2015: My Salesforce Year In Review!

“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot”- Michael Altshuler

I started this year still fresh from a personal tragedy and trust me if you’re an emotional person like I am,  – it’s not easy to lose someone who’s been around all your life and move on in a matter of days. Anyway, I’ve always found solace in several things which thankfully includes my job, learning new technologies and being part of several closely knit communities – that helped cope up with an irreparable loss.

Unsurprisingly, Salesforce played a key role in terms of how my year unfolded so here’s a quick re-cap of my 2015 year in review.

Salesforce1 Mobile Automation using Appium – Continued the series of tutorials after a long gap from last year and finally published the impending part 3 and part 4 of this series. Received a lot of constructive feedback and it was a very satisfying way to finish off the content on one of my Dreamforce 2014 sessions.

Mobile SDK 3.1 & Swift Adventures – The year had started off with an upgrade to several of my apps to the latest Mobile SDK 3.x versions. Although generally stable, there were some critical issues so ended up spending a lot of time debugging and working around those. Started off work on the ‘Designing Enterprise Mobile Apps With iOS and Salesforce‘ series with the amazing Quinton Wall from Salesforce but ran into the usual problem of doing too many things at once and it never went too far.

Jaipur Hackathon – Planned and successfully co-organised Jaipur’s first ever over night hackathon under the ‘Jaipur Hackathon’ banner. Read more about it here – Part 1 and Part 2. There were some amazing submissions and it was great fun – of course, I’d hoped to see some amazing Salesforce apps but that didn’t happen. Anyway, hoping to organise a Salesforce hackathon in Jaipur in the near future – fingers crossed!

Evernote-Salesforce Integration – ‘Noteprise’ – is one of my own favorite open source apps (here’s why and why) built by my team and I finally managed to publish a tutorial on it. Of course, I still plan to do a lot more with the app itself as well as the content to hopefully make it a de-facto learning standard for any native iOS/ Android Salesforce mobile developer.

ng-Conf – Was approached to organise the ng-conf extended edition for Jaipur and absolutely loved the whole experience (Read more – here, here and here. Developed a whole new perspective to successfully planning and executing extended and on-site events. Re-ignited my love to use Angular.js more for Salesforce projects 😉

Jaipur DUG – Although we kept the momentum going with events through the year, I really wanted to do more. With another meetup coming in the next couple of weeks, I guess Jaipur DUG will be alive and kicking for 2016.

 

The Trailhead Revolution – I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the Trailhead revolution right from the very beginning. In fact, I wrote that 2015 will be remembered in the company history of Salesforce as “The year of Trailhead” and I’m glad that it’s come true. From earning one badge after the other (and being in a race with other Trailhead enthusiasts like Mohit Srivastava, Bob Buzzard, James Loghry and several others) to helping others learn and discover Trailhead at Jaipur Developer User Group meetups to educating newbies at the Salesforce World Tour in New York, it’s been one hell of a ride. And the best part – we’re not done yet!!

 

WWDC 2015 – I’m a hardcore Apple loyalist so when the invitation for WWDC 2015 arrived, nothing would stop me from attending it. The best part – I built a Slack community for Salesforce developers@WWDC and we had lot of fun catching up at the conference.

 

Salesforce World Tour – The best thing about Salesforce World Tour in New York was that it was scheduled right after WWDC 2015 and it was a great experience speaking and volunteering in the DevZone, getting folks started with their Trailhead journeys.

Developer Success Story – And then something happened, something which I’d never imagined in the wildest of my dreams. I was chosen as a Salesforce ‘Developer Success Story‘ and as I mentioned back then to my colleagues and friends in the Salesforce community, this is really “our” success story and a moral responsibility to keep up the good work.

Dreamforce’15

Shortly thereafter – Dreamforce 2015 preparation mania took over. This year – I presented 3 sessions at the conference (taking my overall tally to 7) and to say that it was my proudest moment in my career would be an understatement. If you’ve ever presented a session at Dreamforce, you know the amount of ground work and preparation it needs – now just multiply that by 3!

This was my busiest Dreamforce ever as I spent considerable time doing booth duty at the Code Consultation booths in the Developer Zone – the best part – got to meet and chit chat with friends from the community like Matt Lacey, Peter Knolle, Daniel Ballinger, Jitendra Zaa, Rakesh Gupta, Vivek Wadhwa and many more. And to be honest – the weeks and months of toil and the hectic schedule of the event took it’s toll on my health – nearly 6 weeks of illness and recovery but then it’s all worth it!

SFSE

I’ve been a big fan of Stack Exchange since the early days of my career and I’m happy to have contributed my bit to the Salesforce StackExchange family this year.  Not a bad effort to end the year among the top 20 (top 3%) contributors for 2015, especially when I keep juggling between SFSE, forums and Mobile SDK G+ community. The best part was that I got to meet some of the top SFSE members in person at Dreamforce.

Developer Discussion Forums

With so much happening on multiple fronts, it was often tough to keep up but I did my best to do my moderation duties through the year. Definitely could have done more in terms of contributing more answers but thanks to Influitive and other reward programs, the forums are in much better shape – and I’m finally a Happy moderator!! 🙂

LinkedIn Group

It’s been a phenomenal year of growth for the ‘Salesforce developers/contractors‘ group that I co-moderate on LinkedIn. With nearly 25K members and counting, it’s tough to keep up with moderation and spam-free duties but I think we didn’t too badly.

Miscallenous

I’m an introvert at heart but the best thing about being in a community is that you open up to people without even realising it yourself. It was wonderful to meet and interact with a lot of folks from the community all year around.

What’s next for 2016?

Phew – what a busy and satisfying year it’s been. As for year 2016, you never know. To be honest, I never know as well 🙂 but the plan is to keep up the pace and continue to work and contribute in the same spirit. Wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy Near Year!

See you in 2016!

 

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