The Stack is Back!

Attentive readers will notice there’s no Me section this month. I’ve been quiet on most fronts for the last 3 months or so, as I’ve been flat out tech onboarding with our new owners - for those that aren’t aware, BrightGen were majority acquired by Credera, part of the Omnicom group, in November 2021. I’ve been busy moving us onto the corporate systems and applications, which is mostly complete now, so once again I’ve got some time to devote to the socials, the community, and sharing my thoughts on Salesforce/tech news on Substack. Luckily there’s still plenty going on.

Salesforce

Dreamforce registration is open, as is the confusion around the number of attendees. The sponsor information said 30k but Marc Benioff said 200k at the NY world tour. This was later rowed back as including online attendees, but I’m not convinced that was the case. Typically when talking about online attendance Salesforce go into the millions rather than hundreds of thousands. Maybe it will go the route of the London World Tour which was originally 3k, then 6k, then alleged to be 9k, but you could still turn up on the day and register. It appears the only certainty is uncertainty - of that we can be sure.

Working from the office clearly isn’t something Salesforce is expecting it’s staff to do, as it puts the best part of half the Salesforce West building up for lease. It’s still early days for figuring out exactly how in-person/hybrid/remote work will pan out, but a year or two of empty office space might change some CEOs’ minds.

Slack is increasing Pro subscription prices : - it’s only 50-75 cents per user per month, but for those with thousands or tens of thousands of users it soon adds up to real money. Free users will also see some changes as messages and files will now be visible for 90 days, rather than the previous limits of the last 10,000 messages and 5Gb of files. Much better for those with a highly active but still non-paid workspace - I’ve been in some where 10,000 messages was a fortnight’s activity - not so much for those with a couple of users. That said, I’ve always been of the opinion that messaging apps like Slack are a really poor way to store information that people need in the future - by all means collaborate in Slack (or any other messaging app) to figure out the details, but publish the decision somewhere that doesn’t require trawling through discussion history to find it.

Other

There’s a couple of interesting projects that have caught my eye in the last few weeks:

• Bun is a new beta JavaScript runtime that promises speed and a one-stop shop for additional items like transpiling, package management. That’s not the interesting bit for me though - Jared Sumner wrote the whole thing himself in around a year!

• Tauri is a 1.0 released Electron killer, promising cross platform apps at a fraction of the current size. I’ve just started playing around with Tauri and so far I quite like it - whether I’ll rebuild my cligui app using it is another question, mostly how much spare time I have these days!

And of course, the Twitter/Musk saga continues. Having initially looked to use a Poison Pill defence to avoid being bought by Elon Musk, Twitter are now suing him to buy them while also blaming him for their less than stellar results.

Analyst Mike Proulx, VP research director of Forrester, came up with this fantastic summary :

“Twitter now has an acquirer who no longer wants it, a CEO and board who wants to get rid of it, and an employee base whose caught in the middle of it all as their morale plummets.”

Maybe it’s not always great working at a big-tech company.

Speaking of which, some of the larger tech companies are reported to be slowing hiring or even cutting headcount. I’ve also been reading that there is less easy money for tech startups right now, leading to similar behaviour at the other end of the spectrum. Does this indicate a Great Equalisation (everything is a Great something these days) is coming, where tech jobs return to nearer what they used to be - well paid, but not “skew the local housing market if you move out of San Francisco” levels of remuneration? If it does, there’s so much Salesforce work about these days that I’ll wager it would take us a couple of years to notice it.