During the recent Open Source Commons sprint in Chicago, I tried to create scratch orgs for nonprofit and education clouds. Despite having some of the best people in the market in the room, including two Salesforce Solution Engineers, two levels of their bosses, and of course Google, I couldn’t figure it out. As a follow up to a conversation there, Larry Fontillas sent me links to the help docs that contain what I consider partial answers. While I’ve sent feedback to help improve those articles, I am posting my current solution to this challenge. ...

Loading large amounts of data into Salesforce is a non-trivial exercise. While traditional databases can often be loaded in nearly any order, or with just a few simple considerations for foreign keys, Salesforce’s platform behaviors require several special considerations. Over the last few years I’ve done a number of large data migrations into Salesforce, and developed a pattern I like to follow. This pattern allows me to load data efficiently at any scale. While the implementation details will vary, you can adapt this pattern to your projects. ...

I’ve been full time in the Salesforce eco-system for a little over five years. I have eight certifications, co-lead a community open source project, have been on the planning committee for Nonprofit Dreaming twice, and am an MVP. But until this year, I’d never been in Dreamforce. If you’d like a breakdown of the content from Dreamforce, there are many better sources for that. Salesforce+, the plethora of blog posts written more quickly by people who went to more sessions. This is just my reflections on my experience. ...

As we exit the Great Resignation, and move back to more traditional hiring patterns, application materials are increasingly important again. Over the course of my career I’ve been involved in a lot of hires, and read a large number of resumes. I know what I like to see, what I don’t like, and I have a bunch of friends in a similar position (although their likes and dislikes are sometimes different). ...

This is the third and final post in a series of posts to break down the questions from my Queries on Queries talk. The full talk is available here. Is your solution reusable? Migrations feel like one off processes, but teams that migrate once usually migrate again. Have you ensured that as much of your solution as possible can be reused? Do you have a shared library of migration tools that your whole team can access? When you create new functionality are you thinking about ways to make it usable in your next project? ...

This is the second in a series of posts to break down the questions from my Queries on Queries talk. The full talk is available here. Is your work repeatable? You will need to do this more than once. Is your process designed so you can run it over and over without error? Can you easily erase test attempts and start over from a clean slate? Do you have the capacity to do all the practice runs you need to complete your project successfully and on schedule? ...

This is the first in a series of posts to break down the questions from my Queries on Queries talk. The full talk is available here. Are your tools good enough? Our migrations live and die by our tools. Are your tools built for the scale of your project? Do they empower you to do your best work or impede rapid progress? Would a new tool serve you better now or in the future? ...

Last week I gave my Queries on Queries talk, intended to help you improve your data migration process, as a webinar for Attain Partners. It’s a revised and improved version from the last time I gave it. These questions aren’t like the old Joel Test (which is still useful) where the right answer is “yes”. These questions are designed to point you in a direction but allow you to change your answer over time. I generally answer this questions with a paragraph not a word. Use these questions as a challenge to make you and your team better. ...

A good set of notes is how we build a memory of what happened. Good note taking is important in nearly any white collar job, particularly consulting. If we have a long conversation with a client and have to re-ask them about all the details, they will rightly be annoyed. They may demand to know what they paid for the first time we talked. Why we take notes In school we are taught to take notes. Teachers expect students to remember information to pass tests, write papers, and other evaluations of learning. Too often teachers will try to convince students to take notes in specific way. They may make note taking into an assignment and assessment of its own. My wife sees college students who decide that they don’t need to take notes because she does not grade them. These students do not do well. These students missed the point of taking notes. The form of the notes is not important, but the existence of them is. ...

Sorting is a basic part of any computer science program. My sister and I are currently engaged in helping my parents move. As part of that effort I am spending sorting things, which has reminded me of another place where it can be useful to apply things you learn in one field to another. Bucket and Radix sorts are basic sorting approaches taught in any good algorithms class. The process involves sorting like items into buckets, and then resorting items, either within those buckets ( bucket sort), or by their next property ( radix sort). ...