Don Robins is a Salesforce MVP, technical educator and instructor, author, and speaker. With over 35 years of experience in the software development space, Don has an extensive background in custom business applications. Having zero CRM background, Don navigated his way through Salesforce, fell in love with it, and has been with Salesforce ever since. 

An award-winning Salesforce Instructor, Don has presented at annual Dreamforce conferences since 2010 and has been facilitating Salesforce developer classes and workshops.

This is a two-part conversation where Don shares how he got into Salesforce, his long career educating people, some of his thoughts on the platform, and finally, an interesting formula.

Show Highlights:

  • Don’s early years and his career doing voice-overs 
  • Building business applications and creating a relational database
  • His first Salesforce experience having zero CRM background 
  • What he loves about Salesforce
  • Productivity tools in the early days
  • Mastering the complexities and the interdependencies in the metadata
  • Why we need to put our focus on DevOps

Links:

Episode Transcript

Don Robins:
Software engineering, well, we didn’t call it software engineering back then. We called it database programming and was, I think I put in my bio more decades ago than I like to admit. It was actually around 1985.

Joshua Birk:
That is Don Robins who when asked, will refer to himself as a technical educator and he has a historic career when it comes to people learning the Salesforce platform. I’m Joshua Birk, your host of the Salesforce Developer Podcast, and here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today, we’re going to sit down and talk with Don about how he got into Salesforce, his long career teaching people, some of his thoughts on the platform and a very interesting formula towards the end. However, before we get started, I just want to say happy new year to everybody.

Joshua Birk:
I know it’s February, but I haven’t had a chance to talk to some of you for a while. I’m very happy to be able to kick off the podcast again and to be back in the studio. And I just want to thank my friends and family who have been very supportive over the holidays. Now, we are going to try something a little different. If you heard our last episode, you know that we are going to try to be a little bit more invented this year. This is going to be a two-part episode. My conversation with Don went quite long. We’re going to break it into two 30 minute parts. And towards the end, I’ll remind you to come back for more. Now we’ll get back to Don’s early years.

Don Robins:
When I bought my first Apple clone, Apple II clone-

Joshua Birk:
Oh, wow.

Don Robins:
… I bought it in Hong Kong on a trip to Asia, with my dad who was a businessman. And then I brought it back to New York and I threw a CPM card in it and started playing around with dBase II.

Joshua Birk:
Really?

Don Robins:
Few years ago.

Joshua Birk:
Back in the day. Did you have experiences with computers before or was this just something like, I want to give this a try. I’m going to go get this Apple clone and kick things off.

Don Robins:
Well, I played with this Sinclair ZX81, which was one of the earliest really cheap computers, but you really couldn’t do anything of value with it. I had been exposed to computers in the ’70s at Cornell, but I couldn’t really get engaged with them because you could only do anything. You could only take any computer-related courses. It was big iron and it was all punch card and you can only do it if you were in a math major. And I really abhorred mathematics. So I couldn’t go there. I did know, I don’t know if you know the name, Donald Greenberg. He was professor at Cornell and he was actually one of the founders of computer graphic imaging. He created the first reeling [crosstalk 00:02:44] video images, a tour actually through Cornell. And I was excited to do that, but there was just no way I could get into it. So it was sort of something I wanted to do, but there was no practical way to do it.

Joshua Birk:
Got you.

Don Robins:
And this was really driven by a business need because I was helping my dad with his business and typing up packing slips for the goods that he had manufactured. And I would be typing these multi-carbon forms in a IBM electric typewriter late at night over… Typing Lord and Taylor’s address over and over and over, and so there’s got to be a better way.

Joshua Birk:
A better way. Yeah. That’s fascinating. So you kindly kicked off your let’s call it consulting side of the career with your dad as your first client-

Don Robins:
That’s correct.

Joshua Birk:
… than you creating a technical solution for him. That’s really, really cool.

Don Robins:
That is correct. And his colleagues were my second client, my second and third client. But it was driven by business need. It was always driven by business need and it’s like, what can I use to solve this business need? Now those days, dBase II had not been out very long, but you could actually create a relational database. You could build tables, you could hook two tables together. I think that was the maximum relationship chain was parent, child. And you output to screen, you could input form information. You could capture information, create records, update, CRUD. It was basic crud and you could generate output. You could print reports or packing slips.

Joshua Birk:
Got you. Okay. Well, little bit of a tangent because I do kind of check out people’s LinkedIn to source some questions. And it was there that I discovered you were a professional voice actor.

Don Robins:
That’s correct. But I didn’t do it that way, but yes-

Joshua Birk:
I love it.

Don Robins:
… yeah, I was.

Joshua Birk:
That seems not very adjacent to building a computer-

Don Robins:
It’s not.

Joshua Birk:
… to help out your dad.

Don Robins:
No, it’s not.

Joshua Birk:
What sparked that interest?

Don Robins:
Well, it was actually prior to voiceover. And I was involved in communications for a long time. My dad was a ham radio operator and I’m a ham radio operator, although I’m not very active. And actually, ironically, there are actually a number of ham radio operators in the Salesforce community that I’ve stumbled across. Daniel Peter is another one, but there’s a bunch out there. And ham radio operators also were early adopters or hobbyists with computers. So my ham radio, talking on the radio, my dad talking on the radio, that goes back a long way. But where the intersection really was, was I was an actor coming out of school, coming out of high school-

Joshua Birk:
Got it.

Don Robins:
… not higher ed. When I went into Cornell, I actually went in as a theater arts major and quickly lost interest in it. But I was still interested in broadcasting and I did radio work at Cornell, one of the local stations. I did commercial voiceovers. I actually produced commercials for one of the local radio stations. It was the only way you could actually make money working at that radio station. So I voiced, I produced and voiced commercials. And when I was in New York after graduate, I ran a nightclub for a number of years. That was my other passion was jazz. And I actually had an opportunity to work in a well known New York jazz club, back in those days. Eddie Condon, which was owned by a cousin of mine, it was pure nepotistic. I had a great opportunity. I was the assistant manager, bartender, host, Friday afternoon helper in the kitchen, you name it. And then I got sick of that after a few years and decided to go back to theater, but you can’t make a living as an actor.

Don Robins:
I mean, those days in New York and we’re talking the 1980s, mid ’80s, but I was determined to try. And one of the ways you could actually make money was doing voiceover. And in those days, and even today, it’s still hard. It’s very hard business to crack into, but I tried. And I had some limited success in New York in the ’80s, and I moved to San Francisco in ’88 and I had better success here for a few years. But it was no way to make a living. And computers was sort of my night gig and acting and voiceovers was my day gig. And actually working with my dad’s company, it was a little company, was same idea. So I learned computers as a trade, because my mom had come from a theatrical family. And she had said if you’re going to be an actor, you got to be a plumber too. So programming became sort of my plumber-

Joshua Birk:
You plumber.

Don Robins:
… trade, so that I could go to auditions and try to make my way as an actor and a voice actor.

Joshua Birk:
Got it.

Don Robins:
But it won.

Joshua Birk:
Right. Then you kind of evolved into the role of a Microsoft developer, am I correct?

Don Robins:
Yeah. So what happened in the… When I came here, San Francisco, in ’88, ’89, got married in 89, had kids in ’91-

Joshua Birk:
Damn.

Don Robins:
… bought a house in ’94 is like that’s it. Can’t play around in the voiceover business anymore. I was working as a database developer, it was what we called it back then building custom business applications using database tools. It started with dBase moved to FoxBase. Microsoft bought Fox software, and then they built the first, actually, the first true object-oriented Microsoft product was Visual FoxPro. That was like ’94, ’95. That was fascinating. But the writing was on the wall. They were cannibalizing it and they were taking all its smarts and putting it into other Microsoft products. But I built a lot of business applications between 1986 and 1994, 95 in the Fox world.

Don Robins:
Then I sort of abandoned that because the writing was on the wall. So I started working in other Microsoft products, or VB in those days. That was like VB 5, VB 6. Access came out around then. Early Microsoft SQL server came out towards 2000s, the one that was actually really their product. They had bought Sybase. They bought something and had cannibalized it. But I also did a lot of Lotus Notes development. I worked with ColdFusion, which was the darling of the.com era. And it was great. It was a great platform, great language. So a lot of different stuff.

Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And so, I mean, I feel it’s kind of fascinating that you’ve sort of always been a full stack developer because where whenever the stack of grew, you just sort of adopted to that.

Don Robins:
Yeah. Once upon a time, there was no full stack. It was just, there was software and you built it and it ran on a PC and there was client server. I mean, client server was… And then slowly there was N-tier and Microsoft built out the ActiveX concept in the middle tier and the servers and the web server versus the application server versus the database server. And they’ve always been, and still are very server-oriented. And I stuck with that. .NET came out, and .NET was great. And I was quite prolific with .NET in the early 2000s, still focusing on that technology, particularly asp.net, which was a great product. But then I wanted to go back to desktop. I wanted to build stuff for screens and wind forms is what they called it back then.

Don Robins:
It was very challenging to work in that architecture. But we did it. I did it for a while. We ran some projects and sort of faded away and then boom, 2008 hit, and the clients that we had been working for went away, which I was really happy about. And it was like, there’s got to be another way. There’s got to be something else. I want to go back to the web and cloud was really beginning to take off. And I mean, it had already begun to take off, but I said, you know what? I got to go find out about it.

Joshua Birk:
So tell me more about that. Because from my experience, I was a web developer, kind of a full stack developer, client side developer. Worked with Microsoft, worked with Job, just all these kind of little things. When I, and this is a question I ask a lot of people, when I interviewed for my first Salesforce-related job, I did not know what CRM stood for. Ri Karlberg actually asked me, “What experience do you have with CRM products?” And I was like, “You are going to have to back that up a bit, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And so I had no real exposure to the Salesforce world. You as the always the stack developer, how did you first get experience to Salesforce? What was your discovery path there?

Don Robins:
Well, it was very similar. I just want to let you know you’re and not alone. I did not know what CRM meant.

Joshua Birk:
Got it.

Don Robins:
Somebody had to tell me. I had no exposure to products, like Gazebo, where many of my later colleagues did. They came into Salesforce from that world, but I had no exposure to that. To me, it was all about building custom business solutions, database-centric. Store and capture data and output it in a variety of forms or reports or whatever, packing slips.

Don Robins:
I have a very, very good friend who’s been in the industry as long as I have worked a lot more with enterprises and other products. And he called me up one day and he says, hey Don, you know what Salesforce is? And I said, well the only exposure I had to Salesforce, I used to run a .NET user group in San Francisco. I ran it for about a decade from about 2001 to about… I gave it up right after I got involved with Salesforce around 2010, 2011, I handed it off. And we had our meetings at a Microsoft office, downtown San Francisco on 1 Market Street. And in that building was the Salesforce sales offices. They had a presence there. And on the ground floor window, I guess maybe it was a window into the lobby, there was the Salesforce, the sign with the no software logo.

Don Robins:
And it sat in the window and every month I would walk by this thing, look at it. I knew what it was. I knew the name, Salesforce. It said no software with a line through. It’s like, what in the world does that mean? Oh, obviously they don’t like software, so I’m not interested. And that was the limit of my exposure to Salesforce. So my colleague calls me up and he says you probably want to look at this. And I had been exploring other cloud technologies, but I hadn’t gotten to Salesforce yet. There was a number of offerings that are, they’re all gone. They’ve all shaken out. And ironically, I hadn’t really explored Salesforce. And he said, “Funny thing happened to me.” He said, “I’ve been working on some projects and Salesforce has been a part of it. And I recently updated my resume and I put the word Salesforce architect,” because that’s what he called himself. He knew enough about the product to help businesses implemented and architect it correctly.

Don Robins:
So he called himself a Salesforce architect and he said his phone started ringing off the hook from recruiters.

Joshua Birk:
Really?

Don Robins:
And he said, “There’s something going on.” He says, “Maybe it’s just a wave, but you might want to look at this. So he introduced me to it and he had an opportunity working with a former Salesforce partner. They’re gone now, but a big implementation shop and they needed a pair of hands. And I said, hey, teach me. And I started. I actually started to learn development, but declarative and apex programming development by watching a series of captures by Salesforce that had put them out on the Apple, is it the Apple Store on iTunes?

Don Robins:
You could download these things. And basically it was video captures of Chris Barry, who’s the former Salesforce master instructor for the developer instruction with what at the time is called training and certification. That’s what they used to call the training division. It was then called Salesforce University and now it’s Trailhead Academy. And Chris was the primary developer instructor. And during the recession, they captured the Dev 401, the original Dev 401 class and the Dev 501 class that captured them on video.

Don Robins:
And they posted them trying to get attention. This was what they did. And those videos that were out there for years. And I learned Salesforce by watching those videos. And I know many people who did and at the same time it was like, that, I could do that. That was sort of like a user group meeting that lasted for hours and days. And it was like, that’s what I was doing with .NET. I said, great, if I could learn the product that deeply to be able to deliver, because I fell madly in love with the product, I could do that. I’d like to do that. And that’s when the seed was sort of planted about becoming an instructor.

Joshua Birk:
So I’ve got a couple tangents there, but the first one is I mean, you used the word enamored, I believe. It’s like, what about Salesforce based on all of your prior experience, and you’ve been working with Salesforce ever since. So it’s like what was it about that, that just really clicked with?

Don Robins:
Well, enamored is a great word. I call it, I fell in love with it. And what I fell in love with was everything you didn’t have to do, well, everything I didn’t have to do. One, I hate hardware. I hate hardware and I’ve grown to really have a dislike of Microsoft technology because it was so hardware-intensive. You had to learn so many things just to be productive. And I had business partners at the time who loved hardware and I would roll my eyes when they’d always buy another server. And it got old. So I love the fact that, oh, wait a minute, all I need is a machine with a browser, the right browser, obviously, but a machine with a browser, and I don’t need to install software. Now I understand what no software meant.

Don Robins:
[crosstalk 00:16:37], it’s not exactly what it sounds like. It’s not intuitive, but that’s what they meant. You don’t have to install software. Great. I like that. I got tired of the endless folders with Microsoft. We had an MSDN subscription for years and then thousands and thousands of CDs and then DVDs, that all went away. Oh, I like that. I didn’t have to worry about setting up the servers. I didn’t have to worry about building a sandbox server, in addition to a production server. And we maintained a server room in our offices for years and poured money down that hole, which also got old. So I love that.

Don Robins:
But more than that, what I loved was that I had worked with metadata frameworks before. I had worked with metadata frameworks in FoxPro 10 years earlier-

Joshua Birk:
Oh, interesting. Okay.

Don Robins:
… maybe 15 years earlier. And I loved the concept of engines. In the early days, there were productivity tools for developer that would let you use templates to generate code, that sped things up, common patterns for CRUD type forms. But if you modified anything, you sort of detached yourself from the template and you couldn’t go back and redo it. You’d have to lose all your work. They weren’t very smart in those days.

Don Robins:
But I preferred an approach and I worked with some very, very smart colleagues in the ’90s and early 200s that the concept of an engine driven by metadata. So you changed the metadata, you might upgrade the engine for more productivity. This is what sales horse does. They upgrade their engine and they add new metadata types. And it was exactly the same pattern. And I said, that’s it, but they’ve really done it. And it really works. And I don’t have to write the engine and maintain the engine. They do that. And it left me with the 20% I call the 80/20, right. It’s a real 80/20 rule. 80% is provided by the architecture and the engine to do all of the repetitive stuff. And when you want to do something custom, you tweak some metadata in a wizard or a form or the actual metadata and control the output and the behavior. I love that. I didn’t have to figure out how to build the editable grid, the evil editable grid. They’ve done it.

Joshua Birk:
Yes. Grids tables, they are kind of the holy grail of-

Don Robins:
They still are.

Joshua Birk:
… getting… Yeah, they still are.

Don Robins:
So, nothing… I mean, that’s the thing about software development that I really like to speak to. I’ve been doing it for over 35 years. The problem space does not really change. The customers needs do not change, the tools, the technology does change, but it’s the same problems, you’re solving the same problems.

Joshua Birk:
Yeah. I have an old boss and friend who, back when I was in my web boutique development days and we were doing consultancies, he’s like don’t worry about the nouns. Everybody sells widgets, they’re all widgets. We’re just trying to figure out how to sell, help them sell those particular widgets. So yeah, I definitely feel that. Do you talk to developers who you feel don’t have an appreciation for the level of metadata and declarative actions that are possible in Salesforce? And do you think there’s a danger in that?

Don Robins:
I think there’s a danger in that, a greater danger, whether it’s with developers or whether I’ll call them technologists. I mean, the roles in the Salesforce world are getting a little blurry-

Joshua Birk:
A little blurry, yeah.

Don Robins:
… when it comes to development, right? Because of the push into the no code, low code space and the push away from there’s sort of a marketing message that I have a problem with, which I understand it. Which is that enterprise customers, many customers, they don’t want to have to pay for hire, cultivate, find, quote, unquote “programmatic developers, coders”. They’d rather have their business people, their admins, or their app builders, people that they have to learn how to use the no code tools, which are very, very powerful to build everything they need, to build their automations, to customize their applications.

Don Robins:
And the challenges are that under the hood, there’s a great deal of complexity, an enormous amount of complexity. And there’s a danger. The danger that I see is making it sound too easy. Sort of funny and in preparation for this you had me send you a list of stuff I had done a while ago. And one of the things I stumbled, I didn’t send it to you, was a presentation, my first Salesforce presentation, which I did at Dreamforce 2010. And I remember I submitted it. I was late and I got an email from Dave Carol that said it was too late. It was not in time. And then a few weeks later, I got an email says, we want you to do the Dry Run, and it’s like-

Joshua Birk:
Got you.

Don Robins:
… And I reached out and I said, “I thought I won’t.” No, no. He said, “We have a slot. We want your presentation. And I did this presentation and the name of the presentation was they call it enterprise for a reason. And it was things I had learned over the last year or so that I’d been working with Salesforce. And my earliest perspective that the marketing message is everything’s really easy, just point and click, right, point and click. But the reality is that when your application becomes complex, complexities grow in the nature of your software and complexity cannot be so easily simplified. Sure, it’s easy to make a change. It’s easy to add metadata, easy to add a feel. It’s easy to do the changes declaratively, but the ramifications for that are not necessarily a good thing.

Don Robins:
And that’s where I believe the concern and the danger is, that the complexity’s there, the interdependencies and the metadata. And of course the tooling is definitely evolving to allow people to better handle it, better work with it. The new tools on the horizon for DevOps center, et cetera. And the APIs, the dependency APIs, et cetera. But you need to understand that kind of complexity and that’s a skillset. So you need to know it’s there. Number one, you better need to know that it exists. So you better watch out for it. And then you got to learn about it and you have to learn how to master it. And I think that’s a high risk. To me, that’s a big red flag in Salesforce. It always has been. And actually, I think it’s a great opportunity for technologists and for developers. That need is ever present. DevOps has become so much more important to focus on. And it’s always been important, but it hasn’t been focused on, it hasn’t been as visible. And I love that it’s become more visible.

Joshua Birk:
Now I want to pull back a little bit and go back to that moment you were talking about where you’re watching the Chris Barry videos and you decided that’s something you could do. Like you could do Chris Barry stuff. What was your first step towards doing that and becoming the trainer that you are now?

Don Robins:
I had a bunch of conversation with people. I wanted to try and figure out if I could step in. I learned that training and certifications sold classes, they had these classes that were run publicly. I didn’t know that they were also taught privately directly to customers or internally, but I knew there was a public calendar. I knew that there were partners. I understood from some conversations I’d had with some other folk who I got to know in community. I used to go to the early meetups, in those days, the developer user groups, and I was a big user group person. I’d been in user groups forever. Had, as I said, I’d run the .NET group. So I tried to find user community, and then through user community, networking to try to find out, well, what do you know about the training?

Don Robins:
And I met, there was a colleague in San Francisco. He was a founder of a Salesforce startup in the city. And he knew that there were training partners. They called them authorized training center, ATCs. Authorized Training Centers, and that they were partnered with Salesforce and they used their offices to deliver the courses. And they were around the country. And that they did need trainers. And he was trying to introduce me to one, that never happened, but at the same time, I mentioned that I was doing some consulting work through my colleague who introduced me to Salesforce. And that particular partner that he was working with, they turned out to be an Authorized Training Center. Much to my surprise, I was on their website. I said, “Oh, they’re an ATC.” And I started looking at the classes that they offered, but they only offered admin class. They only offered in those days it was called ADM201.

Don Robins:
And I think there was a CON301 or something like that. There weren’t that many classes back then, but they didn’t offer Dev 401 or Dev 501. But I reached out to the contact I had at the company who was a consultant and we were working on a project together and I said, “Hey, you guys are in a training center.” I said, “What do you know about why you do what you do?” And he says, “I know nothing about it, but I know the training manager and why don’t I introduce you?” And he did. And that training manager who’s now actually works with me. He’s on my team as an instructor and now has been as a veteran instructor, he’s great instructor, Danson. And he was teaching in San Francisco, just so happened to be teaching in San Francisco that week. So I reached out to him and I said, “Hey, can I take you out to dinner and pick your brain?” And we did-

Joshua Birk:
Really?

Don Robins:
… at a lovely dinner at Tadich Grill. And what it turned out was that while they had the rights to deliver those courses, they didn’t have any resources.

Joshua Birk:
That capture.

Don Robins:
All of their developer resources were too busy developing. Not only that, it takes more than just knowing the content to actually be an instructor. I mean, this is a really important point that teaching effectively, training effectively is a lot more than mastering the information, mastering the content or even the domain. There’s just a lot more there. So they didn’t have anyone. And I raised my hand, I said, “Well, I’ll do it.”

Joshua Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, if you want to learn about Don Robins’s favorite non-technical hobby, then you’re going to have to tune in next week where we continue our conversation about training the Salesforce platform. And once again, a very interesting formula. Thank Don already for sitting down and talking with me, but as always, I want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again, everybody. I’ll talk to you next week.

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