Intro to Lightning Data Service
Lightning Data Service is a game changer for Salesforce Developers and Lightning Components (Aura) because it reduces the amount of work required by developers.
Learning NetSuite Development
Over the years, I’ve been blessed to work a lot with different ERPs and CRMs. NetSuite in particular is pretty hard to crack into because there’s very little “free” training available out there and the documentation is pretty poor. NetSuite like a lot of software as a service applications uses a variation of JavaScript to…
Implementing a Palindrome Checker in JavaScript
A palindrome is a word or sentence that’s spelled the same way both forward and backwards. Most of the time when doing these challenges during programming interviews you’re told to ignore punctuation, case and spacing.
Awesome Resources for Learning Salesforce Lightning
At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce announced they were changing the Salesforce User Interface to make it simpler to use. The new User Interface is called Salesforce Lightning. In my blog post, What is Salesforce Lightning I cover a lot more about what it is and how development differs from using Apex and Visualforce.
If you don’t have any experience with JavaScript, it will make programming Salesforce Lightning a lot more difficult. I strong recommend having a look at my blog post Resources for Learning JavaScript before you dive into learning Salesforce Lightning because JavaScript is what’s used predominantly in the controller now.
In the last two years or so, there’s been a steady increase in the number of resources that have become available for learning lightning. I launched my first lightning component as part of an AppExchange product about a year ago and have been doing lots of lightning, react and node development since then. I believe that all Salesforce Developers will need to learn and master javascript to avoid becoming irrelevant and unemployable in the next couple of years. …
How Code Becomes Legacy Code
I like to think that a legacy system is code that’s being used in production and still works fine, but is using older designs or older techniques that are no longer in common use. Legacy isn’t a label that means something is broken or retired, it means the software still works but might not be modifiable for some reason – possibly the software only runs on an older version of Linux or Microsoft Server because the language or libraries it depends on has been deprecated.
When I mean the code isn’t modifiable or updateable this can be for a variety of different reasons such as the language it was built in is no longer generally available or can’t be built on a more modern machine. Possibly, your company is already in the middle of updating/re-writing the legacy system or has lost the source code over the years. Over the years, I’ve spent time trying to decompile code and sometimes this works really well and other times it’s completed but the code is impossible to read.
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5 Ways to Increase CRM Usage
Implementing CRMS like Salesforce into an existing company can be really challenging if users aren’t interested in using it or resistant to change. I recall the first time I integrated Salesforce into an organization, we had a very difficult time getting the sales staff to actually use it. Eventually we found a way to get staff interested in using the CRM and stop using Google Docs or Excel sheets.
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Using Promises in Salesforce Lightning
It’s no secret that Salesforce Lightning is changing the way we develop for Salesforce. At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce introduced Salesforce Lightning and it is proving to change a lot of things we do on the platform and I’m sure it will make things a lot better for users in the long term. If you aren’t already familiar with Salesforce Lightning then you need to read my post called What is Salesforce Lightning.…
A beginners Guide to Understanding CRM
In the days of early computing, it was rare that companies would have a way of communicating with their customers that would scale as the company grew. Everything went into different “data silos” that wasn’t necessarily accessible to the right person at the right moment. When I started my career, I worked on phone systems that were mostly being used by mortgage brokers that usually worked off of lists of potential customers in excel.
Usually the brokers had no insight into how things were going or would go unless they kept adding columns for notes each time they called or emailed the person. If the mortgage broker worked on a team or had a manager – it was nearly impossible to coordinate how things were going because everything was based off of the data or papers even that one employee would keep on their computer or on their desk.
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How to Add Third Party JavaScript Libraries to Salesforce Lightning
It’s not secret that Salesforce Lightning is a huge shift away from Visualforce and Apex, I feel like I’ve had to relearn years of development and lean heavily on my javascript development experienced. If you aren’t sure what Salesforce Lightning is or aren’t sure why it’s a huge shift, you need to read my blog article called what is salesforce lightning.
What is a Third Party Library
Third party libraries allow developers to build quickly and take advantage of other people’s abstractions to avoid having to spend time working around browser issues or etc. In JavaScript, third party libraries and code reuse are all of the rage. A third party library is basically anything your team personally write and require for your project to work. …
How to Adapt to Serverless Computing
Serverless computing is a really new and very trans formative change that allow companies to grow and scale their businesses very quickly. Serverless computing done correctly has the potential to dramatically increase development velocity, and reduce costs. In my blog post, What is Serverless Computing I covered what it is and some of the vendors that are available.
Adopting serverless computing makes a lot of sense for companies, but there are steps that you need to do before you can begin moving to serverless technologies. One of the first things to make sure you and your team understand is that serverless computing is primarily event driven and functional programming has the potential to make things a lot easier.…
What is a Self Invoking Function
In JavaScript, it’s common to hear lots of strange terminology without a lot of description around what it is or what it does. I want to try and demystify what a self invoking function is and why you should consider them and the times when maybe you shouldn’t consider them.…
What is Serverless Computing
In the ten years or so that I have been programming professionally, there’s been significant changes to the way we did things whether it be the way we developed software, the way we managed software, or the environments we used to execute our code. Over time, these changes have become increasingly more and more dramatic to the point where it’s now possible to run a company and maintain almost no actual servers.
For the last 18 months or so, I have been working with “serverless computing” which is an incredibly encompassing buzzword for a lot of different technologies and techniques.
Serverless computing is a very large break from the traditional way we developed software and deployed software to servers. Serverless computing is basically an architecture where code is stored and executed by a fully managed provider.…
Why JavaScript
In the earlier days of the web, there was a battle between two scripting languages VBScript and JavaScript. VBScript, thankfully, eventually died and JavaScript became the dominant language for making really easy to use and interactive websites.
In the years since, JavaScript has become more and more used. Backend code can be written in basically any language, even in JavaScript, but the client side will almost always require a developer with some JavaScript knowledge. Every industry has a lot of javascript and some are even rewriting core functionality to use more. Surprisingly, even large banks and credit card companies are beginning to use JavaScript or Node in big ways. PayPal has been rewriting very large parts of their code base to make it more scalable and usable.…
How to Use Reduce on JavaScript Arrays
In functional programming, being able to reduce is one of the fundamental concepts. Reduce is used to iterate through the values in an array and condense all of the values into a single value. Usually the value is a sum of all of the elements, but it could be used to decrement, multiply or even…
How to be a more Efficient Debugger
For the last 10+ years or so, I’ve been programming professionally. Even with ten years of practice, I still am unable to write a bug free applications. In this blog post, I have put together some tips on how to be a more efficient debugger and how to actually resolve the issue. A lot of my bugs aren’t as obvious as they used to be, but they are definitely still there. In the book Code Complete, Uncle Bob Martin, suggests that every error is an opportunity to learn.…
Detecting Inactivity in JavaScript
In a lot of web applications, it can be really useful to detect whether the user is still active or not. For example, when a user is no longer active it can make a lot of sense to automatically log the user out or remind them that they’re about to be logged out. …
How to merge Objects together in JavaScript
Merging objects together in JavaScript isn’t very difficult although there’s quite a few different ways that it can be done.
Note, I’m not covering deep cloning for the sake of simplicity although this can be easily done through most of these different methods.
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Book Review: Advanced Apex Programming
It’s no secret to those that know me that I read a lot and spend a lot of time gathering knowledge and honing my craft. I believe I own and have read most of the books on apex and salesforce that are available right now. Advanced Apex Programming by Dan Appleman is definitely the most advanced book for programming on Salesforce and Force.com. …
How I stay informed of Salesforce Changes
Salesforce does three major releases per year which often include hundreds of changes whether they be bug fixes or new features. Staying on top of what is changing is very difficult as the company continues to expand and is consistently enhancing the platform.
As a professional it’s part of our jobs to stay current on what is available in Salesforce and what may change in the next year or few years. …
10 Awesome Podcasts for Developers
Podcasts are radio like shows that are freely distributed on the internet. A lot of the time they’re distributed through Apple iTunes, Stitcher or other Audio Apps. Podcasts around technology aren’t new – some of them are over ten years old and have over a thousand episodes.
The podcasts I’m mentioning usually cover development and new and exciting technologies. …