Slack to the Future
Salesforce
Marc Benioff continues to extol the virtues of Slack in an interview with Yahoo Finance - "I started Salesforce in an apartment in San Francisco. Today, I would start it on Slack". It’s just over a week to (mostly) virtual Dreamforce and I’m sure we’ll be seeing some examples of how Slack will start pushing Chatter and Quip aside as the tool of choice for collaboration,
InvestorPlace published an interesting article showing how well Salesforce are leveraging public cloud to keep spending down, while retaining the perception that it is all theirs. As the article puts it, customers don’t see data centers.
Determined not to be left behind by Github Co-pilot, a team of Salesforce researchers have open sourced a machine learning system, CodeT5, that can understand and generate code in real time. The Salesforce team believe they have ‘debiased’ the training set by removing problematic content, so it will be interesting to see if that approach pays dividends.
In the Salesforce ecosystem, OwnBackup is acquiring RevCult, a security and governance specialist. It’s no longer enough to store a copy of your data somewhere, you also have to ensure that it is subject to the same protections and governance as your production database. It’s always been a mystery to me why Salesforce don’t want a piece of this action, as it feels like it would be an incredibly easy sell.
Other
Almost everyone accepts that lockdowns accelerated cloud adoption, but StackOverflow have looked at the numbers and think it’s removed 3-4 years from the journey. For me, the most remarkable thing about lockdown was that home internet connectivity held up as it experienced a massive and extended spike!
A great article by Jean Yang from the a16z Future site on the need for the developer experience to acknowledge and embrace the complexity of the actual environments we work in. This resonates in consultancy world, as often a lot of the effort to extend an existing Salesforce implementation is getting to grips with what is already there, with all its foibles.
Me
I’ve been on holiday (vacation for our friends across the pond) and in a bizarre turn of events the weather has been great, so I’ve not been posting as much. I did find time to start a series that I’ve been thinking about for some time - JavaScript for Apex Developers, where I’ll cover some of the differences, challenges, pitfalls and mistakes that marked my journey learning JavaScript as an Apex programmer.
Part 1 covers the strong typing of Apex versus the weak typing of JavaScript.