Salesforce certification exams are a fact of life for many of us in the eco system. Whether you are a consultant who needs to add at least one a year or taking your first exam it’s important to have a plan for how you approach your next test. Getting through Salesforce Exams generally requires a mix of memorization, understanding key concepts, and good test taking skills. Currently I hold 13 Salesforce certifications and have survived 12 exams to get there (there are a couple two-for-ones to be had among the Architect exams) and I passed all but one on the first try. This is by no means makes me exceptional – my current manager holds somewhere between 35-40 certifications, I lost track a test or two ago – but it does mean I’ve taken enough to develop a routine that works pretty well. ...

Two years ago my sister’s oldest child went off to college. As a marker for that occasion I wrote up some thoughts on what I think college student’s should know. In a little while my sister’s youngest child is headed off to college as well; so I decided it’s time to write part two. Since my wife is a college professor, and I’m framing my understanding as being her husband, I need to be clear: these are my thoughts. They are not hers. They are not those of her colleagues, or any of our other friends who are college professors. Yes, my ideas are influenced by being friends with those folks, and I hope they agree with me. But in the end, this advice is mine. If you want advice from a college professor – well college students have easy access to those and should politely ask them directly. ...

My first few articles in this series have been focused on the messages we send to others – mostly our written messages. This time I am focusing on Listening as key skills when communicating with others. Listening is a skill. In general in our lives we are expected to know how to listen, even though most teaching is informal. If you aren’t listening to your colleagues and clients (friends, family, etc.), which can include reading carefully the materials they write, how can you communicate back to them clearly? And when they can tell you didn’t listen closely, why should they listen to you carefully? ...

One of the skills everyone needs to have is asking for help. Whether that’s in our work, our education, or our personal lives, we all need help from time to time. We are focused on work here, but this same basic rules apply in all aspects of our lives. The right time to ask for help is, like so many things, a balancing act. Struggling through a complex issue can be a great way to learn something new. But often we can short cut that learning by simply asking the right questions at the right time. ...

When I started this series on writing for developers and consultants, I thought of this piece first, but I couldn’t get the ideas to come together. Sometimes it takes a few tries. Anytime you write something, you should be aware of what kind of document you’re writing and who is it for. The definition of “document” in this context is very broad it could be: an email, letter, solution design, chat messages, blog post, test script, work of fiction, book, poem, presentation, marketing slide deck, scope of work, and so on: anything that involves writing words. ...

Earlier this month, at Mid Atlantic Dreamin’ in Philadelphia, I gave a talk titled Software Super Heroes: Building the tools you wish you had. My goal with the talk was to convince people that should, can, and in fact do, built tools for themselves. If you work with technology, and your job involves repetitive tasks the same applies to you too. What do I mean by “Tool” and “Tool builder’s mindset”? I like to use a very expansive definition of tool: “A tool is anything that makes a task easier which would be repetitive, hard, or impossible without it.” In that sense just about anything you make that simplifies you work can be considered a tool: a project estimation spread sheet, a good set of directions for a complex task, a flow for a Salesforce admin, a piece of code to normalize a large collection of files, and more. ...

Words matter. Grammar matters. How we use language affects how our audience perceives us. In school teachers and professors taught many of us formal – and strict – rules for writing. Those rules are useful to know, but my point is not that you need to follow them strictly. You need to control the language you use with intention, and create the impression you want your audience to have. When we write at work, we are a reflection of ourselves, our team, and our companies. We want all those things to look good to our clients, customers, leadership – our audience. That is not the same goal as learning all the rules of Strunk and White. It’s about choosing the right words and structures to meeting our audience’s expectations. ...

Every year I bake something for myself on my birthday. It’s a pair of things my mother accidentally taught me. While for much of my life my mother did not like to talk about her own birthday, she loved to celebrate mine, my sister’s, her grandchildren’s, all were cause for her to bake a cake, or some other marker, to share with our friends. But my mother never ate those cakes: she was allergic to wheat. ...

The most important thing you need to have to be a successful consultant is excellent communications skills . If your client doesn’t understand and trust what you tell them, it doesn’t matter what you suggest, create, build, or deliver. I have been helping a few colleagues lately work on their client communication skills and figured I should write down my suggestions for how developers can communicate well with clients. Everyone on a project team needs to be able to communicate what they need, what they are doing, and how their piece of the project works. They also need to know how to address their own errors and mistakes so the project moves forward and the client trusts that errors will be resolved. ...

I started this post back in November, but got rather distracted last month. I have been wanting to setup a CI pipeline for Salesforce scratch orgs for a long time. The documentation out there isn’t great, and it’s taken me awhile to get around to powering through the details. For testing that my scratch org configurations for Education Cloud and Nonprofit Cloud to work properly I finally bit the bullet and setup a Github action. ...