Testing. 123 ..read more

I often ask myself, “When was the last time I cleaned this litter box?” We have three cats in our house. We give them each their own box, and the boxes are spread out on every floor. It is a lot to keep track of, and if a box is not in part of the house that I am in that often, it tends to get neglected. But dirty boxes are not good for the cats or humans around them, so I set out to find a solution to keep track of the cleanings and alert me of any of boxes in dire need of attention. I figured that the easiest solution would be to have a physical button near the box. Something I could press ..read more

Summer ’14 brought us a new Deployment Status page that gave us a real-time monitoring tool on what happens during a change set deployment. It allowed us to somewhat estimate how long the deployment will take, and it also allows us to cancel the deployment if it encounters an error early on. But in my opinion, the best “feature” that the new page brought to us was the Deployment Fish. The fish itself is a bug caused by the circular progress chart on the page that tells you how many components have been deployed. If you have 20 components in your change set, then the circle will by half way ..read more

I unexpectedly spoke at Dreamforce last October. My colleagues at CRM Science had submitted a number of sessions over the summer, and a handful of them were accepted. In order to give all the members of our team an equal chance to speak, we shuffled around our resources. I ended up with the “From Admin to Developer” session with my coworker Matt. Matt had been a Salesforce admin for years prior to becoming a developer at CRM Science, and for the most part, he was still learning. The session was going to be mostly about him describing the tools and websites he was currently using to become a de ..read more

Last week, I wrote about Big O Notation in Apex and how having a O(n) was a perfectly acceptable solution for any Apex problem. However, trying to avoid having to go through nested for loops is often a tricky proposition when you have to process so much data in a single SOQL query. Probably much to the displeasure of my co-workers, I like to utilize those series of for loops to build up complicated data structures. These structures organize the data in a way that is easy to access later on in my code. And the one data structure that I use the most often is the map of lists. The map of lists ..read more

Big O notation is probably the bane of many Computer Science undergrads’ existence. It most certainly was one of mine back in my college days. When you are young and learning programming for the first time, why would you want to waste your time on boring lectures learning about algorithm theories and optimization? When you are a student, you wanted to get in front of a computer and start coding! You felt that it did not really matter how you went about coding up a project. As long as it compiled and provided the expected output, you marked it as a success. I did not understand that Big O no ..read more

During the Summer of Hacks last month, I worked with a pair of coders with no prior Salesforce experience. While I worked on the Apex code, I had them work on the front end because Visualforce could just be straight up HTML if you wanted it to be. So the devs – both of whom had far more experience in modern front-end tools and libraries than I did – decided to use Bootstrap for the front end. But this decision came with a stipulation: “We had to disable the header and standard style sheets for it to work.” This was okay to me for the time because we were building a Salesforce1 app and the mobi ..read more

I participated in the Summer of Hacks in NYC this past weekend. I wasn’t expecting to pitch an idea myself, but when they opened the mic for participants to speak to the group, I raised my hand and walked on to the stage. Photo by @kavindrapatel“This is a Fitbit,” I declared to the room while holding up the tiny, bluetooth connected device. “It measures the amount of steps you take in a day. It then sends that data to your phone, which then sends it to the cloud. The consulting firm Appirio has said that they were able to save $300,000 in insurance costs by giving all their employees a Fitbit ..read more