Recently Josh Birk interviewed my for the Salesforce Developer Podcast on “Weird Apex”. You can find the full recording here. I’m going to share some additional thoughts about the background to the discussion and how the simple act of being inquisitive has lead me to some of the weird and wonderful things I discussed on the podcast.
Image taken of https://developer.salesforce.com/podcast/2021/05/episode-82-weird-apex-with-paul-battisson.html
Love What You Do
When we meet clients for the first time, we tell them that at Cloud Galacticos we are 100% Salesforce nerds. We have team members who are MVPs, user and developer group leaders, and authors. We also have speakers, CTAs, and a number who tick multiple of these boxes. When hiring, one of the things we focus on is how much people enjoy working with the platform. I always ask “Why Salesforce?” Of course, sometimes working your way through a big set of profiles and permissions to figure out what the gaps are is not the most riveting work. I find that it is important to ensure I take time to do things I enjoy within my work to stay inquisitive.
A prime example of this is the VR setup I built with Vincent Reeder for a Dreamforce talk. Virtual Reality is cool and still fairly new tech, however it is not really enterprise friendly (as we discuss in the podcast). Still, Vincent and I took it as a technical challenge to see how we could get different pieces of the Salesforce Platform to play together to deliver something cool. Is this a completely practical exercise that we will reuse? No, but the learnings on how to use the different bits of technology will definitely help me in the future. It’s a much more fun way of learning.
Build a Career You’re Interested In
I’d highly encourage anyone who is looking to learn more about a particular topic to approach it in this way. By trying to keep this in mind I have built my career on Salesforce and have had a great time doing so. It has helped me learn enough to be able to write two books on Apex as well as given me the opportunity to speak at events all over the globe. I would recommend listening to other episodes of the Salesforce Developer Podcast. You will notice this is a common theme.
