careers – Sunshine and Other Unhandled Exceptions

Get Salesforce Practice by Tracking Your Habits

Want more practice learning Salesforce? Don’t have experience beyond Trailhead? Build an app to help you track good or bad habits. This is a win-win-win: hone your app builder skills, improve your habits, and you’ll have a cool app to show off in job interviews.

Salesforce Skills Used

Create a custom object and fields
Create reports
Create dashboard components
Make it mobile friendly
Problem solving: how to turn real life issues into measurable data
Send email every 3 days with stats
Bonus: Screen flow for easy tracking

My version: Migraine Tracking App

Forget record-triggered flows or apex triggers. The real demons are migraine triggers. I want to build an app to track when I have one of my trigger foods and when I have symptoms.

I have a threshold for tolerance of delicious triggers. I can eat some chocolate, dairy or red wine without reaching the threshold and getting sick, but I don’t know what the threshold is. Can building my own tracking app help?

So you still want to Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit?

Here’s what you need to know.

By Gordon Lee

Before the proverbial ink dried on the first article on why you shouldn’t Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit, I could already sense the exceptions the community would raise that I didn’t have the time to address. The Salesforce Trailblazer Community, after all, is made up of passionate tech nerds who have a keen eye in finding exceptions to things. It’s in our nature since we have to sniff out those nuances to be great at what we do.

Folks sent in anecdotes, counter-points, and personal stories about how their experiences were mutually beneficial and what I put out there was a disservice to the nonprofit world. My opinion is that those experiences are the exception, and don’t reflect the greater trend of nonprofits that are harmed when a volunteer is only using them to get experience.

Nevertheless, there is merit in the exceptions raised. So, this follow-up aims to address those exceptions, and clarify when it is a good idea to Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit.

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

Maya is GeekWire’s Geek of the Week

Maya Peterson lounging during a hike in Washington’s North Cascades National Park at Hidden Lake. (Photo courtesy of Maya Peterson, via GeekWire)

Hurray! Our own blogger Maya Peterson is featured in this week’s GeekWire as Geek of the Week, which “profiles the characters of Pacific Northwest tech, science, games, innovation, and more.”

Read her GeekWire profile here.

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.

Continue reading BAM! We did it!

A Glorious NPSP Day Seattle

Both years I’ve attended NPSP we’ve had incredible weather so the idea of a unhandled sunshine error is not applicable to this magical day.

MOOD of the room: Excited, happy, energized, grateful to be part of this amazing supportive community.

KUDOS: Ryan Ozimek and Katie Fadden are delightful facilitators! Megan and everyone at 501 Commons pulled this off flawlessly the day after Give Big! Congrats to Crystal on the birth of her new baby girl! So much !!!

STRAIGHT TALK: In this segment of the programming, we brought the elephant to the center of the room and talked about the .org acquisition. As a .org employee, I just want to make it clear that the opinions below are those of other folks who attended, some of which I might share, but they by no means reflect any official stance of Salesforce:

We want .org or .com to say “IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY. YOU DON’T NEED TO WORRY.”

Continue reading A Glorious NPSP Day Seattle

Building My Dev Cred

…And building a trigger that creates a new task when an email was sent!

In 2018, I’m focusing on building my “dev cred,” as Leah McGowen-Hare put it at Forcelandia a few years ago.

Next week is the final week of my RAD Women coding course and I am thrilled with how far I have come.

I am also building more connections in the Salesforce digital communities of Trailblazer, Power of Us Hub and Twitter.

So I was checking out the unanswered questions on the Trailblazer Community to see if I could help out and I ran into this one:

Is it possible to use Process Builder or Workflow in auto creating a task after an email is sent related to a record? The email (with a specific Subject filter) will be sent from (A) within Salesforce or (B) Gmail/Outlook but will be recorded in the Activity History. I tried to create a WR but it didn’t run after I sent an email.

The answer to that is ‘No.’ The end. Continue reading Building My Dev Cred

A Salesforce Love Story

[ Zach and I are honored to be on Salesforce.com’s blog today!]

FEB 06, 2018 BY LAURA WOODS.

On our Trailblazer Voices blog series, we’re sharing stories of real people facing real challenges, and finding innovative ways to succeed. These stories are as diverse as our world, ranging from one Trailblazer’s career transition to an ongoing mission to tackle the tech gender gap.

Yet across these stories one common theme stands out: community, or as we like to call it “Ohana.” It’s the family-feel of the Trailblazer Community that many Trailblazers cite as the biggest game-changer in their journey. And in no story is that more obvious than the story of Jessie Rymph and Zach Nostdal, two Salesforce Admins who chose to put a ring on it center stage at Dreamforce last November.

It’s not every day that we’re asked to help pull off unforgettable marriage proposals, so with Valentine’s Day around the corner, it seemed like the right time to check in with these lovebirds and ask them to share their story. Continue reading A Salesforce Love Story

Salesforce Admin: The Leanest Job Ever

You’ve probably heard of “lean management” or “lean manufacturing.” It feels like “lean” is ubiquitous in many industries, but I haven’t encountered the buzz word up here in the cloud. We have a self-improvement book club at my employer, Optimum Energy, and last week we discussed 2 Second Lean by Paul Akers.

“Lean” is the involvement of the entire company in continuous small improvements to remove waste and improve efficiency, as practiced by fanatic Paul Akers.

Good Salesforce administration is one of the most “lean” things you could do for your company.

Every day each of Paul Akers’ employees comes up with one process improvement that cuts out two seconds. 2 Second Lean claims you can revolutionize your company in these tiny increments. And I believe it, because that’s exactly what I do all day in SFDC.

At Optimum Energy, for every energy optimization project, a series of emails used to go back and forth between members of three teams until pricing was agreed upon. Now a user clicks a button, launching a flow which asks them a series of questions and starts an approval process. No information is misplaced in an email folder. All the right people are looped in. That’s efficiency!
Continue reading Salesforce Admin: The Leanest Job Ever

How Flow Saved My Job

Flow took me from a “hmm…let me Google that” Salesforce admin to a confident “no record is too far out of reach” admin-eloper (admin/developer). Leadership changed at my company and I had to quickly differentiate myself from my new boss, a Salesforce administrator with way more experience than me. In our initial conversations, he made it clear he would prefer to have a developer working for him. Okay…. one developer, coming up!

Continue reading How Flow Saved My Job