This success story is a bit different, ‘one of a kind’ kind-a story. Our story, me Sudipta Deb and my wife Paromita Banerjee.

It was August of 2003, our first day in college. We both joined the Computer Engineering department. We were introduced to each other through some friends, like usually happens in a college.

It took me only about a week to decide and propose to her and in a few days my incessant phone calls pushed her to say YES. However, in India your parents would be highly unimpressed with you in case you are going out with someone and would be absolutely sure about you ruining your career and your studies.

Well, we didn’t.

Hailing from middle class families, we understood the need of having a stable future, so we made sure we do not REALLY ruin our studies and at the end of our college we both get decent jobs.

We completed our bachelor degree from West Bengal University of Technology in 2007, and we landed with our first job with Wipro Technologies. In Wipro, we worked on Embedded C/C++ technology developing applications for Set-Top Box and Network Adapter. After two years we were put into a Banking project where we were working as Java/J2EE developers.

We continued our steady job for about 3 and a half years, I was sent to US for a few months, and she went off to Singapore for a few months. Our careers were going fast, and we made all the efforts to nurture our distant relationship.

By now our families (Indian parents!!!) were going crazy to get us married. I will not say we complained. ☺ And finally 18th February 2011 we tied the knot, following all customs and rituals of a big fat Indian wedding and also were pretty much bankrupt with all the expenses. We were happy. ☺

We got an opportunity to go to Switzerland for our jobs right after marriage. We grabbed it like hot cake. We were really happy and excited. The years we spent together in Switzerland were the best days of our lives. It was like extended honeymoon for us.

We were happily married and happy developers ☺

And some odd years back we got interested about Cloud Technology, PaaS, SaaS etc. We started doing some online MOOC courses in Coursera, Edx and realized that Cloud is the future. Then, we started digging into Salesforce.com.

We got our break soon and got projects to be done in Salesforce, we got our first-hand experience on Sales Cloud implementations. Both were different implementations, one for a semiconductor client and one for a medical devices client.

Initially it was difficult to switch our way of working from full-fledged coding (being from Java/C++ developers) to configuration. The architecture of our projects were different and we would sit and compare why what is different. It helped us immensely to understand the ecosystem of Salesforce progressively. And in a span of 6–8 months we cleared our first two Salesforce certifications. We studied together and it was fun! It continued from there.

We got more interested. Salesforce was new, interesting and challenging. We started to go through training materials together, we started discussing problems from our individual projects and sit together to find solutions to problems. We enjoyed working through solutions on a step-by-step approach and every day, we learned new things. We went through many blogs, developer articles, YouTube videos to keep ourselves always up-to-date. We enjoyed Jeff Douglas, Andy in the cloud, David Liu blogs and they inspired us a lot. And then Trailhead was launched by Salesforce and it was just so amazing. Now we are spending quite a good amount of time in Trailhead. We also inspire our juniors to start learning Salesforce using Trailhead and have got great response from them.

The journey of our careers with Salesforce has been an exciting one, we share insights on problems and solutions, and we enjoy learning the new features Salesforce comes up with. As Steve Jobs told “Connecting the dots”, it’s true for us. Our experience with C/C++ and Java helped us a lot to learn Apex and we realized that learning curve for Apex was much shorter than C/C++.

Sometimes one of us cannot figure out a security issue perhaps and the other one comes up with the explanation. Now we share a special bond and passion with respect to our jobs and the work we do with Salesforce.

There have been difficult times as well. Salesforce being a niche skill, we have limited resources in our organization and hence are usually critical in the projects we work in. I had to be away in Singapore to manage a project last year 2015 and that also during our biggest festival — Durga Puja. It ruined Paromita’s puja too. Then in December when we were planning to go on along holiday and almost had booked our tickets she had to go off to Chicago on a project for a few months. It was tough to manage our parents. Everyone wanted Paromita to let go of her career because we had to remain separated so frequently. Indian society does not really approve married couples staying away from each other for their careers particularly.

We agree it is not all cake walk; we have our challenges of continuing our careers, find the best opportunities and be together in the same country and same city. It is not easy to be both at a crucial position in our careers and maintain the expectation from people around us, the society around us. We have our share of sacrifices. However, we share our burden and are the strongest in each other’s presence.

And our love for Salesforce is always making our lives more interesting.

Paromita: When Lightning came up, Sudipta was the first one to start digging into it and got me so interested; I ended up creating my first Lightning component even before him! ☺

I love cooking and baking a lot. Now, with his help I am working on a Lightning app to help me manage my recipes and track my pantry.

Sudipta: Once, it was hard managing our monthly expenses. We both would end up spending a lot and not know where all the money went. Now we share an expense tracker built on Salesforce, custom fit for us, and make sure we know what we are spending on.

I am the Kolkata User Group Leader and maintain my own Salesforce blog at http://sudipta-deb.blogspot.com, Paromita is usually the first one to read all the posts.

I got the opportunity to attend Struck by Lightning Event @ Toronto. It was an awesome event. I realized the potential and the future of Lightning in Salesforce ecosystem.

Being an Evangelist in Salesforce Developer Champion Group, I received many gifts from Salesforce. Recently I got the gift “Philips Hue” from Jessica Langston, Salesforce. It was so exciting. I always feel, what you share within Salesforce World, Salesforce will return you even more. We always feel lucky to get the opportunity of being a part of Salesforce.

A lot of people ask us, how is it to work on the same technology and platform? We say, “We have one more thing to share with each other and feel proud about”.

We highly encourage all the developers to look closely at Salesforce. It’s very easy and you will get all the training materials available. Go for Trailhead, Trailhead Rocks!!! We have so much love for this platform and we can proudly say that it was one of the best decisions of our lives.

Happy Trailing ……

Sudipta Deb, Salesforce Technical Lead

Blog: http://sudipta-deb.blogspot.com

Email: sudipta.deb@gmail.com

Paromita Banerjee, Salesforce Technical Lead

Email: paromita.kol@gmail.com