1) What was your first job? McDonald’s – bagged myself 7 stars, too.
2) What positives do you see that have come out of the COVID pandemic? People finally saw the value in QR Codes. OK, seriously it really pushed folk to see how valuable the choice of working remotely was. And it showed employers that this was something that needs to taken seriously. It’s of course not for everyone, but having the choice truly means a lot to many, many people.
3) What is the best tech innovation you have come across in the last 5 years? Anything and everything related to the diagnosis, care, and treatment of cancer.
4) What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever given or got? Work is rarely that important. Your health, friendships, and family trump it 99.999% of the time.
5) How did you end up working in/with Salesforce? I had just quit a job that I’d been in for 13 years, and was phoning around my family to let them know. My brother asked if I fancied joining him to do some development at a start-up he’d recently founded. I asked him what it involved, and he replied “Salesforce”. It was the first I’d ever heard of it.
6) How do you use Salesforce in your job today? I’m a technical architect at an ISV and OEM where we specialise in mobilising Salesforce, and we have a no-code mobile companion app builder that’s built on the platform.
7) Any advice you can give for people starting out in Salesforce? Get involved in the community. The folk out there are incredibly knowledgeable, passionate, and very welcoming. Whether it’s joining the community Slack workspaces (“Good Day Sir podcast” and “Ohana Slack” to name a couple) or the SFXD Discord, or attending one of the many community events and conferences. These spaces will generate a network that will prove to be invaluable for your career and expertise and you’re more than likely to make some really good friends too.
8) Are there any good Salesforce resources (websites, groups, meetups etc) that you would recommend? Oh yes… see above.
9) What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen Salesforce used for? I once saw some folk flying a drone with it at one of our London Developer user group meetups. I think they were using the steaming API , if I remember correctly.
10) What do most companies get wrong when it comes to Salesforce? The name of Wav… I mean Einstein Analyt… sorry I meant Tableau CRM… oh no I mean Salesforce CRM Analytics.
11) What do you wish was better about Salesforce? I wish It were faster, from a user’s point-of-view. I know that there’s been lots of work on this in recent years since the introduction of Lightning, but it still feels slow in places.
12) What’s hot in Salesforce right now? DevOps, and more importantly how the principles apply across the whole admineloper/devmin audience.
13) What could Salesforce recruiters do better? I don’t personally have too much experience of them, but from what I’ve heard from other folk they could do with learning more about the platform in general.
14) What tasks drive you mad? Filling in tax self assessments.
15) Netflix or Prime or other? BBC Three.
16) If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be? I love living in England. I like that we have seasonal weather. But I’ve always fancied New Zealand too.
17) What tech content do you consume/follow/listen to? I listen to a few podcasts. I’d recommend folk checking out Good Day, Sir!, The Salesforce Developer Podcast, The Salesforce Posse and Salesforce Way.
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