Personal Highlights from My First Experience of Dreamforce In-Person!!!
Dreamforce is Now Behind Us … Here are My Personal Highlights from It
Dreamforce is Salesforce’s biggest annual conference event. In fact, it is arguably one of the biggest events in all of modern tech, particularly cloud-based technology. This year’s event marked my first time attending in-person. I did stream it via Salesforce+ in 2021, but I had yet to be able to get out to San Francisco and get in amongst the action itself, that was until this year. In this post I want to offer some of my personal highlights from the event this year. In complete honesty, very little of this post will be about anything technical. Rather, it will focus on the more personable aspects of what happened at the event. No matter whether you got out to Dreamforce or not, my hope is that you will get something out of hearing my highlights.
So, with that in mind … shall we dive in?
Some Major Firsts
Let’s begin with the obvious one for me. This being that this Dreamforce for me had a lot of firsts included in it. Within this singular I had so many firsts … so many in fact, that I can share them in an easy-to-see list.
- First time visiting San Francisco.
- First time visiting the United States as a whole.
- First time attending Dreamforce in-person.
- First time speaking at Dreamforce (I did that twice this year).
- First time being interviewed in official Salesforce content.
Want to see an example of what I was getting up to at Dreamforce? Then check out the video below from the amazing Salesforce Admins team!
Giving Back and Seeing the Impact
Now I don’t know about you … but as someone who often struggles with Imposter Syndrome, I do often ask myself what difference do I make by doing the things I do. Well, at Dreamforce, not only did I get to give back to the Trailblazer Community, I also got to see the fruits of that labour at the same time, and that was really cool to see in front of my very own eyes.
When it comes to being able to give back to the community and seeing the impact of it, I have two particular things that stood out to me at the event.
Megan Tuano and Christine Marshall’s Session at Dreamforce
The first was getting to meet Megan Tuano in-person. For those of who don’t know Megan, she is an awesome person in the community who puts out a lot of great content trying to help others in the community reach their potential through things such as producing great content on how to build a resume, and developing your personal brand. Megan reached out to me a few months back and asked me for some advice on putting in submissions for speaking slots at community events. Shortly after that conversation, Megan started doing sessions with one of my favourite people in the whole of the Salesforce ecosystem, Christine Marshall of SalesforceBen. So as you can imagine, after the conversation I had with Megan earlier in the year, I was dead chuffed to see her get accepted as a speaker at Dreamforce alongside Christine. I’m so happy to be be a small part in helping provide the encouragement that Megan was looking for to go for it and submit for events like Dreamforce. If you were there, you’ll know that Megan didn’t need my help to do anything, but I am absolutely thrilled and honoured to have been asked played even a small part and give some encouragement.
If you didn’t get to see Megan and Christine’s session at Dreamforce, you can see a longer version of the session they delivered by clicking on the link here.
The Admin Skills Kit Stand
One of the things I got to do at Dreamforce was to spend a bit of time in the Trailblazer Forest. In the forest, I got to spend a good portion of my time on and around the Admin Skills Kit stand. For me this was a real highlight as I had the great pleasure of being involved in getting the Community Blog series, Skills for Success off the ground alongside the Admin Relations Team. Over the course of the week, I got to spend a good chunk of time around the stand and got to talk to a lot of Admins who were relatively new to Salesforce and the role of a Salesforce Admin. Conversations on the stand ranged from the Skills Kit itself to talking points around the Admin and Associate certification. It was a great highlight to be able to contribute in a small way on the stand, and it even led to what I would my funniest and most enjoyable moment of the entire conference. Admin Skills is an area in around the Admin landscape that I’m deeply passionate about, so being able to see the Skills Kit come to life and be involved in a little bit is great!
Meeting So Many Amazing Trailblazers
Overall, in terms of the conference itself, I would honestly say that the biggest highlights of the event was the people I got to meet. Many of whom I had only met virtually until that point. A number of whom are people I’ve looked up to in the ecosystem for quite a while now. I won’t go through the entire list of names here, I do want to mention a few people that I thought it was really cool to finally meet in-person while I was in San Francisco.
The first name I want to mention is Claire Jones. Claire is one of the leaders of the London Admin User Group, and while we’ve been to a number of the same events this year, we had yet to have a real conversation until DF22. Claire ended up being one of the people I spent the most time with at the event and we clicked on the topic of Flow (obviously an easy in for me). It was great to meet Claire at Dreamforce, and hopefully we’ll get to work on a session together at a future date. Again, a real highlight of the week for me.
Going back to the Admin Skills blog series. None of that would’ve came to be without Juliette Warren. Juliette worked tirelessly to help the blog series come to life and we got to meet in-person at, you guessed it, the Admin Skills Kit stand in the Admin Meadow. Across the week we got to chat a little bit and it was so great to meet Juliette in-person at Dreamforce ‘22.
I do want to give a quick mention to all the great people that I’ve met through my involvement over the last couple of years in the Nonprofit space. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get selfies with everyone, but across the week I got to meet the likes of Gordon Lee (who I did get a selfie with), Dar Veverka, Samantha Shain, Sarah Pilzer, Don Miller, Anne Young, Cori O’Brien and John Sim … just to give a brief list. I’ve met most of these great people only online via events like the Salesforce.org Coffee Chat, Nonprofit Dreamin’ and the Salesforce.org Open Source Commons Sprints. Sam was given a Golden Hoodie at Dreamforce and that was a great thing to see even though I couldn’t get to the Nonprofit Keynote session myself.
If I were to go on naming names of who I met in-person at Dreamforce for the first time, we would be here for a very long time. So I won’t talk about all of them, but I do want to give particularly mention to Eric Dreshfield, Michelle Hansen, Brian Shea, Gillian Bruce, Brittney Gibson, Jen Lee, Robin MacKellar, Lisa Dick … again just to list off some of the names I met.
Again, I could go talk about this forever, and I’ve definitely missed some of the great people I met at Dreamforce off of this list. Just know, if I haven’t mentioned you specifically by name here, it’s not meant to be rude at all. I really appreciate all of the amazing people I got to meet at Dreamforce.
The Admin Keynote and Release Readiness Live
Most of the sessions I got to attend ended up being in the Trailblazer Forest and I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I thought I would. That being said, out of the sessions I did get to attend, two stand-out ones for me were the Admin Keynote and the Admin Release Readiness Live sessions.
There’s a lot I can talk about coming out of both the Admin Keynote and Release Readiness Live, but my encouragement would be to go and watch them both for yourself. I will be doing a blog about the Admin and Flow Release Readiness Live sessions in the coming weeks and days, but in full transparency I am working on some other post Dreamforce content as well.
So for now, let me focus on one particularly thing to come out of the Admin Keynote … something that is near and dear to my heart as an Admin.
The Future of the Admin Skills Kit
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this post, the Admin Skills Kit is something I was involved in through the Community Blog Series. It was also something I was involved in through giving feedback during the period of time that the Admin Relations Team ran their surveying of the Admin community about their thoughts on the evolution of the Admin role.
In the Admin Keynote, three key innovations were announced for the next phase of development of what comes now that the Skills Kit is live and available to Salesforce Admins and to all Salesforce professionals.
Those announcements were:
- Admin Skills YouTube Series
- Admin Skills Advisory Board
- Admin Enablement Kit
I don’t know much about these three things in all honesty. But I am very excited to see what they are and I’m even more excited to see how they build upon the success of the Admin Skills Kit going forward for sure.
What About You?
So those were some of my personal highlights from attending my very first Dreamforce. I could easily write a much longer blog on all of this, but I want to keep things succinct and to hear your thoughts on Dreamforce. So let me know here in the responses or in the comments on social media what you thought about Dreamforce this year. Did you attend in-person or online, how was that experience for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts on Dreamforce this year, so hit me up with your comments and views.
