💃 Takeaways from a Salesforce TA 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! These past few weeks I’ve been spending a little time each day documenting my environment at work. Peeling back layers 🧅 of our application architecture …

Overall it’s been a good thing.👍️ Helping me understand & maintain the system better.

It’s also exposed some ugly truths. 😨 

Much of the solution is over-customized, code has been over-engineered, common standards weren’t included in the design or implementation, and tech debt is abound. 😭 

This got me thinking 🤔 what our main responsibility is to our client as we implement their technical solutions with Salesforce.

Agenda for today includes

• Takeaways from a Salesforce TA

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Takeaways from a Salesforce TA

📐 Apply common patterns

Building software is inherently complex. 😵‍💫 Add to that complexity a solution that bypasses commonly employed patterns in favor of a design that’s totally custom 🙅 and you’re talking a whole new level of complexity!

Be sure to include an up-front design phase to the things you’re designing. 💯 As you encounter problems to solve 🔍️ look into commonly accepted patterns to help guide you to a solution.

Solutions like the ones found in Design Patterns, Enterprise Integration Patterns, or Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture 📖 are standardized & repeatable across the software engineering industry as a whole.

Architects & dev’s will recognize these patterns quickly & be able to support MUCH easier than a completely customized implementation. ❤️ 

📦️ Maintainability is critical

One major problem can be when dev’s get wrapped up 🌯 in focusing too much on the technical implementation and not enough on the actual business problems. 👎️ 

This type of behavior can quickly lead to code/solutions/frameworks that only exist within your org and, therefore, nobody else can maintain or support (without a lot of work). 🙀🫢 😱 

This exposes your team/business to the Hero Antipattern. 🦸 Not a good place to be.

As you design & implement your solutions keep these things in mind to help:

• Develop & enforce internal standards/guidelines for your team.

• When in doubt opt for simplicity and/or readability.

• Adopt a development framework across your team.

📄 Document everything

I cannot stress this enough. 💯 Everything. Every decision. Every solution design. Everything you do. You’ll be grateful you did ➕ it’s the professional thing to do.

The good news! Since you’re following the first two suggestions on this list then this isn’t so bad. 😆 You’re mostly documenting business process & exceptions to it.

Spin up a base set of technical documentation on your dev framework, common patterns applied, standards/guidelines followed, etc.. ✍️ This documentation can be handed out to each client.

Just add areas to get the edge cases/deviations included in each set of doc’s and your clients will love you. 😍 

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes