You’ve heard all about the $1Million Hackathon, the Developer Keynote, and our Luminary Sessions for Developers, while Dave and Mary have both shared their personal Dreamforce 2014 ‘playlists’ (accessible, along with this blog entry, via the df14 staff picks tag).
I’m here today to draw your attention to some of my own personal favorite sessions for which, by the way, you can still register. Log in to the Success website, and the links into Agenda Builder should work for you:
Services and the Cambrian Explosion in Tech
Wednesday, 9:45 AM – 10:15 AM, Developer Theater
In this industry analyst session, Redmonk‘s Stephen O’Grady, of Developers are the New Kingmakers fame, will look at how services can help developers manage the plethora of choices available to them, and help them focus on doing what they love. A great pick to learn where the industry is headed next!
Rapid Prototyping Chatter with a PHP/Hack Canvas App on Heroku
Tuesday, 9:00 AM – 9:30 AM, Mobile Theater
Rodney White, Founder and CEO of The Acceleration Agency, will live code a PHP app, running on Heroku, leveraging Facebook’s high performance HHVM virtual machine. The app uses Force.com Canvas and the Chatter REST API to build real-time translation right into Chatter. I saw the dry run of this session – it’s a corker – essential for anyone prototyping integrations with Force.com!
Case Study: Migrating Westfield APIs to Heroku
Thursday, 12:30 PM – 1:10 PM, 2006
We’ve all seen how to implement external APIs on Heroku, but why would you move your INTERNAL APIs outside the firewall? Abhinav Keswani, of Trineo, and Thiago Figueiró, of Westfield (the mall people) answer this question with the benefit of their experience. Again, I’ve seen the dry run, and, if your job involves APIs in any way, shape or form, you do NOT want to miss this session!
Live Coding an Implementation of Call to Case
Monday, 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM, Mobile Theater
Another live coding session, in which David Schach, Technical Architect at X-Squared On Demand and stalwart of the Bay Area Salesforce developer community, progressively builds a Call-to-Case app on Force.com, creating a new Case record, adding SMS notifications, and even a phone call to confirm that the case was logged. If you’ve ever wondered how to get started integrating telephony and Salesforce, this is the session for you!
Managing Metadata in the Browser with the Tooling API, Web Workers, and JSZip
Tuesday, 9:00 AM – 9:40 AM, 2007
Remember last year’s session on using Grunt to automate your static resource builds? This year, Skuidify‘s Zach McElrath takes the same idea in a different direction, using the JSZip library to bundle images, CSS and JavaScript into static resource ZIP files right in the browser. If you haven’t met JavaScript’s Web Workers, this is a great opportunity to discover how they allow you to run background threads in your web apps. Add a dash of the Force.com Tooling API, and the result is a must-attend session for hardcore techies.
These are my top 5 ‘hidden gems’ at Dreamforce 2014; what session are you most anticipating? Let me know in a comment!