Dreamforce Recap

Dreamforce 2017 was a blast.

Firstly, in spirit of Thanksgiving, I'd like to say thanks.

Thank You!

THANK YOU to the team at Salesforce for giving me the opportunity to speak again this year. THANK YOU Mike, Gillian, and Josh for your guidance during the event (on top of your other duties). Speaking at Dreamforce this year was challenging and fun. THANK YOU to my co-presenters, Jen and Norman for being kickass and inspiring. THANK YOU to attendees for your participation during our sessions. THANK YOU to my blog visitors for joining me today.

Now that everyone has been thanked, let's get to the recap.

My Sessions

This year, I had two presentations. You can watch these online:

• Where's The Undo Button? Deployment Best Practices
• From Admin To Architect

The presentations went well, and were a great way to kick off the conference.

The Community

The best part about Dreamforce is meeting up with my friends and heroes in the community. I tried to squeeze in as many face-to-face meet-ups as possible, but four days is just not enough time to see everyone and attend everything at Dreamforce. I won't post all the photos here, but I tweeted most of my Dreamforce pictures. I loved attending the Appirio Reunion, 10K Party, Dreamfest concert, and Michael/ DOMO Cigar Party. The lunches and dinners that I went to between other gatherings were incredible. I loved seeing my friends at the 7Summits booth and making new friends with colleagues at the TCS cafe. Moving across the country has been a little hard for me. I don't fit in with the people in the SF Bay Area (yet?) but seeing my friends, colleagues, former colleagues, managers, and former managers in the Salesforce community was refreshing, inspiring, and uplifting. I'm so thankful for my #ohana.

Apart from being a source of encouragement, the Salesforce community has played such a significant role in my career and in the careers of my mentors, that we focus on it at the end of our Admin to Architect presentation. If you haven't attended a Salesforce conference or user group meetup yet, don't delay. Attend and make connections with others in this field. You'll make friends, grow your professional network, AND learn.

My Favorite Session

I think I died during the Meet the Developers session, which is a session that CTO Steven Tamm runs with lead architects to answer our questions about the platform roadmap... This was my favorite session because SOQL Christmas was announced --

• The dreaded CPU time limit error message will maybe be worked on (shoutout @danappleman for asking)
• Select * is coming
• Polymorphism is coming (I wrote down 'joins' -- though I'm not sure if the person who asked included various joins that, in my opinion, are much nicer in SQL than SOQL)
• Polymorphism is coming!
• Polymorphism is coming!!!!!

Bad news: the session was either not recorded, or has not been posted yet. I'm not sure what else was promised because I blacked out after hearing the news about polymorphism.

My Favorite Keynotes, Other Sessions

Admin Keynote
Developer Keynote
Trailhead Keynote
Marc's Opening Keynote
True to the Core with Parker Harris (delivered and roadmap)

Several sessions have been posted online, both on Dreamforce site (scroll wayyyyy down to see different keynotes like Sales Cloud Keynote, Service Cloud Keynote, Marketing Cloud Keynote, etc.) and Salesforce Live (again, scroll down to the very low bottom of the page and expand the schedule to click on session titles).

Some friendlier session navigating is available for sessions posted on the Salesforce Developers Youtube account.

Taylor Swift

Yes, I'm putting a Taylor Swift subsection in my Dreamforce recap.

Taylor Swift's new album, Reputation, was released at the end of the fourth day of Dreamforce, Friday morning at midnight. It is sooooo good. Currently, my favorite song is either Delicate or Call It What You Want. This album will forever be the soundtrack to my 2017 Dreamforce memories. I love her. Maybe sometimes, I love her too much...

On that note, I'm convinced Adam totally won the Lip Sync Battle because he sang a Taylor Swift song. She is queen. (Also, he slayed at Tay and I hope this becomes a thing for next year!)

Final Thoughts

I'm so happy to have been able to attend Dreamforce as a speaker this year. Though there were no major product announcements at this year's Dreamforce, that won't stop me from dreaming about Polymorphism and Taylor's Reputation tour, which is lumped into my thoughts about Dreamforce.

Until next year!

Meet Norman Krishna, DevOps Architect

Norman Krishna

Dreamforce is just around the corner! It's my pleasure to introduce you to one of my Dreamforce co-presenters, Norman Krishna.

Norman has built release management from the ground up at small, medium, large, and super-sized organizations. Now, as a DevOps Architect, he is able to bring his meticulous organization and  delivery processes to every aspect of a project.

Norman and I worked on a large enterprise Service Cloud implementation last year. On the project, I was staffed as Technical Lead and Norman was the Release Manager.

During our time on the project, Norman and I had a lot of fun reviewing and exploring concepts of release management and deployment best practices. We spent a lot of time planning and building deployments, and worked through each release to refine our success criteria necessary for solid subsequent releases. Working through deployments with defined processes and common success criteria ensured every release succeeded, but we were always ready to execute a deployment rollback, if needed.

Given our experience together and his expertise on the topic, Norman was an obvious pick for co-presenter of "Where's the Undo Button? Deployment Best Practices" this year. In the event that you promote something to production that causes your users or stakeholders grief, three strategies we are sharing during our session will help you to restore production to a steady state.

Grumpy Cat doesn't know we have an undo button.

We hope that you can join us for the session and we will be sharing more information about deployments and release management in the coming weeks.

Learn more about Norman in the following digital interview.

Meet Norman Krishna: Digital Interview

How long have you worked in an IT-type function? 

For the past 9 years

What did your career journey look like? 

Have been in IT all my life -- starting from hardware Engineering support, software development, sales, general management, entrepreneur and now in Salesforce DevOps - it has been a great journey. What I love about my job is that it is constantly evolving. And Appirio has given me a great opportunity to work with a series of new enterprise clients (approximately one every year) and each of them are different in IT culture, infrastructure and processes.

What is your current role like? What does it entail? 

Currently, I am a DevOps Architect - primarily involves working with Dev teams to ensure that complex Salesforce applications are moved from development sandbox through qa, uat and finally production involving multiple IT teams and disciplines.

Do you have any advice for IT newbies/admins in the Salesforce space (in general)? 

Salesforce is a fantastic platform offering a diversity of experiences. You should have an open mind and be able to switch into multiple career options - Business Analyst, Developer, DevOps, Data Specialist, Integration specialist, Program/Project Manager. And remember - certification is also important. 

What is your favorite feature of the platform? 

As a DevOps, I love the wonderful metadata API that allows a multiple of deployment methodologies including rolling your own with the Tooling API

Favorite beverage? 

Spinach smoothie with kale and chia seeds.

What was your Salesforce certification journey like? How did you achieve your cert? Would you encourage others to attempt certifications? 

Actually, the best was my last one Software Development Life Cycle -- spent a couple of weeks reading through the reference material and passed the first time. Certification means more pay rises and most material is available online.

Did you have any mentors along your career journey? Who? How did you find them? 

Many of them - but Appirio has a wonderful mentoring process and I am fortunate to get a great mentor. And I also mentor others when needed.

Any books we should read or podcasts we should listen to? 

No one other than the legendary Jeff Douglas.

Any television shows or movies we should watch? 

Glen Garry Glen Ross - shows human emotions at it's best and worst - and also a great cast.

What was the silliest request you've ever fulfilled? 

No requests are silly -  what you need is to educate the requester.

What is the most common request you're happy to fulfill? 

Architect a Release from scratch.

Any AppExchange apps/Git repositories/other technological items worth a nod? 

Too many to list - but the best is Copado - a DevOps tool that nearly automates 99.99 of releases --expensive right now - but may become the market leader in future.