ELEVATE

Yesterday, 6 November, the hugely successful ELEVATE salesforce.com Developer Workshop visited the UK for the first time in Bristol.

The event was a full-day workshop with two tracks: one for Force.com platform beginners, the other for developers wanting to build a mobile app with Force.com.

Turn out was excellent with over 50 developers turning up from as far away as Glasgow. The Salesforce developer community was out in force with local developers Chris Alun Lewis and Simon Lawrence leading the beginner workshop. Much thanks to local Cloud Alliance partner Desynit for offering up their expertise and for lending a third developer Julio Barrado as a helper for the hands-on tutorials.

In the mobile workshop, I was assisted by local Force.com MVP, Simon Goodyear.

One of the joys of working as a developer evangelists is to witness the community taking an active role. Even with the growth of salesforce.com as a company, we need our community. They magnify what we do whether it is in the developer boards, on Stackexchange, or blogging. For this reason it was gratifying to see how these individuals helped bring this event to life.

Bristol Developer User Group

After the workshop, the Bristol Developer User group, aka Force-by-Force-West, held their bi-monthly meeting at the Llandogger Trow pub nearby. Salesforce MVP Francis Pindar gave a preview of the Apex 10 Commandments talk that he will be giving with fellow MVP Kevin Poorman at Dreamforce 13 in two week’s time. Unfortunately, Kevin couldn’t make it over from the states, but you can see him and Francis present this talk in the DevZone on Thursday 21 November at Dreamforce!

With many new members in attendance the talk was well received. Afterward, many people remarked upon how much the community adds to their work with salesforce.com. Whether that is how to build the right report, define your object model, create custom logic with Apex, or build a killer mobile app, the documentation is great, it gets them started, but often it is the community that helps them over the line.