New Year, New Release
Salesforce
The big news for January is that TrailheaDX is now TrailblazerDX and is back in person for 2022. The event will take place on 27th/28th April in San Francisco with content available online. This hasn’t been universally well received though, as it it clashes with Northeast Dreamin’ (28th/29th) and Texas Dreamin’ on (28th-30th). There’s so many community conferences these days that I guess this situation was bound to happen eventually. It’s unfortunate that both the conflicting events are also in the US - clashes with events in other territories would have a fairly minor impact, although still better avoided. While I usually like to come down on Salesforce for this kind of thing, they do have a few challenges that community events don’t:
Scale - Salesforce events are, outside of pandemic times, huge, so are somewhat at the mercy of when the large venues in San Francisco are available
C-Level Availability - TrailblazerDX is going to revolve around the packed calendars of the likes of Marc Benioff, Parker Harris and Bret Taylor
Other Events - while it’s been a couple of years since we’ve had them, Salesforce planning will take into account the aspirational World Tour events that were pretty much a monthly event
Which isn’t to say this doesn’t suck for the organisers of the community events - the last thing you want is to be competing with the 800 pound gorilla, but once again it looks like Salesforce and their ecosystem is a victim of its own success.
Spring 22 goes live on the weekends of Feb 5th/12th, just in time for Valentine’s day. If you want to find out more about what is in this release, come along to the BrightGen webinar that I’m hosting.
Prioritization of the latest round of ideas is open until 7th February, so get in there and spend those coins. The leaderboard looks very polarised right now - 50% of the ideas are nonprofit and they make up the entire bottom half - there’s a message there for Salesforce product management I’d say!
The App Exchange celebrated a major milestone as it passed 10 million app installs. I’d like to think I’ve played my small part with BrightSIGN, but I have no idea if components are included in that figure!
On the community side of things, the London’s Calling call for papers is open until the end of the day on 13th Feb, again just in time for Valentine’s Day. I’ve spoken at a few of these events in the past - it’s a great experience and I’m hoping to do it again this year.
Peter Goodman’s book, Davos Man, takes a pop at Marc Benioff among other billionaires, contending that they have rigged the system for their own benefit and are only interested in solutions that don’t impact their wealth, profiting from the pandemic and then proclaiming themselves as the real heroes. I’ve just ordered the book so stay tuned for my thoughts on it.
Other
The global low-code market is expect to reach around $40 billion by 2027, according to Valuate Reports. Interestingly, the list of leading players doesn’t mention Salesforce, which I’d imagine is a bit grating after the push that flow has had in the last couple of years. Update 31/01/2022 - Salesforce now appears in the list - clearly they read my Substack ;)
The risks of blindly trusting open source came into sharp relief as the developer of colors.js and faker.js deliberately sabotaged them. While it doesn’t appear to be entirely straightforward as to what was behind this, it appears very likely that money was the motivator. There are many novel approaches to raising funds in the open source world, so maybe holding systems hostage will take off.
I read an interesting article earlier this month (Jan 22) about the top soft skills that employers want from technologists - I was surprised that time management and meeting deadlines didn’t rank higher, as these are absolutely vital in my opinion.
Me
January always racks up a few blog posts, starting with my review of the year:
followed by a post on the new ApexTypeImplementor functionality coming in beta in the Spring 22 release.
And finally refreshing data retrieved through the wire service by Lighting Web Components.
Hello. Big fan of your posts. I appreciate the time and thought you put into these. When I checked the website you linked for the Low-code market report I saw that Salesforce is listed on the page. I don't know whether it was added after you reviewed the page, but I wanted to let you know. Cheers. Andy Engin Utkan