Finding my career & then finding my tribe

For anyone who knows me today, they know that I live and breathe Salesforce — at least when it comes to my job. Some who are not directly involved in my career think that I work there (or that I used to), while other just know me as a complete & total Salesforce evangelist.

While some of that is incorrect (I have yet to be on Salesforce.com’s payroll), it is 100% accurate to say that I have built a relatively successful career around a piece of technology that I had never heard of when I started thinking about “what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

When starting college, I had some lofty aspirations to go into medicine — a plan that was quickly dashed by an overwhelming first semester. And while briefly panicked, my parents advised me to just take a few courses that interested me and perhaps forgo planning for a bit. It was in that second semester of my freshman year that I took my first Brain & Cognitive Science class (on a whim) and found something I loved. It was challenging and there were problems and mysteries to be solved.

Fast forward to 2011. I’ve been in the Salesforce space for several years, but had not yet reached the level of technical skill that I was hoping to achieve. It was at this time that I had a boss who encouraged me in the same manner as my parents had — allowing me to pursue an interest in learning Salesforce developer skills.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to take one of the earliest “Introduction to Object Oriented Program” courses offered by Salesforce. And I was even luckier to have Leah McGowen-Hare as an instructor.

Between Leah’s enthusiasm and my boss’s encouragement, along with massive help and support from the Salesforce developer community, I was able to write my first trigger (and test class!) in May 2011. And then another & another. Not only that, it helped me to become a better business analyst, as I could talk to both the business user and the developer on how to best meet the needs of the business.

Over time, I came to learn about all the technical resources that are available me as a developer. Obviously, there are local developer user groups, which are a great place to get started and to network locally with other Salesforce developers in your neck of the woods. There is the Salesforce Stack Exchange, which is a great place to get some more technical answers that are throughly reviewed by peers. There is the Salesforce Developer Boards, which is a great resources for quick answers and also searching for solutions to common problems. And there is also the Salesforce IRC channel if you are super old-school. This is probably my favorite out of all the resources, because it where I found my people. I have developed genuine friendships with some of the folks that I’ve met through the IRC channel. The channel is made up of a group of individuals who (while sometimes snarky) are always willing to lend you some help or advice on solving your problem.

I was lucky enough to find my place in the Salesforce world, but the piece of advice that I would offer to everyone is this: if you are passionate about learning something it, go after it & see where it takes you. You could just find a really awesome place in this world.