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Pro-Choice in Aiken, SC

Last month the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe vs Wade, and ended the right for millions of women to get critical medical care (that care being blocked includes, but is not limited, to abortions) and threatening additional rights all Americans currently enjoy. In the days that followed I joined a small but vocal group of people from Aiken calling for protection of the rights of women’s and others. It’s taken me a few weeks to get these pictures off my camera and posted, but I did want to get them up for anyone who is interested. There are people in South Carolina who dissent. ...

July 31, 2022 · 1 min · Aaron Crosman
Boone_Fork_Trail-21

Scenes from the Boone Fork Trail

For memorial day weekend my wife and I went camping at Price Lake for a few days. I took a couple hours one afternoon to hike around the Boone Fork Trail. In a moment when the country is in another downward spiral about all I can think to offer are a few images of a place worth being. ...

June 30, 2022 · 1 min · Aaron Crosman
A road

Getting Started with Salesforce2Sql

A little over a year ago I started work on Salesforce2Sql to help support people doing data work with Salesforce. Salesforce2Sql is a simple Electron app that allows you to clone the schema of a Salesforce org into an SQL database (currently supports MySql/MariaDB and Postgres). These mirrors are useful when you want to stage data during migrations in or out of Salesforce. When is Salesforce2Sql useful Salesforce2Sql is a tool dedicated to doing one thing very well: mirroring Salesforce schema. It does not attempt to extract data or convert data in any way. ...

May 15, 2022 · 6 min · Aaron Crosman
New Zealand Sheep

Solve Interesting Problems

During a recent department event my wife introduced me to the sister of one of her students. The event was an award ceremony for some of the history and political science majors – the student’s sister was along to support her brother (and as a smart college student get a free meal outside the dinning hall). As a CS major, this student is trying to understand her options for what kind of programming she might be interested in. As a good professor my wife introduced us so the CS major wouldn’t have to pretend to be as excited about history as everyone else present. Listening to me talk about what I’ve done in my work she commented that maybe she should be a web developer – my reply was that she should do the work with problems she finds interesting. ...

April 30, 2022 · 4 min · Aaron Crosman
Cake, No Cake

Salesforce Developer Podcast Episode 119

This week’s Salesforce Developer Podcast featured an interview I did with the host, Josh Birk, the end of last year. As much as I still don’t like the sound of my voice on recordings it was a fun interview and I am really excited to see it come out. We talk about Snowfakery, Salesforce Open Source Commons, the evolution of PHP, Drupal, my career in general, and even a bit about spinning. I’d love to hear what you think. ...

April 16, 2022 · 1 min · Aaron Crosman

Supportive Open Source Projects

For a little over two years I’ve had the privilege of helping lead the Data Generation Toolkit Project for Salesforce. In general, Open Source projects are not known for their inclusive and supportive communities. I believe it is fair to say our project demonstrates that building a supportive community can yield great results. ...

April 10, 2022 · 5 min · Aaron Crosman
AHC_4363

Still a B Student

Now and then something happens to us all that reminds us we’re not perfect. I’ve written about the strengths of B Students before, and well last week I proved that sometimes I still have room to improve. When I started this blog I set the goal of posting once a month. I have stuck with, or exceeded, that target except for two months since 2016. I missed September 2019 and last month. Last time around I set the goal of four posts in the following month, so that is my established case law. ...

April 4, 2022 · 1 min · Aaron Crosman

Disable a Salesforce Trigger in Production with VS Code

I recently had to disable a Salesforce Trigger from a client’s production environment. Having discovered the need last minute for a project, I needed to react quickly and make the change quickly. Since the official documentation is a bit lacking I decided it was time for blog post of better directions. The Salesforce CLI directions in the article above make a few annoying assumptions: That you’re happy to use MDAPI not SFDX. That all your tests pass in production (which should be true, but let’s be real it;s always). You enjoy working out CLI commands in a rush. What you need SFDX already setup VS Code with SFDX Extensions Pack Basic knowledge for how to use them. Disabling a Trigger Using SFDX in VS Code. Connect VS Code to your target org. Easiest solution here is to just go to the command palate and authorize an org. ...

February 26, 2022 · 3 min · Aaron Crosman

Project Estimates Tool 2.0

A few years ago I wrote a piece about project time estimation and created an estimating tool. My goal was to get project managers to listen to the fact that estimates were inherently a guess not promise. The tool I created took a series of project tasks, the estimated time range, and a level of estimator confidence. It then ran a Monte Carlo simulation with those tasks, and generated a histogram of possible outcomes. ...

January 23, 2022 · 5 min · Aaron Crosman
Data Generation Logo

Announcing Two New Snowfakery Faker Providers

For the last two years I’ve been fortunate to serve as a leader of the Salesforce Open Source Commons Data Generation Toolkit project. That project has produced and inspired a variety of efforts, including Snowfakery and a collection of starter recipes. This week, along with my colleague Allison Letts, Salesforce’s Paul Prescod (the creator of Snowfakery), and our fellow project contributor Jung Mun, I helped create two new faker providers for Snowfakery: Faker Nonprofit Faker EDU What These Faker Providers do The use of Snowfakery is growing. The more we use it, the more we want the data tailored to specific projects. And the more we find places where the Faker project’s providers do not have quite what we want. In particular the project does not (well did not) have providers for nonprofits and education specific data. ...

December 4, 2021 · 3 min · Aaron Crosman