It’s day two of Dreamforce 2011. Metallica rocked the gala last night, and Marc Benioff is kicking off the Platform keynote. I can see the tired, bleary eyes, but I can also see the glimmer of excitement as the keynote unfolds. Apparently, the event has been so super-charged, the video chip of Mac seems to have been zapped too. But the show must go on.

Despite the long days behind us already, it is time to pause for a moment to say a huge thank you to the developers in the Force.com and Heroku communities. I am thrilled to see that after only a day and a half of being publicly available, the new Force.com and Database.com gem has already had a number of community contributions, and developers are already discussing how to take some of the tools we built for the the developer workbooks, and make them their own.

I spoke to one developer, Cory Cowgill, this morning who sat in my Creating Cloud Apps for the iPhone and iPad session where I demoed the Mobile SDK Xcode template which allows you to build a native iOS app in under two minutes (don’t believe me? Check out the video). Cory mentioned he was going to take the template, and modify its default application setup to generate what he needs for his projects. It sounds small, but this is huge. The Platform has always been about enabling developers. One way to do this is to go where they are with Xcode templates directly within Xcode, to Java done the Heroku way, and so much more.

Da Vinci said it better than I ever could, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication“. The platform provides this simplicity, but it is the developers who embody another of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started“. At the heart of any successful platform are the developers.

So, in conclusion, from all the folks in the Developer Marketing team, we would like to say, Thank you developers for all your contributions. You are the true power of the platform.