The Master Plan for Salesforce Community Developers

The promise of fast application development using the Salesforce platform is very appealing and the latest release has attracted over 800,000 developers.

Heroku (part of the Salesforce family) is also attracting a lot of attention. By allowing developers to deploy their applications with a simple git push command, it helps make continuous deployment becomes a reality.

These are just two of the reasons I took the opportunity to join the amazing team at salesforce.com. So you can imagine I was overjoyed when I started as Developer Advocate for EMEA. Here is what that role is all about.

The Plan

The plan is simple. Help developers understand the value of developing applications with the force.com platform as well as the benefits of using Heroku to deploy their other application and services.

Starting with the UK, I am working hard to pull the current Salesforce developers together and build a strong community. I’m also helping developers new to the platform to get a solid understanding of where they can use these platforms for their companies benefit and their own.

Building the community

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One of our partners, Tquila, did a great job of starting a Salesforce developer community in London. I have aims of making it this community more active. In the last month we have seen a 300% rise in members and I hope we can keep growing with exciting events in the coming months.

I am also looking for a few passionate geeks to start communities in their own areas. Its pretty easy to get started and salesforce.com will create a meetup.com site for you so other developers can find your events. Those events dont have to be grand, it can all start with a meetup in a pub (like the developer meetups in Bristol & Leeds). It just needs someone to kick-start it all and you will soon have a thriving community.

Check to see if there is a Salesforce community in your area and get involved to boost your career - and have some fun too! If there is no group in your area, why not contact us and we’ll help you start one?

Bringing developers together

People can always do so much more with the help of others. I see the community as an amazing place to learn, discover and share ideas and techniques with open minded developers.

Through the local Salesforce communities we are building across Europe, we will be running lots of different events. Here are some we are lining up already.

Hack the Tower - getting practical

There is so much more you can discover by getting a group of developers together and putting together an application in the space of a few hours. I recently supported the London Scala hackathon where we used Heroku, Github, Play framework and MongoDB to build a community website in a morning.

Another variation is to bring developers together from the same industry. Not only will these developers face similar challenges when building applications, they can work with each other to build services that benefit the industry. Our first mini-hack is with developers in the media industry on 21st November.

Using our space in Tower42 not only gives amazing views of London but allows us to running a series of hackathons for the many developer communities around London. Our first “HackTheTower“ on the 8th December in conjunction with the London Scala user group.

Developer Days

There are some amazing things you can do with the Salesforce1 Platform and Heroku platform. To learn all these can take a bit of time and so to help those new to the platforms we are planning “developer days” to kick-start your journey.

The developer days will consist of a morning of discussion to help you understand the Force.com and Heroku platforms. Then you spend the whole afternoon building applications, practising what you have learnt with guidance from our on-site experts.

The developer days will run across Europe in the coming months (update: these are now called Elevate).

Who am I?

My background is mainly in Java development, although I have also done JavaScript, Python, Ruby and .Net apps too. Recently I have been learning functional programming with Clojure (and Emacs) and teaching what I have learnt to others.

I love learning Clojure because its an amazing new (and old) language and its great to deploy my Clojure web apps on Heroku. I also give talks and run practical sessions for Clojure, Java, Scala and other technical communities across the UK.

I have been lucky to work with some great companies in my time. They including Atlassian, several start-ups in London and several consultancy companies (mainly financial services) across the UK and Europe.

Talking tech is great fun and I love discussing all the possibilities out there. Hope to meet you at a community event soon!

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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