakland was surprising.  If there are a group of you going, consider hiring a house or an apartment.  This is our our team from BrightGen did it this year and it works really well, you get the common areas of the kitchen and lounge plus your own space (as long as there are enough bedrooms!).

You May Be Going "Out Out"

When you leave your hotel/apartment/house in the morning, you may think you are just spending the day at the conference and will be returning prior to heading out to one of the parties in the evening.  Be prepared that this may not be the case - there are so many events, drinks, meetups and tweetups going on that you can easily find yourself out for the whole day and evening.  

You're Going To Need A Bigger Suitcase

Pretty much every everything on the baggage carousel at Heathrow was spherical or had a 'heavy' tag on it.  Make sure you leave plenty of room for schwag - even if you don't plan on getting any, you are bound to end up with some books and t-shirts at the very least. Failing that, buy an empty suitcase out there and fill it up for your return.

Nothing On Announcements?

You may be surprised that none of my thoughts on Dreamforce cover the Force.com/developer announcements - that's because the next London Meetup will be a panel guided discussion on these topics, so if you want to hear more about those then join us for that.  If you need another reason to attend, Adam Seligman, VP of Developer Platform Marketing for Salesforce.com, is the special guest. 

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London SFDC User Group Technical Architect Talk

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This week I gave a talk at the SFDC London User Group meetup that took place on 26th July at the Skills Matter eXchange.

A recording of the talk is available from the Skills Matter web site, and the slide deck is available for download here.


If you have any questions on the presentation, slide deck or the technical architect certification in general, please post them to the comments section below and I'll lift them up into a Q&A section in this post.