Posts

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. ...

Earlier this month my mother, Maria Crosman, passed away. Her life came to a peaceful end after a long slow decline. My sister, father, and I were at her side at the end. It’s hard to know what to include when writing a remembrance of Mom. No one post can really cover it all. So I’m not really trying. In addition to being my mother, mom was a minister, teacher, mentor, pastor, gardener, grandmother, and friend. She could be serious, stern, loving, warm, and funny. When the situation called for it, she could switch between those mode quickly. ...

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). ...