Last week I learned that two of my proposed topics were accepted for presentations at Dreamforce 2012 as breakout sessions on the Developer Track. I am honored to have been chosen and excited about helping others improve their development practices and techniques.
My first topic is Enterprise/Team Development on the Force.com Platform
Have you tried working with multiple developers in a single Sandbox or Development Org? Did you lose work or have to wait for someone to complete their tests before saving your changes? Are your cloud projects taking longer than you want them because you are limited to a single developer and they can only write so much code per day?
In this session, you’ll learn strategies that will help your teams increase their productivity by helping them coordinate more effectively and leverage powerful practices to complete your projects faster. A few of the topics we will dive into include:
What to think about before you write any code
What type of org is right for your team?
Source Code Control Strategies and its importance
Unit Testing Strategies for dealing with data and callouts
Deployment Strategies
This is a pragmatic session that will help you and your teams become more productive. Bring your team members, your challenges and your questions.
My second topic is Cloud Jumping: Leveraging Dynamic Capabilities of Heroku from Force.com
One of our clients had a situation where formulas were too limiting for their needs and implementing custom objects to express criteria was too cumbersome, error prone and time consuming. What they really needed was to be able to write complex formulas in a dynamic language.
Writing our own formula language and the code to parse it within Apex was something we considered but quickly decided that it would take too much time due to the complexity involved. A tight deadline and knowing that writing a custom formula engine is not trivial forced us to invent a different solution, one that is a unique combination of dynamically generated Javascript on Force.com that is executed on Heroku.
Why reinvent or develop a new formula language when one already exists?
In this session, you will learn how we implemented this solution that enabled us to jump between Force.com and Heroku to leverage the strengths of both platforms and provide a timely solution for our customer. Come prepared to dive into the cloud and think about ways that you could leverage something similar in your own companies.
Dreamforce 2012 runs from September 18th – 21st in San Francisco, California. If you are or will be attending, I invite you to attend one or both of my sessions.