So it has been a while since I have written anything on here. I feel terrible about this and really want to be writing more regularly and sharing some of the cool things that are going on with people.
So what have I been doing all this time? My last post was in February and revolved around some of the Force.com features that I had found most useful in team based development. I made a short presentation to the Agile Yorkshire user group based upon this post that was fairly well received. In one of those interesting moments of hindsight I am getting now, I honestly don’t feel the presentation was really that good and if I were to do it again I would completely rewrite it, but the presentation did encourage a few people to look into Salesforce and that is good enough for me.
At work I have moved onto doing some iPad and mobile development which has been exciting, culminating in the recent release of DATASHELTER Mobile for Salesforce. I am now working on other exciting pieces and look forward to releases and launches of these for you guys to see.
There has been some slow emergence of some open source projects I am founding and co-founding for Salesforce developers and users. One of these will be based around the premise of improving the ease of learning Salesforce development for both non-developers and migrating developers. We saw recently with the hiring of Matsumoto-san that Salesforce is very keen to drive developers to its platforms and is aware that the strength of any platform offering comes in no small part from the way it interacts with and aids developers on it. A large reason that Microsoft were so dominant in the past 20 years is the way in which they looked after the developer community they had. We all remember Ballmer’s developer chant. It is evident that Apple and Android are destroying RIM and Nokia because their development platforms are easy to use. I think Salesforce realise this (and if they don’t they should soon) and as such want to try and help developers utilise the technologies they have in the best way possible. The hope is my little project can help this aim on its way.
Again, revolving around the world of work, we have started using the fantastic GitHub system and I have been given the enviable job of leading the roll out of this. I can honestly say I have never used a more consistently brilliant and quick system. [On an aside, I did try out the GitHub for Mac offering and its nice. It just din’t do everything I wanted exactly as I wanted it to though and I did find myself grumbling at its speed and feedback occasionally. It will remain installed and updated, but only get used sporadically. The command line is much more fun anyway.] I have been coming up with a branching pattern and testing it to ensure it fits in with our development systems in the smoothest way possible and hope to start linking Git and Chatter together for our own internal reporting needs.
So I do plan on keeping this more up to date. I haven’t even mentioned the fact I have been playing with Ruby, looking into UX and Human Interface, getting back into some graphic design work and reading a lot into Agile development and complexity theory, Core Animation and re-reading the brilliant Pragmatic Programmer, Refactoring, Design Patterns and slowly working through The Art of Computer Programming. I have started looking at obtaining my DEV 501 status as well and whether I should renew my CSM, obtain a CSP or quit the Scrum Alliance all together.
So expect some hopefully exciting writings soon!