After twelve years at salesforce.com, you’d think I’d know everything there is to know about our technology and the amazing people who build it, but the salesforce.com-sponsored Girl Geek Dinner proved me wrong. Salesforce.com’s Women in Technology team was honored to be the host for the 28th Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner. Girl Geek Dinners is a global non-profit effort to bring technical women together for networking, technical talks, and food. The energy and enthusiasm of the over 100 women in the room was inspiring.
So here’s what I learned:
- The scale of the data and transactions that salesforce.com handles every day is staggering – nearly 1 BILLION transactions per day!
- Salesforce.com’s multitenant architecture is the key to handling such large volumes of data effectively. Salesforce.com Architect Jeanine Walters explained it beautifully. You can also check out the whitepaper.
- ABT: Always Be Translating — Product managers are like translators, taking what customers say they want and turning it into what they really need. Great analogy from Susan Kimberlin, Product Management Director and linguistics expert.
- It’s impossible to overcommunicate. Just when you think you’ve communicated enough, you probably need to do it again. A humbling realization for a 22-year technical communications veteran like Mysti Berry, salesforce.com’s Principal Content Strategist.
- Salesforce.com has a small engineering team in Israel… along with 15 other locations worldwide. Clearly, I need to get out of San Francisco once in awhile.
- The real difference between developers and quality engineers is that quality engineers like to break things, at least according to Reena Mathew, Principal Architect in Quality Engineering.
- Extensive automation is what guarantees the quality and reliability of the salesforce.com service. Our engineering team is so sure of it that we publicly post the status of all our servers at trust.salesforce.com.
- I’m a designer. And so are you. Senior UX Manager, Anna Mieritz, says that good design solves problems, and we solve problems every day, so all of us are designers.
- Don’t forget the pictures. People don’t like to read.
- Present your best idea last. Research shows that people often gravitate towards the last idea presented, so put your best one last.
OK, maybe I did know a few of these things before the salesforce.com Girl Geek Dinner, but what I didn’t fully realize is that we have some pretty amazing technical women behind these great technologies and thought leadership! And that’s my best idea so I’m ending there.