Salesforce Trails and Trials Jon Cline

This time on Salesforce Trails and Trials, hosts Jon Cline and Erik Yewell talk with Zachary Pals, who took a unique career path to go from moving couches to Salesforce consultant.

Jon Cline has been working in IT since 1998 and is a very curious person. Erik Yewell has been in IT for 24 years and done just about everything you can imagine. They share their wins and worse so you can learn with them.

Zachary Pals is a Salesforce consultant with an interest in swing dancing and a philosophy degree from Pepperdine University. His career took a unique path, including Task Rabbit jobs and bartending before moving a couch for Jon Cline led to a career in Salesforce. Lots of learning with Trailhead (https://trailhead.salesforce.com/) and time on projects with Jon’s team over the past five years has changed Zachary’s career trajectory.

Rather than the typical show notes, we’ll share several quotes from the conversation. First, here's that bread recipe we mentioned: https://www.feastingathome.com/sourdough-bread/

Snippets of Our Interview With Zachary Pals

Being your own boss: “I never really had a strong vision for what I wanted to do with my time. I'm fortunate enough and talented enough that I probably could have chosen a number of different routes and been successful at them. So I ended up choosing kind of nothing and doing everything. I was doing handyman work and Uber and I didn't really like the independence. I don't like doing what other people tell me. I remember I was telling my friend how I was doing my own thing, doing handyman work and whatnot. And he said to me, ‘So Zachary, you finally found out that you don't like working for other people. I could have told you that 10 years ago.’ So it was a lot of that—just me not really knowing what I wanted to do.”

Realizing the need for change: “The thing I needed to learn and sort of get over to make the phone call was two things: One, really coming to accept that I wanted to go somewhere and do something in life and shared economy, handyman stuff wasn't going to be that—I needed something else. And I saw that this could be something like that. And then the other thing I needed to sort of entertain the idea of is entering the tech space. I saw this as a good opportunity, but it was just nothing I'd ever considered before.”

Taking on responsibility: “The more I learn, the more responsibility I gain, the more responsibility I gain the more anxiety there is, but then the more skill I have, so then it helps me cope with the anxiety. It's been a constant struggle, of just the willingness to continue to step into anxious situations.”

Perspective: “That's been a learning point for me as well, being highly introverted and highly independent, and like doing my own thing, and then to have you and the team to be able to come to and talk about those things. … And you said, yeah, OK, that'll get you here. But like, what, if you wanted to go here? Is that going to get you there? Is that going to get you to making $100,000 or $150,000, or if you want to gain these responsibilities or support a family in this way—you helped me put perspective around which route I wanted to take.”

Value of consulting: “It has been invaluable to have a consulting background where I get a lot of very good experience in a short amount of time. So there's different routes you can take: Trailhead is great, getting certifications is great, I will say getting my sys admins—while necessary and beneficial—didn't really teach me a ton about how to actually understand Salesforce and do Salesforce. It was really the work that did it. So it obviously depends on where you're at in your life, like a junior admin position is a great place to start even in-house somewhere. But it might not be the right fit for somebody in a different season in life. But I did find consulting to be invaluable, because you're gonna get more experience across a wider range of things and learn much m

This time on Salesforce Trails and Trials, hosts Jon Cline and Erik Yewell talk about the value of code standards and the peril of not having a dedicated admin. Plus the marriage of Salesforce and Slack, the power of debugging, and a nerd manifesto. 

Jon Cline has been working in IT since 1998 and is a very curious person. Erik Yewell has been in IT for 24 years and done just about everything you can imagine. They share their wins and worse so you can learn with them.

This episode includes a quick reflection on the show’s one-year anniversary. “It’s really about helping people improve their lives,” Jon says.

What We’ve Learned

Jon learned about the ongoing improvements and integration as a result of Salesforce acquiring Slack. Eric learned about increased hierarchy with roles and a new Flow optimization.

One Small Thing

For this episode’s one small thing that can have big consequences, Erik and Jon bring their own examples:

Jon talks about companies that try to share admin duties across the organization, and expect employees to pick up the slack in their spare time. Somebody has to be given that task or it’s just a time bomb waiting to go off. 

Erik talks about the importance of including code standards in your consultant contracts. It’s a simple form of governance that can ensure code is written correctly—not just that it works, but it’s efficient and sustainable. That kind of documentation can keep you from bricking yourself into a corner and then having to break down walls to get out.

This Show’s Quote

Erik: “The most rewarding thing about development is debugging.”

Jon: “There isn’t a best practice for making a sandwich, but there is one for spreading the mayo.”

What’s Your Trial?

Call our hotline and leave a message to share your story: 540-TRIAL-75 (that’s 540-874-2575).

Extras:

OrgConfessions
Nerds: A Manifesto by A Capella Science
Debugging tools: Apex Log Analyzer and Octane

This time on Salesforce Trails and Trials, hosts Jon Cline and Erik Yewell talk about admin power in the wrong hands. Plus Slack bot platforms, Miro decision trees, bow ties, gratitude, and holiday lights.

Jon Cline has been working in IT since 1998 and is a very curious person. Erik Yewell has been in IT for 23 years and done just about everything you can imagine. They share their wins and worse so you can learn with them.

Erik talks about learning Slack bot platforms and automating tasks. You can do it with Heroku and Azure of course, but there are also options for MuleSoft, Workato, and Zapier. Meanwhile Jon learned about using Flow as a validation tool for handoff to Conga document generation. Plus, they both revel in learning anything on YouTube from tying a bow tie (something Jon learned) to changing a car window (something Erik learned about, but decided to leave to the professionals).

For this episode’s one small thing that can have big consequences, Erik and Jon talk about too many system administrators. In short, admin power in the wrong hands is not a good idea. But you can address this challenge and keep people happy by setting up a delegated administrator to restrict how much access some admins have. 

What are you grateful for? Jon and Erik talk about the value of starting with gratitude, whether it’s a meeting or a conversation, and they’d love to hear what you’re grateful for. Who are the people that have helped you or projects that have moved you forward? Maybe it’s a manager that gave you a good kick in the butt. You can call our Consulting Camp line and leave a message to share your story: 540-TRIALS-5 (that’s 540-874-2575).

Extras:

Jon Cline is wearing a bow tie all month as a part of Dressember. You can make a donation to his campaign to stop human trafficking.
The Salesforce Developers Podcast is worth checking out, especially recent episodes on Enterprise Apex programming and the SFXD user group on Discord.
Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture by Andrew Fawcett.
Jon shares Miro templates for creating decision trees and a polymorphic visual flow for Salesforce that can save a lot of time (check out the new architect resources coming soon).

This time on Salesforce Trails and Trials, hosts Jon Cline and Erik Yewell talk about Salesforce Classic vs. Lightning. Plus, lots of discussion about future integrations with Slack, how to do more with Flow, and the power of opportunity.

Jon Cline has been working in IT since 1998 and is a very curious person. Erik has been in IT for 23 years and done just about everything you can imagine. They share their wins and worse so you can learn with them.

Salesforce recently acquired Slack, and there are new integrations coming down the pipeline. Erik has been learning a lot about Slack and some of the coming changes discussed at Dreamforce. Jon has been tackling business rules for complex billing for some construction clients, prompting a tangent about Flow.

For this episode’s one small thing that can have big consequences, Erik and Jon talk about the impact of continuing to use Salesforce Classic versus switching over to Lightning. It can be hard to switch over, especially if organizations have a lot of legacy implementations that will take some work to convert. But in the end, sticking with Salesforce Classic will just continue to build technical debt and cause more and more problems as Salesforce focuses on Lightning. 

Extras:
Using Slack to more quickly get clients on-boarded with slash commands and Flow.
Opportunity is often at your door but it doesn’t always knock.
Luck is the intersection of opportunity and preparedness (learn more about your luck surface area).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCYLmr7-Nbo&t=3s

This time on Salesforce Trails and Trials, hosts Jon Cline and Erik Yewell talk failure. Plus, unexpected consequences of changing picklist values, metadata dependency API, some helpful tools, the value of user acceptance testing, and bread.