23 Jan 2013

London Salesforce Developer Meetup - January 2013

Its been a cold week in London so its great to see so many venture out to the latest meetup of the London Salesforce Developer community.

Thanks to our hosts, Make Positive, there was plenty of pizza to warm everyone up and plenty of drinks to cool everyone down again. Make positive have a very roomy office to work in and its a great space to talk to other developers and admins involved in forcedotcom projects.

We had a great talk from Rob Cowel, giving his insight into developing applications and system integrations across three cloud platforms: forcedotcom, heroku and IrisCouch (CouchDB).

I also gave a quick update of Salesforce news, up coming events, new organisers for the community and a collection of resources for developers getting started with the force.

London Salesforce Developers Meetup January 2013 from John Stevenson

t of people whist not playing ping pong. As always there is a good mix of people, including Salesforce staff, the Make Postive team, developers from Tquila and many more.

I met a developer who has been working on a blog, www.cloudfollows.com, with others around the world aimed at those relatively new to the forcedotcom platform. A quick glance had me very interested. It looks a well presented site with lots of handy tips.

I caught up with Salesforce MVP’s Francis Pindar and Keir Bowden and they are keen to run some workshops to help people gain experience with the platform. We’ll be running our first workshops in Tower42 on the 11th April. There will be room for approximately 10 developers.

There is always so much conversation going on and I often hate to break it up for the talks.

The Talks

I gave a quick overview of coding events we are running for the community. This includes Hack the Tower and the upcoming coding dojo for Salesforce developers at Tquila.

John Mahoney, Clerisoft.com gave a quick demo of Steroid, a custom components framework for the forcedotcom platform. It provides a library of re-usable custom components for both desktops & mobile devices. Clerisoft developers pick ideas that are requested on … but are not planned to be added to the platform by Salesforce engineers.

John was looking for feedback on the concept, what components developers would find valuable and any for pepole to go try them out.

Keir Bowden, Salesforce MVP gave a quick run through of the developer certification process. Each level of certification has been designed to help you grow your skills and get great roles in industry. Salesforce and it customers really value the certification process, as it gives a measure of confidence in the ability to deliver projects successfully.

Keir is also driving the formation of the EMEA TA review board, which is a peer review process for the top level of Salesforce developer certification.

Keir has now experienced the review board from the inquisitor side, being involved in the first EMEA review board. As Keir is now on the EMEA review board he is no longer in a position to offer advice on how to pass the TA certification.

Keir invited Chris Eales along to share his experiences, as Chris is the latest Technical Architect to pass the certification level.

Next months meetup

The next monthly meetup for the London Salesforce developers is at Make Positive on the 27th March. If you want to speak about anything please get in touch or leave a message on the meetup event.

See you there.
Thank you.
@jr0cket

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