Author: Maya Peterson

Maya is a 3x Salesforce MVP, a 2x Dreamforce Speaker, and holds 16 Salesforce Certifications. She has over 7 years of experience on the Salesforce Platform delivering high value solutions for a variety of customers and clients ranging from small business to enterprise and spanning across multiple industries. She is passionate about growing her own skills as well as others. When she's not going full ‘force’ you’ll find her creating art, backpacking, cooking, or volunteering in her community.

Sunshine Stories: Lashonna McBride is paying it forward

Lashonna is a Technical Analyst for the run:CRM team at Slalom. In her role, she assists with various areas of Salesforce customization and maintenance, including composing user stories, testing, and building out enhancements for existing orgs. Lashonna was recently appointed as a board member for the non-profit organization, Amplify, which helps to empower underrepresented voices in tech, and provide resources to those who may not otherwise have access.

Company: Slalom
Title: Technical Analyst
Years of Experience with Salesforce: 1-2

LinkedIn Profile

Twitter @LashonnaMcbride

Trailblazer.me

One Process To Rule Them All

This year I had the honor of presenting at Forcelandia again. Forcelandia is one of my favorite user led conferences, both because of it’s wealth of technical content and because, living in Seattle, it’s our closest PNW Conference. Big Shout out to Slalom for being a Platinum Sponsor this year! And of course to all the amazing folks that managed to put this great event together.

BAM! We did it!

On Tuesday, May 21st we celebrated the completion of our pilot Salesforce training program in partnership with Dress for Success Seattle. Dress for Success Seattle seeks to offer long-lasting solutions that enable women to break the cycle of poverty and become more financially independent.

Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management tool, but it’s really so much more than that. Salesforce enables businesses to streamline their processes and customer engagement. Salesforce touches many aspects of a business from Marketing to field service, e-commerce, and the nonprofit sector, it generates many new jobs each year. Salesforce encourages those already familiar with the system to spread their knowledge with an initiative called #BAM – Be a Multiplier.

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How To Git Back To The Future Man

This year I started learning about Git. I also started watching an absurdly funny, but often offensive, comedy show I highly recommend called Future Man. In Future man, a Janitor must travel through time to prevent the apocalypse. Because I was learning Git at the time, and because the mind works in mysterious ways, I got to thinking… What if time travel was handled like Git source control? I know nothing concrete or scientific about time travel and a little about Git so please bear with me… It’s the end of 2018 and I want to end the year with some light-hearted SciFi fun.

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Use Custom Permissions To Bypass Validation Rules And Pass Unit Tests

Picture this… it’s already 9pm on deployment night (Friday night of course). You’ve pushed to three environments already and spent at least three hours resolving unit test failures. If all your tests pass this time, you can go home and enjoy a well deserved hot cocoa….

THEN THIS HAPPENS:

Unit Tests Fail

FIELD_CUSTOM_VALIDATION_EXCEPTION

Someone else deployed a Validation Rule that is causing almost half your unit tests to fail, effectively ruining your weekend and destroying all your dreams. Has this ever happened to you? Well you’re not alone…

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Formulas Rule! Master Complex Assignment Rules with Formulas

This year at Dreamforce 2018 I had the opportunity to present an advanced admin session with Roan Bear. The Session, Formulas Rule! Master Complex Assignment Rules with Formulas, addressed how admins can use formulas to better manage and optimize assignment rules.

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Salesforce Automation: Phenomenal Cosmic Power (itty bitty query space)

If you’re a Developer, you’re probably fairly familiar with your org’s Governor Limits (CPU Time, SOQL queries, DML operations). But if you’re an Admineloper or Business Analyst, excited to design automation with new tools like process builder and visual flow, you might not be taking these limits into account, and subsequently hitting errors.

This last week I had the immense pleasure of presenting on this topic at Forcelandia. My session provided an overview of Governor Limits, how they pertain to Process Builder and Flow, and tips for avoiding hitting these limits with your clicks-not-code automation.

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Why I’m excited to attend Forcelandia 2018 and you should be too!

As a more advanced Salesforce admin/configurator/”admineloper”/consultant (i.e. all the hats but dev), it’s often hard for me to find content at conferences that hits that sweet spot right before one ventures into code. I’m talking Custom Settings, advanced formula logic, Custom Metadata Types, integrations and external objects, cool deployment tools, and of course, flows and all they have to offer, etc! When I look for content I don’t want to watch another training on how to set up Sales Path or how to use process builder, I’ve got that covered, and when I do have questions I can usually find the answer using searchtheforce.com. That is why this year I’m super excited for all the advanced admin content offered at Forcelandia.

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Why You Should Always Try To Break Your Own Stuff

When I was just learning Salesforce and starting my career, the company I worked for at the time often tasked me with the exciting and highly sought after role of writing test scripts and performing Quality Assurance testing. It turned out I had a knack for it. First and foremost, because as I was new to Salesforce, I excelled at blundering my way through the system breaking everything imaginable as I went. Picture me as a hurricane of user errors, wreaking havoc on even the simplest of test scenarios. The second more important reason I excelled at QA, was because when I wasn’t breaking things on accident, I tried to break them on purpose.

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Lightning Learning

Salesforce continues to grow and acquire new technologies and develop new features and while I pride myself on knowing the declarative side of the platform well, what I truly pride myself on is knowing the platform well enough to do the research quickly and efficiently to answer the ultimate question: Can we do this with clicks, and if so what is the best way?

So in the spirit of learning and sharing, here are a couple cool things I learned about recently…

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