Today, we sit down and talk with Jung Mun, certified Salesforce Administrator, consultant, and developer. She talks about her long history in technology, her journey to learn Salesforce, and also her current work in various open-source projects, including Snowfakery and CumulusCI.
Jung built her first HTML site from scratch when she was in tenth grade. Eventually, she went to grad school in New York City and got exposed to art and technology. She explored interactive installations with microcontrollers and sensors reacting to people’s gestures. Then she ended up developing a mobile app for virtual and augmented reality. At a hobbyist level, Jung just loves having fun building things and showing up as a piece of artwork in a show.
Having been immersed in her art career her whole life, it actually took her months until she finally decided to move into Salesforce in her current role.
Show Highlights:
- Her transition from art to Salesforce
- Why she finds it easy to learn to code in the Salesforce environment
- How she got involved in RAD Women
- Her Open Source Commons experience & her fourth Sprint
- What is Snowfakery?
- What her Snowfakery project looks like
- The concept of scratch org
- How Snowfakery impacts the role of an admin
- What makes a good README of a successful repo
- Her data dictionary project on her GitHub repo
Links:
- Jung on Twitter
- Jung on Github
- Snowfakery-Recipe-Templates Github Repo
Episode Transcript
Jung Mun:
Kind of trying out per project based learning. And for some reason I do like to configure things, learn things going deeper, if I really want to know how things work.
Josh Birk:
That is Jung mun, a Salesforce certified developer, admin and consultant. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce developer podcast. And here in the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Jung about her long history in technology, her journey to learn Salesforce and also her current work in various open source projects. But we are going to start, as we often do, with the early years.
Jung Mun:
I was a kid who went to kind of study art since I was eighth grade.
Josh Birk:
Okay, wow.
Jung Mun:
So it was really hard for me to kind of not think of art other than art.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
But in meantime, I was also a gamer. Around 10th grade I built my first HTML site from scratch with a little bit of CSS and a bit of JavaScript, copying paste type of deal. Fast forward, I went to grad school in New York City where I got exposed to art and technology. At that time I was exploring interactive installation with microcontroller and the sensor.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
Like a sound, a microphone, or a photo, a transistor type of deal where it reacted to people’s gesture. So I built my interactive installations with the microcontroller, like Arduino or Raspberry Pi. And moving on, I found my curiosity developing mobile app for virtual and augmented reality, so I did that for hobbies level.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
Kind of having fun building stuff and show up as a piece of artwork in a show.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. So, you really have been always pretty technical, it sounds like. Are you self taught in, what were you coding? What, Python or C++ on the Arduino?
Jung Mun:
Arduino is based on C.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
And for the mobile app development, I use Unity game engine, which is based on C Sharp. So I was kind of taking online course and bunch of YouTube video kind of video, trying out per project based learning. And for some reason I do like to configure things, learn things going deeper if I really want to know how things works. My whole life, having a work background in nonprofit, education or small companies, I’ve been always configuring, researching, try to find a solution with the limited resources. And also, I think it’s a kind of maybe family history, my mom is assistant admin.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
She kind of exposed us to computer early on.
Josh Birk:
So it’s always been in your blood a little bit?
Jung Mun:
I guess so.
Josh Birk:
Quick tangent, what were some of the early games that you were into?
Jung Mun:
I was a Diablo type.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice.
Jung Mun:
Kind of.
Josh Birk:
You had a lot of good company there, there were a lot of people into Diablo, including myself, so I gotcha.
Jung Mun:
StarCraft, I was a Zerg user.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Okay, combining that a little bit on your GitHub repo, I just have to ask you about this, your GitHub repo, there’s an old repo for something called Thing Thing Thing. What is Thing Thing Thing?
Jung Mun:
Oh, while I was a self claimed game maker, they’re also a kind of collaborated project that you can participate.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
It’s mainly building an environment for little character and there’s multiple people sitting in the same room and kind of create their own character and write a script for the animation. That was kind of short term project that I participated, hosted by one of the art community.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. A lot of technical stuff, a lot of cool art projects. You’ve got a master’s degree in that stuff. When did you start moving towards Salesforce in nonprofits in your current role?
Jung Mun:
Oh my God, this is… I know the decision that I made, it was a huge one that I had to think through months.
Josh Birk:
Oh, wow.
Jung Mun:
Because I’ve been running toward art career for my entire life and it was heartbreaking to think outside of it. But I think it was a right decision, so after the grad school, I was working as an adjunct in a multiple university.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
At the same time I was kind having a freelance, part time-ish, helping small company, individual on whatever the tech problem they have. And that’s where I got exposed to Salesforce, but even before, my partner one day told me, “Hey, I heard Salesforce from one of the podcasts,” he listened.
Josh Birk:
Oh, really?
Jung Mun:
And I was like, “Oh yeah? What’s the big deals about it? What do you try to tell me about?” And he’s saying that, “This is something that you can self teach yourself. And I know one person who’s good at it is you, so I thought it would be really good for you to kind of see what’s up with Salesforce.”
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Jung Mun:
So moving forward, I kind of keeping at the corner because I was busy with bunch of other things. And one day I start studying about it, kind of teach myself what Salesforce is about. And it really looks fun.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Jung Mun:
There’s a people need something and there’s an admin and developer providing solution for those needs and there’s a whole ecosystem built around Salesforce. And what amazed me, as I know and learn more about Salesforce, is that there’s a vast knowledge that’s already there for you to learn. And at that point, I was thinking it will take me years, even my lifetime to learn whatever is currently out there. Plus three times we leave every year that I cannot keep up with.
Josh Birk:
Right, right.
Jung Mun:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, I think that’s… I used to do workshops. I designed the workshops and I designed the schedule for the workshops and I decided what was going on in the workshops. And I think I started just doing a joke at some point, which is like every year, Salesforce just makes this harder. Because it’s not like the platform itself and other things… It just gets bigger, that’s all Salesforce does.
Jung Mun:
Yes.
Josh Birk:
Year over year, it just gets bigger and gives you more options and more fun tools and deep things to do. What was your approach to that, then? What were you using to dig into that and actually learn Salesforce?
Jung Mun:
Pretty much the trail had helped, but also I was being exposed through some work related experience. Then at one time it’s kind of a little far fetched yourself, being able to wear multiple hats, different jobs. And at one point I have to cut myself and make decision. “Okay, it looks like you love Salesforce, then making art, then teaching, then whatever that you’re doing. Do you want to make commitment?” And once I made that commitment, I call up to my university, “Hey, I’m not coming back next semester. See you later.” And I start putting myself all in, getting myself certification, looking for full-time jobs and rest is history.
Josh Birk:
And when did you get involved with Red Women?
Jung Mun:
After I was in my current job, I knew from the start that I will be in Salesforce development. For some reason it was pretty darn easy. You can cut that up, darn.
Josh Birk:
Darn is fine. That’s still family friendly enough.
Jung Mun:
It was pretty easy for me to learn to code in Salesforce environment, then go learn JavaScript or learn C Sharp.
Josh Birk:
Really?
Jung Mun:
Yes. It was pretty easy because I think there is a level of visual interaction. If you change something in code, you can see the change immediately.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Jung Mun:
So I think that visual stimulation really helped me to digest the code easier than other programming language.
Josh Birk:
Got it, got it.
Jung Mun:
Sorry, I didn’t answer your question. I always talk around the vignette, so sorry about that.
Josh Birk:
No problem at all. Okay, but you’re picking up Salesforce, you’re picking up Apex and then yeah, bring me to where you’re getting with involved with Red Women.
Jung Mun:
While I was kind of prepping myself to dive into learning Apex, I also looked for resources. I can go for the code boot camp, but I don’t want another schooling after my master. So I found Red Women from Trailhead community and I wait for until they have a next cohort open and I went there and I really need this. I need somebody who can help me to kind of get the foundation of Apex or Java, per se. And I met Bonnie Hiner-
Josh Birk:
Nice
Jung Mun:
As one of the part one coach and she was amazing. She helped us, everybody so much. And starting from how to read Salesforce developer documentation, and that was the huge part that she kind of got us through how to become Apex developer.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Now, in your current job, you kind of describe yourself as an admin-eloper, and I think you kind of hinted on this earlier. What brought you to kind of have to be the jack of all trades for your work?
Jung Mun:
My previous work history, I’ve always been a person with multiple hats.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
Starting from coming up with a plan for my artwork installation, I have to have a step by step instruction. Or working for nonprofit, you have to be everything. Definitely for my company, we do have a small team for technology.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
And I became only one person for Salesforce. You have to work with the environment that you are in and try to make the best out of it.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Jung Mun:
I think that’s where Snowfakery kind of comes in, try to help that situation and increase my productivity in a way.
Josh Birk:
Okay, okay.
Jung Mun:
And eventually from day one I told my manager, “Hey, I’m going learn Apex so I can do some development.”
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Jung Mun:
And he was so supportive.
Josh Birk:
Good.
Jung Mun:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Nice. Okay, well let’s dig into Snowfakery a little bit, but let’s start a little bit back from that. When did you first start getting involved with what’s now called the open source comments?
Jung Mun:
I think it was February last year or so.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
I heard about [inaudible 00:13:16] or Community Spring through PowerUp Hub.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
And I was like, “Oh.” It was like my long time dream to be in a sprint either Hackathon.
Josh Birk:
Really?
Jung Mun:
And I never had one. So, I’m going to sign up, see what’s going on with this.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Jung Mun:
And it was the best decision I made. I learned so much, I missed so many great Salesforce professional or not. Yeah, that was the beginning. And the last one I attend, which was yesterday, was my fourth sprint.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Were those all virtual or was the first one not? I’m trying to remember how many virtual sprints there have been.
Jung Mun:
There have been four virtual sprints plus so many before the physical sprint, yeah.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Have you been to a physical sprint or has this all been remote?
Jung Mun:
It all has been remote. I believe the onsite sprint will happen in area city where I don’t live.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Jung Mun:
I never live, yeah.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. What was this last sprint like? What were you working on?
Jung Mun:
This sprint, I actually helped the grass root mobile survey app group.
Josh Birk:
Oh, okay. What’s that?
Jung Mun:
That’s a little like perk of participating open source project, is that you’re not really committed to one project. You can kind of move around and share your skill and knowledge now, based on your interest. For this one, the grass root mobile survey app is Heroku based app that connect to Salesforce where it is literally, you can think of the field agent, but this is for nonprofit organizations where they need a people. For example, let’s give an example, I think that’s better.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
For example, this nonprofit is for disaster relief and they go out there with this mobile app and start interviewing people, is there any need, the type of damage, is any of your family member missing? You have to perform those interviews. And this mobile app takes those data and push to Salesforce.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Jung Mun:
And this is for nonprofit usage where they need a lot of people with the limited resources.
Josh Birk:
Got it, got it. When did you first get involved with the Snowfakery project?
Jung Mun:
It was my first open source project and I’m still involved with the monthly meeting, where I get to share what I’ve been doing with Snowfakery. It was very last year, my first sprint, and since then I’ve been active member for the Snowfakery project as well.
Josh Birk:
Got it. I kind of have to ask, because it occurs to me as we’ve been talking, there’s this kind of shift, because you were a one woman army, effectively, but you had the strong desire to get into a sprint and a Hackathon. How did that transition go from its all just Jung, to you are part of a larger team and working on open source projects? Has that been kind of a transition for you?
Jung Mun:
Oh, oh, no. I’ve been always interested in perspective that’s outside of me.
Josh Birk:
Okay, okay.
Jung Mun:
And that’s why we communicate. I don’t want to go too much philosophical, but-
Josh Birk:
Please.
Jung Mun:
That’s why you communicate, you share idea and you talk through issues so you can come up with the best solution at the time. And open source sprint where everybody collectively and collaboratively works together, you’ve got to know something that’s outside of you, something that you’re never exposed to. Oh, and make a reflection of yourself about yourself and also how your admin practice.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. What’s your current involvement with the Snowfakery project? What are you working on?
Jung Mun:
For the sprint, we mainly focus on creating a recipe for different use case. We want to create a fake data for opportunity, we kind of scope out the use case and create a recipe per case. Otherwise, we currently are working on best practice to create Snowfakery recipe, what is considered a good Snowfakery recipe.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Jung Mun:
We are kind of reflecting on what we’ve been doing in terms of developing Snowfakery recipe and creating some guideline, which includes some of the best practice to shape your scratch work, like scratch work definition. For example, if you’re going to create a recipe for enterprise territory management, you have to set up scratch or definition a certain way with the metadata dependency, something like that.
Josh Birk:
Got it, got it.
Jung Mun:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
And I’m realizing now, having gotten to this point, in the off chance that somebody’s been listening to the podcast and has totally skipped over what would now be maybe two episodes with Snowfakery being described, let’s level set for everybody, what exactly is Snowfakery?
Jung Mun:
Snowfakery is the tool created by Salesforce to help Salesforce user, but also outside of Salesforce, to create fake data for development or testing. I know the base language is Python.
Josh Birk:
Yep.
Jung Mun:
And it also has library called Faker to generate the fake data.
Josh Birk:
How are you personally using Snowfakery with your job?
Jung Mun:
Oh, I can be an evangelist for Snowfakery, for sure. It changed everything, let me put it that way. Before Snowfakery, I want to perform integration test and deployment test with multiple sandboxes. And in order to set up that development work cycle, I have to somehow figure out, try to shape my sandbox for development ready.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
But sandbox doesn’t get to copy the data from production, and also, that’s not really a best practice to copy production data.
Josh Birk:
Right, right.
Jung Mun:
So every time, at least one or two hours, I was working on kind of recovering all the static data that we use in production. Fiscal year, for example, or campaign member status, if you have a campaign member status category or general accounting unit, those type of data never changes.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha, gotcha. How much time do you think you’re saving with it?
Jung Mun:
Oh, it takes me one minute.
Josh Birk:
Really?
Jung Mun:
Less than one minute, yeah. I refresh the sandbox, log to sandbox through a VS code, push the Snowfakery data and ta da, I’m ready to develop.
Josh Birk:
Nice. And have you had to do any personal customizations for that, or is it just basically generating recipe and go?
Jung Mun:
This is a part that I’m still figuring out, because Salesforce introduced this concept of scratch work several releases ago. And I think I’m going to kind on shift to CumulusCI a little bit, because-
Josh Birk:
Okay, please do.
Jung Mun:
I use CumulusCI as a base to run the Snowfakery and CumulusCI, their automated flows are, the first hand they design around scratch org model. But for my small org, we use sandbox for development.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
And there’s no automated flow for a persistent org.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
So I have to somewhat create a custom task and custom flow to sort of semi-automate that process. For example, the one thing that I first built was there’s a dev org and a QA org and there’s a future org, right? So I create a follow where log out from all the CCI orgs.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
And authenticate again to all the CCI orgs and then push the static data.
Josh Birk:
Tell me a little bit more about Snowfakery and how it impacts the role of an admin.
Jung Mun:
Definitely, it really made me rethink of my own productivity as an admin, as well as developer. Is that you as an admin, you improve the user experience, increase the user productivity, but it often is a secondary to think of your own productivity. And definitely, Snowfakery with CumulusCI really boosts up the way that I do things, creating solution and it really speeds up every process. So I really recommend, if you are an admin who’s into increasing your own productivity, tap into SFDX, tap into Snowfakery. See if this is the tool that you want to explore.
Josh Birk:
And that’s interesting to me, because you are very technical, but you are pitching this directly to admins. And so, how admin friendly would you describe that experience?
Jung Mun:
It’s definitely daunting when you encounter command line interface and code editor, but I think there is a certain level, kind of step by step guideline. Is there any good instruction for admin to follow through to do certain tasks? For example, moving report from different folder to folder, not manually, but using VS code with SFDX. That saves so much time.
Josh Birk:
Interesting.
Jung Mun:
And I’m just blessed that I was able to figure this out.
Josh Birk:
And when it comes to CumulusCI and Snowfakery, has there been kind of an effort to make them more admin friendly?
Jung Mun:
There has been and I think we’re still working on building some sort of UI for Snowfakery that can be either installed Salesforce or standalone. We’re still working on it, but at the meantime, I also, from my own project, I want to start publishing on my Git repo, do certain tasks with visual studio code using Snowfakery, posts on my repo doing a certain task with Snowfakery with SFDX, sorry.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Jung Mun:
Sorry, my tongue is not working.
Josh Birk:
That’s fine. Now, I have a quote, I think from Samantha Shane. And I don’t actually have the quote in front of me, but it’s basically a glowing review of work that you did for PR that was cleaning up a lot of ReadMe’s. And it was kind of fascinating to me that it was style and it was quality and priorities. What goes into a good ReadMe and what makes it kind of a successful repo to have?
Jung Mun:
I do get to face a lot of ReadMe pages on the Git repository, because I like to kind of nonchalantly explore different repositories. And the repository that’s hard for me to digest is definitely a long ReadMe.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
And if you have an inline link that jumps around the pages, that’s excellent. So I look into the length of it, but most definitely, you have to consider a ReadMe as some sort of elevator pitch.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Jung Mun:
Like, on the first sentence you define and summarize what this tool does and what it is. And then you kind of go onto, this is how you start it. I try to brief my ReadMe if I can. That’s my first checklist.
Josh Birk:
Okay, nice. And I did want to ask you about, you have a dated dictionary project up on your GitHub repo. What is that and what kind of problem were you trying to fix with it?
Jung Mun:
The data dictionary project, actually a byproduct of me getting involved with Snowfakery.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
Because, in order to create a Snowfakery recipe, you have to have API name for all the field.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha, okay.
Jung Mun:
And what is the best way to pull all the API field name from each object? And I kind of consider as me practicing for Apex code, think of a way to write code better. It was a one day project where I also, for my work, I was creating a data dictionary for my org and I just couldn’t find anything that really fit my taste.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
So I kind of wrote that for fun and I actually used for creating a Snowfakery, kind of run that code on the anonymous window from your org and define which object that you want to extract the fill schema data. And the output is saved in your file, so you can just download as a CSB file format.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha, nice.
Jung Mun:
And you can kind of copy and paste entire row and paste into the video studio code. And you know those VS code, the multi select?
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Jung Mun:
You can kind of do multi select everything, clean it up and put semicolon at the end of the field name and you’re ready to type data.
Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, if you want to learn more about Jung, head on over to the show notes where we’ve got links to her social media and her GitHub account. Now, before we go, I did ask after Jung’s favorite non-technical hobby and well, first there’s a really, really cute bit, but also, I’m just glad that she’s still into gaming.
Jung Mun:
I do have to spend time with my partner, because I spend my whole day learning Salesforce. Occasionally, I also still paint on MTG, Magic the Gathering card.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Jung Mun:
I don’t know, you know that game?
Josh Birk:
Yep.
Jung Mun:
But there’s a huge fan base, so I sometimes alter those cards.
Josh Birk:
I want to thank Jung for the great conversation and information, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, 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, and I’ll talk to you next week.