London’s Calling

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Europe’s largest Salesforce community event, London’s Calling. It was celebrated in Skills Matter, very suitable place to embrace such a group of skilled Salesforce developers, admins, customers and partners.

The day started with an encouraging key note by Erica Kuhl and ended with another motivating one, by Petter Coffee. They talked about the importance of Salesforce’s great community,  and about key topics as the importance of developing customer centric applications and the imminent explosion of IoT technologies.

During the whole morning and afternoon, there were 28 sessions about multiple subjects, as administration, development, integration with external systems, marketing, project management, etc. There were four sessions at a time, so, whichever session you attended, you were missing some great ones!

In my case, I was more interested in development sessions. So, I’m going to summarise the content of the sessions I attended:

• TDD in Apex and why you should be using it (Chris Aldridge): Chris talked about the advantages of using TDD philosophy in development, the problems we encounter for following it when working with Salesforce and how can we use tools, as for example Mocks, to adopt it in an easiest way. In the end he demoed a great practice example of how to apply TDD stage by stage using Mocks behind the scenes. Watch video here.
• Building a web application with Google Places and Lightning Connect (Myself!): I explained to the audience how I have developed a restaurant recommendation engine in Salesforce which thanks to Lightning Connect is able of reading nearby places from Google Places API and recommend them to you based on your affinity with other users. Watch video here.
• True unit tests with Apex Mocks (David Frudd): David presented the open source Apex Mocking framework that has been developed by FinancialForce.com, which is based on java Mockito framework and which marks a before and an after when writing unit tests for Salesforce applications. He demoed a real example of how to use it, explaining how to verify that an specific method has been called or that specific values have been returned by a method when the entry values matched whatever. Worthy session! Watch video here.
• Making your data flow with Data Pipelines pilot (Carolina Ruiz): Carolina explained how three Salesforce pilots which are related to big data and asynchronous processing work: Data Pipelines, Big objects and Asynchronous Apex. She did a demo about how to integrate Data Pipelines with Wave, and she showed as an example of how to archive data with Big Objects and Asynchronous Apex. Great and fun session as ever! Watch video here.

Apart from the sessions and key notes, we had:

• Partners stands, in which you were given information about the different companies and sponsors. It was great that we found some new Spanish companies that are arriving to the Salesforce market.
• There was a demo jam in which some companies quickly showed their main applications. The awarded winner of the demo jam was ebsta.
• There was as well a fabulous after party in which I was able to meet and chat with a lot of Salesforce experts, MVPs, DUG leaders, which is great because interesting conversations arose and possible future collaborations and contributions!

To summarise, in my opinion, London’s Calling was a fantastic event in which the Salesforce community demonstrated its power and possibilities, and personally for me it was a great first experience, in which I learned a lot and which I hope to repeat soon.