Meet Robin Gupta
In two short years, Salesforce Developer Robin Gupta went from knowing nothing about Salesforce to presenting at Dreamforce. It was an unexpected, and serendipitous turn in his career as an engineering leader. Robin had joined an enterprise healthcare firm, where his first assignment was managing the quality and test automation setup of a legacy Salesforce system. “I was confused for a few days,” he recalls,“without knowing that Salesforce is one of the most welcoming development platforms.”
Robin at Salesforce Tower
Now, Robin is a Vice President of Product and Technology at Provar, a leader in integrated Salesforce quality management and test automation. He emphasizes that Salesforce is not just a product, but a development platform. Robin sees that one of the biggest benefits for developers is that the Einstein 1 Platform takes care of infrastructure, security, and even AI needs, so that developers can focus on development. “It’s not just about writing code,” he says. “It’s about building innovative, scalable solutions that grow with businesses.”
Salesforce is like having a Swiss Army Knife for solving business challenges.
Learning the right skills and mindset
Coming from a Java background, Robin was able to quickly build Apex and SOQL skills thanks to Salesforce documentation and Trailhead, Salesforce’s free learning platform.
So far, Robin has achieved the Mountaineer rank on Trailhead, his favorite being Quick Start: Einstein Copilot. Modules on data modeling and data management have also been particularly helpful as they “instilled the right mindset in my head for taming enterprise-grade production data.”
There are many hidden gems on Trailhead. In particular, the recent ones around large language models, prompting, and generative AI are pure gold.
Robin holds two Salesforce certifications and recommends Salesforce Certified Administrator for anyone new to Salesforce. He feels that it provides a broad and pragmatic view of the platform, with rich insights into enterprise Salesforce deployments. Salesforce Certified AI Associate gave him a good overview of current AI systems and mental models for thinking about generative AI in general.
Robin presenting at Salesforce Developer Days
Community support beyond borders
For Robin, the #1 key to his success in his Salesforce career has been the developer community. He says, “My experience with the Salesforce Developer Community has been incredibly enriching and valuable for learning and getting support. Whether it’s at events or online, folks in the community believe in camaraderie and supporting each other regardless of different geographies and languages.”
Robin has been a speaker at larger events like Dreamforce, Dev Days, and TrailblazerDX, and an audience member at local community groups in Bengaluru, India and other events. He’s passionate about the Quality space and finds the Test Automation Trailblazers group especially valuable for conversations around test automation. He also attends the Release Readiness Trailblazers group to keep an eye on the latest new features and innovations on the Salesforce Platform.
Robin enjoys being part of the community.
Robin firmly believes that without the help of the Salesforce Developer Community, it would have taken him years to be able to design, develop, and test strategies for large-scale enterprise deployments. With that in mind, he strongly believes in the concept of “paying it forward” and tries to make a positive impact by sharing his knowledge at events, answering questions in online and offline forums, and contributing to open source projects.
A wise man said to me at an event: ‘Your network is your net worth.’ And I feel that it’s strongly applicable for both the online and offline Salesforce communities.
Passion projects and AI explorations
Robin also takes his passion for test automation beyond his workplace. He’s the creator of a tool called TestZeus, an open-source Selenium wrapper for streamlining Salesforce test automation. He’s even authored a book on the topic called Ultimate Selenium Webdriver for Test Automation. All for the benefit of the community he loves.
At work, Robin and his team are starting to explore the power of AI in their projects. They’ve built a retrieval-augmented generation bot, Provar Assistant, to help internal teams answer customer questions quickly and easily. They used customer issue data from their own Salesforce org to train and tune the bot, so it can provide accurate, succinct answers to most queries. They also use GitHub Copilot for assisting with routine coding tasks.
He’s an avid follower of Developer Advocate Alba Rivas due to her perspective and insights on practical AI and Salesforce development.
AI has accelerated the build, deploy, and operate pipeline for our teams by at least 50%. And we believe that this is just the beginning of the Fifth Industrial Revolution.
Advice for new Salesforce Developers
At the beginning of his Salesforce journey, Robin had no idea it would become such a rich career path. “When I was pushed to learn Salesforce late in my career, I was thinking, ‘Oh no, not another new technology.’ But little did I know that it would be one of the inflection points of my career, leading to eye-opening learning and experiences.”
For those held back by their own self-doubts or feelings of imposter syndrome, he says “Don’t assume others’ expectations of you. The Salesforce Developer community is here to help you, if you help yourself, by learning the right skills with a positive attitude.”
Give some force to your dreams, and soon you will be at Dreamforce.
Robin and Astro.
To meet developers like Robin Gupta and expand your technical skills, join the Salesforce Developers Community and be a part of the conversation on all things Salesforce development.
About the author
Christie Fidura is the Director of Global Trailblazer Engagement. In this role, she seeks to engage and elevate the community and work directly with them to understand their challenges, concerns, wins, and inspirations. You can find Christie in the Trailblazer Community at https://trailblazer.me/id/christiefidura. A certified community manager and multiple-award winning marketer, Christie believes in technology, community, and equality.