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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. ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

This is Faith. Faith has found joy, happiness, and contentment – except when she needs her toenails trimmed, dinner is late, or she gets woken up for a nap. Life for Faith wasn’t always easy. She spent a little time on the race track before they closed, and was among the last dogs to ever race in Florida. Her first adoptive home didn’t treat her well, and she bounced back to the rescue group underweight, with a cracked tooth, and uncontrolled multi-drug resistant worms. But those problems are gone (at least we hope, the worm treatment takes several months and we just got our first clean test last month – need three in a row). But Faith found a life she loves in our home. ...

In consulting we should expected developers to do all the same basic things as everyone else on the team. That includes supporting a culture of mutual respect with other team members. We should explain our work clearly, be effective in meetings, and take feedback well. In consulting especially, we should engage with clients professionally, effectively, and happily. We should not be isolated off on our own teams working from specs we didn’t write, for clients we haven’t met. Basically, we need to be good team members and we can be expected to be that way. Developers, like most everyone else, do their best when when surrounded by people who treat them with respect. ...

A few years ago during a job interview at a nonprofit organization, the Executive Director asked me about the culture of the job I was leaving. He had noticed that I was stressing the importance of good feedback during my interviews and wanted to know why it was so important to me. Indeed, part of why I was job hunting was the job I had rejected the notion of mistakes – everyone’s work was always good. I told him that, and that I do my best work when I get honest feedback. He responded by drawing a distinction between being nice and being kind. He was sure everyone I worked with was quite nice, but they didn’t sound very kind to him. ...