I need to address the fact that writing the introduction to this blog post has taken me longer than it did to write my first Apex test class. Everything that has come to mind has been centered around memes or ‘Hello World’ analogies, which is sad because that means I am having more issues introducing myself than programming in a new language. My name is Samantha Ready, and I am the newest developer evangelist here at Salesforce.com.

For the past two years I have been working at Salesforce.com as a technical resource for sales engineering. Prior to my career at Salesforce, I worked at a startup as a developer writing CGI scripts with Perl, and before that I had various internships building apps in Java, Perl, and C#.

Since joining the Salesforce family, I have been working with Apex and Visualforce on a daily basis building prototypes and apps. I have dabbled in every facet of the platform from mobile web apps and custom code to point and click app builds. I plan to take this experience and use it to demonstrate the power of the platform and how to effectively build apps on it.

It is extremely easy as a developer to immediately focus on the code before considering the clicks. As developers, we often think about how to write the code itself before even fully evaluating the entire problem at hand. This way of thinking is actually detrimental your max potential on the platform because the power of Salesforce is not only in what it enables you to do, but also in what it allows you to not have to do. Automated business processes, permissions and security settings, page layouts, and approval flows are just a small chunk of the underlying architecture that can improve the effectiveness and functionality of your applications. My goal is to educate makers of all backgrounds on how to execute their ideas by leveraging the platform’s core features to create a dynamic and impactful enterprise application. I hope to redefine what it means to be an enterprise application developer, and inspire you, the makers, on the art of the possible.

However, all work and no play makes Sam a dull girl. Thankfully as a developer evangelist work can be play! My first order of business before even officially joining the team was to fly out with my fellow evangelists to London Town and mingle with the UK developer community. I had a lot of fun meeting the developers at Cloudstock and hearing how they came to develop on the platform. As the cherry on top of another stellar Salesforce conference, I was fortunate enough to get to watch the current king of rap, Jay-Z, and his partner in crime Kanye perform in London with the winners of the Cloud Trivia and Mini-Hacks.