TrailheaDX here we come!

There is a new Salesforce conference event on the horizon, and I think it's going to be a good one!

I missed Dreamforce 2016, through my own misadventure (I literally got married the weekend before) - and I also missed Dreamforce 2015 - because I had attended the previous three years, and Desynit had a swathe of excited new developers so it only seemed fair to let them attend whilst I held the fort back here in Bristol. I thought with a two-year hiatus, if I worked real hard, and was real nice to the management - my application for Dreamforce 2017 would be met with open arms....

Imagine my horror then; when Desynit announced conference attendees for the year, they told me I wouldn't be attending Dreamforce 2017 either! Three swings and three misses, what had I done wrong?!

Well - what had I done RIGHT - because Desynit then announced they weren't going to send me to Dreamforce this year, they are going to send me to TrailheaDX instead!

My fellow Salesforce developer Dorian Sutton and I will be jetting off to San Francisco at the end of June to take part in what I personally believe could be a turning point in the "Computer Science Conference" world.

Previously there have been two types of IT Conference - there is the Dreamforce style - which let's be honest is a flashy party full of salespeople and free branded pens (which break before you get them home). It is a fun party, and it's always nice to meet so many people and see so many sessions - but to the development world it's also a little like being an exhibit at a zoo; and also typically pretty overwhelming.

On the other side of the coin, there are IT conferences (typically held in educational institutions) where the loudest noise you will hear for 3 days is someone dropping a tea spoon at one of the coffee stations. Back-to-back sessions (often led by sponsored bigCo experts) make sure no-one is forced to suffer the indignity of having to talk to a stranger for any length of time and half the attendees are actually just there to get away from their colleagues and cubicles - and are back in their hotel rooms by 17:29 each day.

Enter TrailheaDX.

TrailheaDX - to me - looks like an incredibly exciting opportunity to finally have a technically oriented conference environment, without too much of the "whooping" and t-shirt cannon hype, but still actually in Technicolour™, with some life and vibrancy to it.

You know it's going to be good, because the actual Salesforce platform developers and engineers will be there, talking to people and leading sessions.

If you look at the session list it is absolutely cutting edge. Advanced Lightning Components, Einstein the DX CLI - this isn't just people revamping a presentation they gave 6 months ago (and 6 months before that); it's new and exciting, and for once - the Safe Harbour statement might actually mean something to me!

The CLI

This is the biggy for me, at Desynit we have spent hour and hours, over months and months trying to work out, and improve our version control, release processes, disaster recovery, forward-working enviroments and everything that every over branch of programming has at least some options for.

We have Bitbucket, and scripts, and can often be found begging each other to try to follow the convoluted processes we have that basically make every change request cost sweat and blood. The DX CLI promises to solve all these problems for us and make our lives bliss (remember that safe harbour statement I mentioned earlier?!)

But we are seriously looking forward to this, the whole team will be waiting with baited breath for our return from TrailheaDX to report back what the upcoming changes will be for Metadata control and Git integration to Salesforce.


So if you are going to be there.... get in touch with me on Twitter, and perhaps we can meet up for that awkward coffee that I'm hoping I actually won't have to do; but more importantly, we can retweet each others experiences, which is far more interesting anyway.