Posts

I am excited to be co-leading a new project focused on accessibility at the Salesforce Commons Community Sprint being held this August. Our working title is the Accessible Community Working Group. Since last fall I’ve been working with Salesforce’s Kelly Hamilton to review Trailhead content for accessibility. Our goal is to make sure the content goes beyond just passing formal WCAG requirements. We are trying to make sure it’s actually useful to the largest audience possible. ...

I have a new open source side project: High speed brain health games. The first release is ready for MacOS, Windows, and Linux. It’s a series of games designed to drive you brain to work fast. The idea is to trigger implicit learning mechanisms in our brains. It appears this type of training can help reduce dementia risk (more on that research below). First the games. What are these Games? There are eight games including in the project. Each game is derived from a description I found with Gemini’s help of games used for brain speed research. Nothing I was able to distill from the research said which, if any, are better than others. It didn’t appear to be a question the researchers have tested yet. So I more or less built a version of everything I found (well Gemini found). ...

Is AI going to kill consulting? No. Will AI change consulting, particularly technical consulting? Of course. Will AI shrink consulting? Depends on economic growth and other factors. Having put a few stakes in the ground please give me a few minutes to defend them. Rumors of Consulting’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated. Ever since LLM-based AI became public, and people started to ask them questions, I have heard people saying AI will kill consulting. Often they make it sound like something that will happen next year, or even next week. I believe people who say this misunderstand of the purpose of consulting. ...

Several years ago I created a tool to help me estimate projects. It uses a Monte Carlo approach by taking your task list, estimated hours range, and your confidence in your own estimates. From those inputs it generates a series of possible outcomes to give you a sense of how long the project might take. Try my estimation tool. Quick History At the time I created it I was struggling with the accuracy of the estimates I was doing. I was either underestimating because of optimism bias, or over estimating because I offset my bias too much. ...

Lots of people working in technology have a choice between working for clients or working for consultants. We work on one side of the relationship thinking how nice it would be to have the advantages of being on the other; the preverbal grass is always seems greener. I spent a little more than ten years as a client before I became a consultant. I spent just a bit longer as a consultant before becoming a client again. There are things I’ve learned in each role that help me do the other better. To ensure a mutually beneficial engagement it is helpful to understand the perspective of the other team. ...

Accessible design is about people. Real, honest to God, human beings. They are our friends, neighbors, and even ourselves. This is not a technical article, about how to implement accessible designs. It’s about the thought process content creators should go through to make their content useful to as many people as possible. For those of us who don’t use assistive technologies on a regular basis, creating accessible content can be an abstract concept. We get tempted to focus on passing the scan, avoiding law suits, and generally treating accessibility as a checkbox. It is easy to forget that making your content accessible is about making it useful to people. ...

Now and then I have to work something out that requires a lot of searching around to find all the pieces. When that happens I often write up the instructions on the theory that other people might benefit from the complete answer. This time I wanted to work out how to create a buttons in a Salesforce Lightning Web Component that allow a user to manage the records. There are two links that matter in lots of use cases: ...

While working on my Email Invalidation Tool, I ran into Salesforce truncating Custom Metadata text fields at 512 characters. I struggled at first to understand why the static methods – my goto with Custom Metadata – were resulting in broken records. Turns out the solution is simple – use SOQL. The Problem: Salesforce Truncates Custom Metadata Text Fields When loading Salesforce Custom Metadata records using the static methods getInstance() or getAll() long strings are truncated at 255 characters (I actually ran into it at 511, but the documentation says 255). ...

One of the nightmares of most Salesforce Administrators is the day that their full copy sandbox sends fake email messages to real people. To help us all sleep better, I created a tool to make it easy to invalidate all the email addresses in all the email fields in your sandbox. When I migrate data I often add .invalid to all the email fields in the org. More than once this saved my team from accidentally sending a large number of messages. Having a tool to do this easily in a sandbox has been on my todo list for a long time. ...

The last time I offered up advice to college students generative AIs (ChatGPT and friends) were just emerging. Now AI tools are a critical part of work in a lot of fields. College students are using these tools all over the place. So I would like to offer some suggestions and thoughts for those in college who are using, or tempted to use, AI to complete their assignments. As you are about to see I have concerns about using AI in your education. That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to all things AI. I using it in my work when it’s useful, and in keeping with company policy. I use it on side projects even more. Generative AIs are down right useful – when used in the right context. ...