I am very pleased to be able to formally announce that I am working on a second edition of my book, Mastering Apex Programming! Firstly, I want to thank all of those people who have been kind enough to purchase and review the book, at the time of writing it has an average of 4.6/5 on Amazon which is incredible. So why the second edition? What will be new, improved, added or removed? Firstly the why. In the 2 years since the book was released Apex as a language has moved ahead and so I want to update some of the content to take note of tweaks or changes, as well as add some relevant sections on ..read more

In a couple of weeks time I will be speaking with Peter Chittum at the London Salesforce Developers Group about Salesforce Evergreen. Evergreen is Salesforce’s upcoming Functions as a Service offering, and as part of my planning I began thinking about my experiences with other FaaS toolkits and what it all means. The more I thought about it the more I got to thinking – hasn’t Salesforce had a FaaS offering for years? Aren’t apex future methods actually a FaaS framework? Let’s discuss. What are functions as a service? We’ve all heard of the other various *aaS things offerings. SaaS now domina ..read more

Salesforce Performance - Some Thoughts Late last year, I was interviewed by Xi Xiao on his Salesforce Way podcast about Salesforce Performance, a topic I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the years I have been working with Salesforce. You can listen to the episode now on Xi’s website and I wanted to share some more thoughts around the topic. Back end vs Front end As Xi mentioned during the conversation we can think of separating our performance concerns into the back end and the front end. For the front end our concern is put simply as “how quickly can we make the page render”. Th ..read more

Last week was Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, when over 100,000 Salesforce fans descend upon the city to listen to the latest innovations from Salesforce. I was unable to attend this year, but followed along closely at home to the announcements, and the one that stood out to me in particular was not Salesforce Blockchain, Einstein Voice or Customer 360 - it was the Salesforce Evergreen announcement that for me could be the real game changer. The Impact of Serverless To understand why you have to perhaps take a step back and look at how the rise of AWS and in parti ..read more

In my previous post we walked through the first algorithm we are putting together in this series - Linear Regression. I noted in the post that before we moved on it would be wise to cover the MathUtil and Matrix classes in detail to save us some time later. So let’s do it! MatrixOperations We are going to first deal with the MatrixOperations class as we will find later on that we will be using this class to perform some of the operations within our MathUtil class. The first method we will discuss is multiply. Going back to our initial discussion of matrices in part one, remember that a matr ..read more

In my previous post we walked through the first algorithm we are putting together in this series - Linear Regression. I noted in the post that before we moved on it would be wise to cover the MathUtil and Matrix classes in detail to save us some time later. So let’s do it! MatrixOperations We are going to first deal with the MatrixOperations class as we will find later on that we will be using this class to perform some of the operations within our MathUtil class. The first method we will discuss is multiply. Going back to our initial discussion of matrices in part one, remember that a matr ..read more

On the 21st May Salesforce released a brand new certification, the “Heroku Architecture Designer” which is focussed on validating that those who are using Heroku, particulalry with integrations to Salesforce, have the knowledge and understanding of the different architectural needs for a Heroku app vs a Salesforce app, or an app deployed on another platform. I have worked with Heroku fairly extensively in the past and decided I would have a read through some of the Heroku documentation and give it a go. I am going to hold my hands up and be completely honest in saying I did not prepare for th ..read more