In Praise of … Trailmixes
The Trailhead team released the new Trailmix capability recently (or quite some time ago, depending on when you are reading this) and it’s fair to say that it has been well received in the Salesforce Community. I’d wager that most of us that have used Trailhead, especially those responsible for upskilling others, had rolled their own via a Quip or Google doc, or maybe even a Visualforce page. I don’t know about yours, but the official version is much better than mine, consisting of more than a list of links with no further information. Access a Trailmix when you are logged in and you’ll get a handy indicator as to how far you are through and how long you have to go:
You can also create your own community Trailmixes and boy have we been doing that. Mine is related to the partner requirements for achieving Lightning accreditation. Once you’ve built your awesome Trailmix, sharing is easy with built in buttons for a number of social networks.
Anyone who has read any of my posts on Trailhead in the past knows that there’s always a list of demands, and this one is no different:
- This module appears in the following Trailmixes
If you’ve enjoyed a module, this would allow you to find mixes that it appears in, hopefully with similarly enjoyable modules - Like Trailmixes
This would allow the popular mixes to get the recognition they deserve - Share Trailmixes
Sure I can share my own, but I want to share the love and promote the work of others - Stats
We developers just love measuring things and stats around mixes would be no different. Views, likes, shares, in progress, completed — all of this could be tracked and monitored. - Rangers who liked …
One for Einstein in the vein of Amazon’s recommendation engine. If a mix receives a like then it would automatically suggest mixes that appealed to others who liked it.
Now I can understand why some might think that Trailmixes are overkill, especially those that already have a large number of badges. However, people joining Trailhead now are faced with nearly 300 modules + projects and might have a hard time figuring out how to proceed. Give it a couple of years and we’ll probably be into the thousands, so they’ll only get more useful as time goes on.
I’m better known in the Salesforce community as Bob Buzzard — Umpteen Certifications, including Technical Architect, 6 x MVP and CTO of BrightGen, a Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner in the United Kingdom who are hiring.
You can find my (usually) more technical thoughts at the Bob Buzzard Blog
