Joe Castro is Chief Technology Officer at Appirio and Co-founder of the Merivis Foundation. He is a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect who continues to pursue programming as a hobby and professionally whenever possible. Today, Joe and I discuss his passion for educating others, and his work with Merivis, an organization dedicated to helping military veterans get back in the workplace through Salesforce skills.
Show Highlights:
- The story of how Hector Perez Jr. and Joe came together to co-found Mervis Organization, fulfilling the desire to provide veterans an opportunity to transition into great jobs at Salesforce.
- Some advantages that military experience brings to somebody trying to learn the Salesforce ecosystem.
- Joe describes the Mervis method and why he thinks it’s been so successful.
- We talk about specific solutions Joe, Hector, and the team are using to help with training and education.
- After Hector and Joe realized they couldn’t run the Mervis program on email, they decided to run it on Salesforce. Joe shares that story.
- How Trailhead changed the strategy of training Veterans on Salesforce.
- Some of the strategies Joe uses for training people in architecture.
Links:
Episode Transcript
00:07
Joe: Thankfully, I’m a quick learner. And so the concepts that were taught, you know, in undergraduate and then get in grad school, I mastered quickly and was fortunate to be in graduate school and University of Texas MBA program. The dean of technology asked me to help says, you kind of got this covered, right? Could you help teach these concepts to my undergrad students?
00:29
Josh: That is Joe Castro, CTO of Appirio and co founder of Merivis. I’m Josh Birk, Developer Evangelist for Salesforce. And here on the Salesforce developer podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we sit down with Joe and talk about what he was just talking about there a little bit, some of his passion for educating others. And a lot of this dovetails into his work with Mervis, an organization dedicated to helping military veterans get back in the workplace through Salesforce skills. And Marvis is a little thing that he co founded with an old time friend, Hector Perez.
00:58
Joe: Hector came to me And this is in 2014, like 2014, early 2015. And he was already working at Salesforce and was involved with vet force, you know, and he’s a veteran of Air Force himself. He was a, I’m sorry, of the Air Force. And he was Air Force medic, and saw a lot of the struggles from people that he knew growing up in from the military, transitioning and finding work after they left the military. And the military, you know, did so much for Hector and he really wanted to give back. And so that force when he was at Salesforce was a great way to do that. But he saw at the time, that it wasn’t as easy as taking an admin class, like you couldn’t just drop somebody that maybe join army at age 17 didn’t have, you know, a lot of corporate experience, that just throwing you in an admin to one class wasn’t a recipe for success. So he came to me and you know, at this time, I was already known as a CTA, and I was Training other architects to you know, to take the the certified tech Ark Review Board. And he said, Hey, would you mind helping me out? I want to give some veterans an opportunity to transition into great jobs at Salesforce. And Salesforce needs more people working in ecosystem and I’m like, Sure, I’d love it. And so he asked this in 2015. And I signed on. And the interesting thing is, I signed on to help and and quite honestly, I would do anything for Hector. So just in the fact that he asked, I probably would have done it anyway. But at that time, in 2015, I was an architect and working on some of the hardest problems that we see on Salesforce, right? If it could have been done easy, they didn’t come to ask. And so being able to take some time out and remind myself what an impact you can make as an admin and the things that you can accomplish with workflows and process builder and formula fields was a welcome relief, and it really kind of made me fall in love with the platform again,
02:58
Josh: what are some advantages that military experience brings to somebody trying to learn the Salesforce ecosystem?
03:04
Joe: Oh, and there’s a lot of different things that are but a couple of the things that that I’ve noticed over the years, is that the attention to detail, right? Salesforce is a great, great platform to innovate quickly. And you know, we always say fails fast, fix it, you know, get to that next version, right? But sometimes it is very helpful to sit back and say, yes, you have somebody that’s thinking through the details of saying, well, you just described something to me. But did you consider this, this and this, this is, you know, we’re ignoring this user group, or here’s a logical outcome that we haven’t, that we haven’t addressed. The level of detail that I’ve seen in general from the vets that have come through service and vet force in general. Yeah. And our Salesforce military now is been incredible in that experience, their real world experience has been tremendous. The second thing though, is they deal with things at scale, right. You know, you talk about operating in a team or you talk about you know, well You know, we’re building this for a set of sales reps that, you know, five teams of 10 sales reps, right? Yeah, they may have been in a platoon of 2000 or managing, you know, so much more the scale of what they did. And, you know, they might be literally writing on top of a nuclear warhead, you know, and so they don’t get a rattle the skin of the bats are used to, and you know, what is really life and death. You know, it puts into perspective when you’re, you know, I’m trying to make sure that I’ve set up sales path correctly so that a sales rep doesn’t get a validation rule error.
04:34
Josh: How would you describe the Merivis Method and why do you think it’s been so successful?
04:39
Joe: From the beginning, you know, we started marathons, this was even before trailhead, thought at first that we were about giving content giving perspective so that when event landed in the admin to a one class, that they’d be in a better position to succeed, pass their exam and get into a job transition towards in Salesforce, yeah, in the Salesforce ecosystem, however, what we soon realized, because Hector and I were overwhelmed. At first we were Hector and I were trying to meet individually, with every move, that’s we’d hold office hours, we, you know, do this, but we needed help. So we started reaching out to our own networks, and inviting people to coach. And so what ended up happening is, Marvis became a way to connect veterans and military spouses with people in the ecosystem. And it became a very high touch, like very personal model of being able to say, I’m having problems. And this might be a technical problem, because I don’t understand this workflow or this formula field, right? What happens? Why can’t I get a picklist value to show up on this formula field? It could be technical, it could just be what really does an administrator do, right? It could be, you know, I’m struggling to understand, you know, what my career path is going to be, but nervous became that, that outlet or that way that we were able to connect veteran with giving them a mentor to show them what their career path can be. Yeah. And that’s really that high touch model is really paid benefits. And it really is keeping us relevant today. We’ve expanded the programs that we offer, we’ve expanded, you know, the the types of, you know, homework that we give the assignments, the prep work, but at the heart of it, it’s connecting it, you know, we really take pride in making that personal connection between the coach and the individual veteran and military spouse writes,
06:28
Josh: And Merivis started as something of a regional effort. But what is its range now?
06:35
Joe: We started out in Texas in Austin, because that’s where Kate Hector and I lived.
06:39
And so it was easy to do.
06:42
Just locally here and there was a lot of demand just in Texas. Yeah. But we soon found out is we were held. You know, we held a recall a cohort, which is about a five week program. You have three weeks of prep. Well, we kind of get them. today. They’re working on trailhead content and customer service. homework assignments with their coaches. And then week four, they show up for a class, which is the in person app into one. And the final week is kind of preparing you for your exam. Well, when we when we did that, what we found was, we said we primarily want to serve, you know, vets in Texas that way. It wasn’t a high cost for them to travel from San Antonio, let’s say, to spend the week here for the in person class. Yeah. But we found that we were getting applicants from Georgia, California and New York, right. And all of a sudden, we were like, Oh, well, this is you know, we need to expand right there. There’s so many people come in, where other areas of the country where we could land a new home base. Yeah. Because we do like it’s not required, but we do. It is nice when a coach and the students or the you know, our American service veteran, can meet up on a Salesforce Saturday and meet in person that helps. We like having all of our veterans in a given geography to get together for happy hours or Salesforce Saturdays. Really has become a community, not just between the mentors and the veterans. Yeah. But you know, this kind of your own network as well. So we expanded by necessity. And now we’re in a we’re offering classes in both San Antonio and within Texas we’re gonna offer this year but we’ve had cohorts that have run in, and Seattle. We’re looking at stuff in DC this year. Boston has a tremendous amount of interest in San Diego. So we’re in the middle of expansion right now. And it’s, it’s a little crazy nice.
08:28
Josh: Well, speaking of crazy with everything that is going on in the world today, what kind of strategy do you have for having a physical location versus virtual events?
08:39
Joe: Yes, it’s, we’re really having to rethink just like a lot of people. A lot of organizations are right now. What does it mean to give an A to educate, collaborate and get experience? Yeah, where I we really saw that, you know, the, the, the face to face was a bonding moment, you know, for everybody and try To not recreate that, but to get a an equivalent a bonding experience in this, you know, in a virtual environment is a huge challenge now, we’ve taken a couple of things as our first steps to do it. And one is we want to make sure that you know it’s sometimes it’s easy to gauge when somebody doesn’t get it when you’re when somebody’s standing across the room and they see a blank stare Yeah. But what we’re working on right now is a set of kind of fail safes you know, we’re we’re a little bit more explicit about the challenge that at least our the our admin cohorts, you know, this introduction to Salesforce go through so that they understand that you know, had that admin exam is tough, you know, let’s prepare you to take it. Let’s talk about you know, if you don’t pass it the first round and a lot of people don’t let’s let’s talk about, you know, automatically scheduling some, some office hours and some follow ups with your coach, we can get you pass,
09:52
Josh: so making sure that people don’t fall through the cracks.
09:55
Joe:This is something that we’re having to do a little bit extra effort and a personal touch but Then the other thing right now is finding ways for people to bond. And so we’ve got a couple of programs in America, the mayor of his fellows is kind of the prime one where it favors real world project experience. And so we take instead of just saying, Oh, yeah, read, you know, go through this trail head, you know, answered the questions, answer these homework questions. We say, oh, here’s a problem. And a lot of them are real things that are problems at, you know, at marriage, and it’s, you know, hey, we need a way to track certifications, better for our, you know, our alumni. Yeah. Or I need you know, I need these fields on the contact object because we need to do X. So instead of me doing it or getting a volunteer to do it, we give this as assignment for the for the members fellows where they can collaborate on a real project that’s solving a real need. Yeah, they’re learning a little bit of Salesforce. They’re learning how to operate on a project team. They’re learning a little bit of DevOps because they have to take it from a sandbox and push it to production, right? really something you talk about in admin class, but it’s something that They need to learn. Yeah.
11:00
So we’re trying to, you know, to shift a little bit, both to make sure people don’t fall through the cracks. But in this time, that we’re not just giving more homework and more, you know, more study, but trying to give them opportunities to interact on real projects, guys, you know, I want to touch on one part of that a little bit more, because it’s something that constantly comes up when I talk to people about training or certification.
Josh: How do you feel the act of failing something is part of the process of learning itself.
11:29
Joe: It is, failures is a huge way. The best way I’ve learned right, talk to me. People talk to me today. So I worked at Dell from 1998 to 2012. And I built some amazing systems, especially in those early years that were groundbreaking. And people today and this is 1520 years later, are talking to me about systems that I stood up and build an architecture in 20 years ago. And the funny thing is, the reason they’re talking to me, is because when I look back at that on my car You know how what we get wrong looking back at it? I know what I know today because of the huge failures.
12:07
Sorry, Michael.
12:11
We overcame, obviously.
12:14
But learning, you know, failure is a critical component of learning. Yeah. Right. And so we take that fast forward to America’s fellows. I’ll say this is you know, there was one change request that we had that we assigned to one of America’s fellows and I’ll let I’ll let him remain. I probably won’t, but I’ll for now pretend like I’m ever named remain nameless. And I knew it was something that that couldn’t be done, like the way you know, with a process builder the way that he thought he was gonna get it. Yeah, I knew he couldn’t get done. So I said, Hey, well, you know, work on this for a little bit and then come back to me and then you know, we’ll discuss it. Yeah. And I just left it at that. I said, Don’t you know, just look at it for an hour and then call me. So a couple days later, he called me He’s like, all right. I’ve been staring at this for 12 hours and I can’t get it to work.
12:57
Joe: It just won’t work.
13:00
Yeah, could have told you. he was a little upset but right understood the platform a lot better if some of the limitation, right. And you know, we work, we work through it. But that real world experience that failure is what gives you the perspective to understand what are some of the things that Salesforce can help you do? Yeah, but but it’s also as important to know those kind of areas where it’s not a Salesforce can’t do it. Yeah. But that you need to consider are you using the right tool for the job? Right, right. You know, a process builder, a flow flow Connemara and process builder, but it can’t do everything. There are considerations where you need to do something, right. I can’t fire a process builder on a delete something like that.
13:44
Josh: Yeah, I remember going to a barbecue for a company that I had left the year before. And I was talking to two developers and it just sort of dawned on them. They’d like Wait, you’re the guy who wrote X, Y, and Z. I’m like, Oh, yeah, I wrote all of that stuff. And they gave me this. Look at are in fear. And I’m like, right there looking at my old code base. I should apologize now. Yes. So So let’s talk a little bit about specific solutions. What kind of software and tools are you using to help with the education?
14:15
Joe: Okay. So, first when we thought, you know, here’s we’re going to educate and train a set of veterans, we want to do this on the Salesforce platform, first and foremost, right. And so, you know, the first thing that we did not the first thing, after we realized we couldn’t run this program on email, we said, hey, let’s run it on Salesforce. Yeah. And so of course, we you know, we have a community where our veterans and coaches can meet, right, yeah. When we when we standard kind of community groups, you know, we’ve got very specific things, types of groups, depending on the class depending on you know, a private group for you and your coach, and things were working well with that we use Salesforce knowledge for some best practices. And we had a custom object that was, was giving our homework assignment. So, you know, when when I put you as a as a veteran, right, you ended up as a contact because you had to be a contact. So I could give you a community user record. Yeah, right user license, but then that contact record, I would pair, you know, I would say, hey, this contact is paired with this coach. And they are both everybody’s working on this cohort, right, which might be admin to a one or our process builder. We’re in the process builder, I’m sorry, the app builder. Yeah, class. And so all of a sudden, now I said, Here is a set of template Whois records that I’m going to instantiate. I’m going to send you a quiz and you’re going to answer it. And so we use technologies, like record types, bring what is shown when you’re answering a quiz when you submit it, you know, it becomes a you know, visible now to your coach, right. So there was a little bit of sharing going on. And these were great things to as examples because as some of the homework assignments, were referencing that record that object They were looking at so I could teach using the technology that I was using to teach them. We were in that way for a few years. And that was very effective. Except it had the downside of it was very homework centric. And so you got a great, yeah, you know, did you understand or not and didn’t like that? Because it wasn’t about you getting this question, right. It was about provoking thought. And, you know, and being able to give a discussion, you know, start off point for discussions with your cup, right?
16:30
So last year, we took those same homework assignments, and we really look through them, we have to constantly Of course, thank you Salesforce, make sure our homework is still relevant because every you know, every release, you know something is right. But so we’re constantly reviewing the homework, but what we did was we said instead of generating a you know, and by the way, we generated the homework assignments using flow, right, because I can, you know, I can look and query a set of, you know, what students are in this class that has now been activated. Get the template records and clone them so that they can create a an individual assignment record a homework record for that, right? But instead we’ve now we’ve flipped over and we’ve put those those questions into template quip docs. And with the same type of process, I generate a, you know a quip document, make sure to share it out with the coach and with the with the students so they still have a private area where they can collaborate. But there’s no concept of like the coach’s giving them a score, right guys, that’s enabled them to have, you know, because quip kind of the kind of the hyper collaborative right they know when some when when the other opens a document so they can jump in, you know, we can kind of in real time, I can monitor who’s entering their homeworks I can, I can kind of jump in or some other you know, some other people can look at the homework and kind of be more collaborative. Yeah, while still respecting the privacy of the coach and the student nice.
17:50
Josh: And that’s all vanilla quip. You’re not using any custom live apps or anything like that.
17:55
Joe: I’m exploring some live apps. This is vanilla quip. I mean, we’re using you know the quip Quick 360 right, so this is initiated, you know from within Salesforce, you know on that on their cohort member record, Doc is you can see it so I don’t have to go out and search for it. But at the same time, there are some things that have to be that needs scripts, like in order to share a quip doc with particular persons, right, I, you know, I can’t just do that from within Salesforce. So there’s, there’s a few API calls that I’m making to quit. But I am exploring a live app because, you know, for instance, I want to give some pointers, like, you know, okay, I asked you a question here about a formula field doing this. I want to give you the answer, but I want to kind of hide it until you ask for the answer. And so right now, I just have this big section that says, hey, answers are below. I’m going to build a crip live app to hide that and that’s, you know, again, that’s that’s fairly low overhead, but right, it’s, you know, it still requires me to learn a little bit more react.
18:56
Josh: I was gonna say it’s also a really good excuse to desktop react. So it
18:59
Joe: Exactly, exactly.
19:01
Josh: Well, speaking of things like gamification and changing things up how has trailhead altered your strategy?
19:09
Joe: Trailhead is awesome. Once we, once we realized that, you know that a lot of the core things that we’re trying to teach to bring people up to speed, right? Yeah, trailhead gives not just let me tell you what the you know what record level security is. But there are trails that are intended for end users. Right. And so that helps to give some of that background that Hector and I originally envisioned, right, so what Hector and I were doing, explaining what a lead was, and what is difference between a contact and account? Yeah, and some of those things, you know, trailhead takes care of and keeps up to date. And it’s it’s we’re engaging within the content we were creating, even though I consider myself a very funny person.
19:52
So trailhead help really helped us dramatically. But what it also did was it showed us It gave our veterans a military As an outlet to show how committed and engaged they would be in this ecosystem. Yeah, I can’t tell you these people. They’re there several people, a lot of my events that are Merivis vets have more trailhead badges in it. And it’s you know, you’re looking at it, you’re like, they just they it shows the ability to learn. Yeah, but it’s it’s given us the ability as well to identify those people who are on fire and helped us connect them to the right job because it’s not just about training. Right? You know, our intent is the same as Salesforce military, it’s to find a partner with our veterans, military spouses, you know, to help them get into jobs in the Salesforce ecosystem, and to progress in their careers. So Trailhead has been incredible way for us to help them get that base knowledge, identify the people like their interest, and kind of plug them in with, you know, with our network of contacts.
20:54
Josh: Okay, so this is a bit of a random question, because it’s something you mentioned briefly when we were talking earlier and I’m not sure how it is fits with the the term itself made me very curious what is it two minutes sprint?
Joe: the two minute drill two minute drill.
Josh: There we go
21:07
Joe: Two minute drill. So I also like to train architects that are trying to take the CT review. And so I do a lot of that formally at aperio. And just in general, but one of the things that I saw was a lot of people, you know, they went they got some of their architect certifications and said, I did this, this and this. Now I want to go take the CTA reviewable. Yeah. Right. And, you know, I’m very involved in that in that program. And I’ve seen a lot of people come away from that and just, you know, like, Oh, my gosh, I totally. And so like, I didn’t I couldn’t put it all together. Yeah. What I noticed was like, there’s a core set of competencies that you need to know. Yeah, large data volumes, like record level security, right. Where do I you know, org strategy, mobile strategy, all of these, all of these topics that come up on the exam. Yeah. And I’m like, think of this like if you were training for the decathlon training for the day. calphalon you need to master individual, you gotta you gotta master the high jump, master the pole vault, you do all that separately, you train it to master it right? And then on game day, you know, it’s still gonna be hard, you have to string all of those together, but you need to train individually.
22:15
So the two minute drill was my attempt at having a YouTube presence of going on and saying, because I did this with a lot of my architects in a period to get them ready for the exam.
22:25
Yeah, I said, Okay, I’m gonna do is I’m not, I’m not going to give you an eight page scenario, which is what you see in the review board. Yeah, roughly. But I’m going to give you a paragraph. I’m going to describe the scenario. Yeah, I want you to listen to it. And I want to, I want you to give yourself two minutes to think about it. Just two minutes. And then I want you to record yourself for another two minutes explaining your answer. Hmm, just two minutes. And then you know, then and then I’m like, hey, pause right here and my video and then I’ll tell you what I was thinking. Not that I’m what I was thinking was right. This was the intent of this exam. And so the concept being If you get familiar where you can recognize this as a problem, where I can plug it in with the right answer, yeah. And do that quickly and repetitively, then you’ll be more prepared to string those all of the training together and pass the review board.
23:15
Josh: Nice. Very neat. So what’s your favorite success story out there from Merivis?
23:20
Joe: favorite success story?
23:23
Josh: I know, I’m asking you to pick a few from your favorite children.
23:26
Joe: It’s hard. And I have to go back to you know, to one of the originals. Yeah. And this is, you know, this is a success story about about Sheldon Simmons. He was actually featured last year in the dreamforce in the keynote, and we’re blessed to have him but and there are a lot and I’m gonna steal this and make sure I talk about two pieces of it. But Sheldon, in particular, he came through and he showed us a few things right. He had he was he was struggling with a few different jobs and at the time where he came to the Americas cohort, he was working night shift, you know on a factory line. What he didn’t tell us was he’s working the night shift all night, driving straight to the admin class leaving for an hour in his car, and then going through the evening class. Wow. And he did that. And I said, this is our first cohort. So I was sitting in the back of the room, I was trying to gauge you know, you know, how every individual is engaged. Were they learning? Yeah, what did I need to do? And he never, he never dust off, you know, he was engaged. I was impressed with him Even then, yeah. But he took that class. And of course, he struggled afterwards, because he wasn’t hidden past the first time, the admin examine it a second time. Even when he did pass, he didn’t just get a job. And so, you know, we, you know, had to work and get some real world experience, you know, volunteering. So the shoulder experience is, you know, it’s all on him. At that point. He was a story of perseverance. He kept at it. He was six months later, and he finally got a great job. And you should listen to him. Tell him I’ll tell his his experience and his story. But he’s a success story. But what it showed us is that you can’t just offer training, right? We need to be that or say, all right, you’ve got individual needs that need to be met. Yeah, whether that’s an accommodation for life, you know, an offer more virtually, or if it’s, we need to be more involved in getting our veterans more experienced, because people just don’t hire a certificate. They want to know that you’ve had real world experience, right?
25:25
And so that’s helped us pivot to be able to give more real rounded knowledge of being a training organization. But Sheldon is just a great start. He now sits on our board of directors, right. And he were in. He works at slalom. He is, you know, he’s a consultant his own right. Yeah. And he’s killing it. And this is, you know, five years ago, to now his life has changed. It’s not just that he got a job, right. You know, he’s, you know, his entire, you know, kind of trajectory for him and his family has changed and that’s a great discussion. But if I take I take Sheldon disappearance, he was already out of Military, he was struggling. And I turn around and I look at what nervous has been able to do in a particular Sheldon story. And through a few other of his friends, were able to get the story of nervous to Roger Miranda, who was still on active duty. And when he came to us, Roger said, I’m doing this so that I’m not worried about how I’m going to feed my family when I retired from them, all right. And, you know, and both of them are amazing stories, because they’re both very much involved in the marriage community in the veteran community. I know it’s Salesforce military, because they’re climbing up, but then they’re sending that elevator back down, right, they’re lighting a path for others to follow. And both of them excelling in the careers. You know, tremendous story. Yeah. But they’ve helped shape what nervous is, which is a personal connection of understanding. How can I help you right? Get to your next to that next level, right. It’s one of our slogans from, from services. You know, the next mission is you Right. That’s what we like to tell our veterans right. We’re here to help you on your next mission.
27:05
Josh: And I think if I recall from Sheldon story, there’s a video I will link to that in the show notes. But, but there was a phrase to use something like, like pulling people forward like like when you’re the next person on the mountain. How much do you see that with Merivis?
27:20
Joe: Oh, it’s it’s incredible. So I don’t get all right. I do get questions. When people say Joe, I’m, you know, I got a job doing this. And I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Yeah, so I got a lot and I love being there. I love hearing the challenges that are always getting more often than not, they’re pinging each other. They are they become that family that support system outside of military that quite honestly, the military gave them when they’re deployed. They become that network for each other. And so they truly they truly visit that like, Roger, he was like saying, I’m doing this and I want this to be the pattern. So that future you know, the future people that come down this path, don’t get out of the military without knowing what they want. Do I want to show them? This is a great way to build your next career. Right? And so that idea, and I think it was Hector, that said is like, Yeah, when you reach the top of a mountain, make sure you send that elevator back down. And we see that every day there every day right now, Kate pressors, our executive director gets a call saying, How can I help? How can I volunteer, we have alumni, a lot of our alumni that want to be coaches for that next, that next class of recruits. And these you know, these are people that are two or three years into a career. They’re admins or they’re working on project work app builder. Like I want to help, and we’ve learned that’s a great recipe for success.
28:37
Josh: that’s that’s amazing stuff. Okay, well, let’s move a little bit over to your other role as CTO of Appiro. And we touched on this with the with the two minute drills, but what are some of the strategies that you have for training people into architecture?
28:52
Joe: Yeah, training. You know, architecture is is an interesting thing, because it means different things to different people, right. Some people are just a senior developer. Right? Right. And when and quite honestly, when I got to Appirio, and I came here from Accenture in 2014. It was a blend of roles. So we had architects and in kind of lead developers or tech leads, it filled the same role. And so there was no right. Now, today when I talk about what architecture means, you know, we’re, you know, we’re now a part of the Wipro, we were acquired in 2016. It’s a much different landscape where an individual set of you know, code that solves a problem may work, but it may cause greater issues for their own. Right. Yeah, a great example is, you know, we’ve had when I, when I talked about we that same issue with files, right, we’ve got this great little class that stores files in AWS and, and so that when you need to retrieve the actual attachment from the Salesforce record, it grabs them, right.
29:50
Yeah, well, that’s great. And somebody built it, but the problem was, they didn’t think about, well, long term, you know if I need to share this with different users Different things with different types of users. How are they going to access this? Because they did some things like give it permissions using a permission set.
30:07
Today? Yes, there’s recent change that was locked to the standard license or the recruiting for very specific things. And so the architect has to take a saying, I’m going to meet the today’s problem, but I’m going to put future considerations and I’m gonna think about one thing, I’m gonna steal a phrase from a book, The, the unicorn project, which if you’ve read it, but you know, they talk about, you know, not technical debt, but complexity, debt, right. And so the complexity, because not all debt is technical, right? And they define complexity debt. And this was I forget who originally coined this in 2003. Because I didn’t read the book that originally but they talked about complexity that being Yeah, being the amount of pain that you’re going to experience the next time you need to address this area. Right. And so the architects domain is being able to To predict what is going to be complexity debt. And so I try and get my architects to understand the bigger picture. solve the problem for day and understand, you know, the one of the things that I’ve had to do over the years is make a ton of considerations. But when you make a consideration for technical or business process or timeline reasons that you need to set it up in a way that minimizes that future debt.
31:28
Josh: That’s our show. Now, before we go, I did ask Joe, what was his favorite non technical hobby was and it turns out, well, he kind of likes the outdoors.
Joe: So I have done I always have been a lake rat. So we live in Austin, and so we live very close to Lake Travis. And we like to spend my free time when we have a we call a wakeboard boat so big boat drags a big week.
31:50
Josh: I want to thank Joe for the great conversation. Of course, all of the great work that he and the team over at Merivis are doing to help military veterans get back into the workplace and thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this podcast, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and also have links to your favorite podcast service. I’ll talk to you next week.