Christian “Szandor” Knapp is a Principal Technical Evangelist for DIA die.interaktiven in Germany. He holds a degree in Philosophy but got into coding based on his childhood love for video games. From there, he experimented with various platforms and training until he ended up where he is today.

Szandor has a unique perspective in this community. He has intersected his many passions throughout his life and they make him who he is. We talk about many of these things in today’s episode and discuss his various experiences with computers and Salesforce. Join us to hear a great conversation on philosophy, gaming, and more.

Show Highlights:

  • Szandor’s background and introduction to Salesforce.
  • How his passions for philosophy, literature, and gaming all intersect.
  • His reaction to Trailhead opening up.
  • How he started getting actively involved with the Salesforce community.
  • What he does in his current role.

Links:

Episode Transcript

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
What’s the benefit to me? It’s not for [inaudible 00:00:12]. It’s not about JavaScript. It’s a little bit about JavaScript. But looking at other people’s stuff and how they solve it. And that’s something you so much, you get it more and more in Salesforce because there’s more open source.

Josh Birk:
That is Christian Szandor Knapp, commonly known simply as Szandor. He’s head of development over at Appero in Germany. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. And here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today with Szandor, we go into a wide range of topics. We’re going to talk philosophy, we’re going to talk gaming, we’re of course we’re going to talk some Salesforce, but we will begin actually with what he was doing before interviewing, which was a sun bath.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Well, I put myself into the sun. I close my eyes and enjoy it.

Josh Birk:
Excuse me if I’m getting too personal here, is this a shirt off type deal?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
If it’s warm enough? Absolutely. But currently it’s not warm enough. It’s more of many layers of clothing and keeping warm kind of bath, but still nice.

Josh Birk:
But still nice. I had a visit with my doctor and then after my visit with my doctor, he’s like, “I’m kind of concerned because you don’t have any vitamin D in your body.” And he paused for a second and he’s like, “I want to be very specific here. I’m not saying you have low vitamin D. I’m saying we could not detect any levels of vitamin D your body.”

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Oh my God. You need to get into the light, Josh.

Josh Birk:
I needed more sun baths at the time. I had just started working remotely and I literally was just not getting outside kind of thing. Huzzah for sun baths. I like that.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Well, I need them to stay healthy sometimes or at least, after the winter, I yearn for sun rays touching my skin and it does a lot to my mental health or wellbeing, so to say. I just know I need to get out and need to get sun, especially after winter because we get less light.

Josh Birk:
I’m with you from a mental health point of view. Winter always hits me hard. Actually, on this topic, I just got a sun lamp, an actual lamp that does sun style, UV light. I am trying to do 15- to 30-minute sun baths every day even if I’m not getting outside. Or, right now here in Chicago, it’s London. It’s freaking London, it’s dreary, it’s cloudy. It wants to rain. And it’s like sun, I’m trying to be outside with you, but you don’t want to come out and play. It’s very important. My doctor’s concern was real.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
I understand your doctor. If possible, I try to work outside. So even daylight, even without sun, just daylight is something else than being in a closed room all day.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. We rented this place and it has these two balconies that we can go out and just sort of hang out with if the weather is nice. That also helped me keep my sanity over the pandemic, because I didn’t have to actually go out into the world and interact with other people and worry about masks and stuff like that. But I could actually be outside and enjoy the nature while the nature was good.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
I suppose, for my colleagues at that time, the standups were quite funny. We do a daily standup and with voice and video. And when I was sitting on the balcony, maybe late November, I was packed in lots of clothing and winter hat on my head, certainly funny, but it was important to get outside.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. Okay. Well, let’s dig into a little bit more about you. I always like to get into the early years. What is your earliest memory with a computer?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Windows? No… Yeah, Windows is true. I was going to say 95, but that’s not true. My memory is now doing a flashback, so I reached Windows 95 and then I realized, no, it was Windows 3.11. And then my memory flashed further back into school, I believe. And that still was some early version of Win 3. I know I worked a little bit on DOS systems, Microsoft, but I’m not the generation of Atari or Commodore and the old gang, so to say. No ageism intended there, no ageism, but basically my active computers time started with Windows 95 and I was born in ’83 and my first computer was in the middle of the nineties. Windows 95.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Because your background, let me check my notes here. You’ve got a degree in philosophy, right?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
That is correct. Yes.

Josh Birk:
Were you leaning into computers at some point before that, or was philosophy your game and then computers was a way to pay the bills later on?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
No, it was first my… You start with computers, but maybe let’s start with gaming consoles. What was the device I engaged a lot with, as a child? To me that was certainly the Gameboy.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
That early handheld. And I think before I got the real computer, I had a Super Nintendo and played lots of role playing games, which also helped me to pick up a little bit of English early on because the things back then weren’t localized. It’s very astonishing to me thinking back to myself as a child, knowing nothing about English, but trying to play English-language games on my Gameboy. I still somehow managed, because everyone did it in that days in Germany and who had a Gameboy, of course. And we somehow coped and had fun and didn’t quite understand the nuances maybe, but they were simple games, I think, too. That was the thing. And then I discovered a computer and I thought, wow, computers are so much better than consoles because I can play on them and do also other stuff.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
But the connection between now a Salesforce developer and the connection between code and computers are games basically to me, because in my early days of computers, I tried a lot of games, Monkey Island, of course, I hope you played that as well.

Josh Birk:
Oh yes.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Everyone should have played Monkey Island. It’s true. Then I discovered in the early online days, so to me that must have been ’99, 2000, maybe, don’t quote me on the years. But then I discovered what being online was and what email writing was and bulletin boards were. I also discovered Ultima Online, another role playing game. I’m not into shooters or action based game. I’m mostly into role playing games, strategic games, and lots of JRPGs, Japanese role playing games. Final Fantasy VII here. If anyone’s listening of that generation, not VII, no, not XI, Final Fantasy VII.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And Ultima Online, somehow I understood you had to pay for that. And I also learned via the internet, there are free servers to play on and I hopped onto one of the free servers and fast forward, those servers had a scripting language, Lua script, I think it still exists today. And I started, well, quote-unquote “programming” items, non-player characters, NPCs as we call them, in role playing games. Personas, figures, swords with certain effects like burning swords or swords that bite you back if you do a certain action. And that is how I went into code. And from there, I loved it full stop. To me, it was the culmination of, well, being a magician by using words and texts. It’s not like I was opening a grimoire, a magic book, and reading spells out of it. But I was basically using language or language-like constructs to shape a world like my Ultima Online world at that time.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And from there I got into PHP and SQL and then I started studying philosophy for, well, for quite a long time, 10 years. I also spent a year in UK in Durham, great experience as well, but I didn’t do any kind of code during that time. I must say I also got a little bit frustrated with writing code. Back to my story, I started with PHP and SQL and you had to do that on Apache, and then you had to know how to set up Apache and then you realized, well, Apache might have been at that time Linux mostly things. So you had to learn a little bit of Linux as well. And then I also thought, okay, languages are great. Let’s pick up another one.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And I dipped my toes into Ruby and I became frustrated because Ruby has a package manager and those are called gems or gems. I don’t know what the correct pronunciation is. Anyway, a package manager and, oh, great. I can use this and that. And not a lot of that worked out of the box on my Windows machine. At the same time as a language beginner, you’re not really keen on debugging other ones’ libraries. And the same was true with the updates on Apache and security liabilities. And I built a website and it got shut down by the administrators telling me, “Well, you can’t use Eval.” E-V-A-L. It was the early days, right? Nobody told you about the OWASP Top 10. Nowadays for security reviews for Salesforce, yes. I know what the OWASP Top 10 is. And for everyone listening, OWASP Top 10 is, well, a sort of list with those vulnerabilities that are most common in VAP applications.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Yeah. It doesn’t matter on the tech stack, it’s just what it is and the security reviews for ISV check for those as well. I still want to have a philosophical debate on how much of OWASP is actually applicable to Salesforce. But it is true, SOQL injection is theoretically possible and we ISVs are proud to offer our clients secure software. I, at least, pride myself on exactly that. Yes, I want to have secure software running in enterprise systems and that’s one of my passions.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Anyway, I got frustrated with that. And my nerdiness also brought me into the decision, well, I could go into what’s called at that time Informatik here in Germany, so basically computer science. But computer science on a rather abstract academic level. So don’t think of it as a coding class. It was rather like, this is how computers function conceptually, and this is how a network might function conceptually, and these are all the logic gates and layers you need. So really abstract. And I thought, okay, I can do that and not learn a lot more about coding or I can try to feed my nerdiness and go about the real question, which is why is there rather something than nothing, which is still the greatest philosophical question to me.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
I’m classic, a classic here, a shoutout to David Reed who will love that. I’m classic in that regard because philosophy to me is a lot about astonishment or being astonished about. And whatever you look at, if you look at it closely, you find another layer of questions and answers that can be looking at a flower and then thinking about how do colors actually work and how is it possible that I perceive a color and I even like that color? Or you can go with a physician’s approach in the terms of, well, there are atoms, and directed in certain ways, and you can be astonished about that. Or you can just take the coincidence of me or you being here.

Josh Birk:
For you, in a lot of ways, everything just sort of overlaps. It’s not philosophy and gaming and programming. It feels like your day-to-day cerebral functions, it’s kind of all three of those moving forward?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Yeah. Because I love texts and stories. Good code also tells a story and is obviously text. And to me, I also used to work as a journalist for a few years, for example, writing text and learning how to write concise texts or copies for marketing related stuff. I’m a text guy. Yes. And that’s why I also not only studied philosophy, you also had to have some other specializations. And so my major is in philosophy, yes, but I also studied German and English literature.

Josh Birk:
I have a hint as to why you got into Salesforce, but what was your first introduction to Salesforce itself?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Make it work.

Josh Birk:
Make it work?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
That’s basically what I was told at my first job about Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
Oh, I’ve been there.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And there was a weird vision of, well, how about a drag-and-drop interface for text macros, so to say, so greeting and a nice body and something at the end. And that was in Visualforce times. And I hadn’t touched programming in 10 years and yeah, didn’t happen. But we made people very happy in my first job with Salesforce. I started at a startup in Munich. I studied philosophy, had a degree, and I knew I didn’t, or hadn’t studied philosophy because of a certain job perspective. This was also the thing that I couldn’t explain to anyone like my parents, is “Yes, I’m studying philosophy and literature and yes. Yes. That’s not something that qualifies me for a specific job. Not at all.”

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
So I was basically throwing out applications to IT companies saying, “Look, here am I, do you want to talk to me?” Well, I had a few interviews, but let’s skip that. In the end of the day, I ended up with a startup in Munich.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And from the outside perspective, we sold software as a service product. Actually it was a CRM for tiny businesses, so to say, so one-man businesses or one-woman businesses, and we started with 12 or 15 people when I joined. And then we used the product of course, but also Salesforce, to scale up to 200 people in six nations over a course of two years.

Josh Birk:
Interesting.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And Salesforce was a strong companion in that time business-wise speaking, because you could basically take the process and clone it more or less and put it into place for the Nordics, so people in Norway or Sweden, Denmark. And without Salesforce, that would’ve been more difficult, I’d say.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
A lot more difficult.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And to me, that’s the business side of things. And to me, working with Salesforce felt liberating. I think that’s what you hinted at hinting me at, because I didn’t have dependency hell. I could open Developer Console and get going, had a prototype already running before I had installed the current Java update on my machine. I know I had a little bit of experience with databases and database migration and things that can go awfully wrong in those areas. I know nowadays maybe, I mean, nowadays, it’s eight years ago, but to me creating a custom field is still a very delightful thing to me even today because I know what I wouldn’t need to do in PHP, my admin and SQL for the same purposes. And I’m not talking about translations there or anything, or even layouts or forms or whatever you get out of the box in terms of web technology with Salesforce. And you could focus on Apex and Visualforce.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
What’s very special, I think about Salesforce, is the fact that it combines business and technology so closely. And that means that it brings people together ideally. Where I know there are frictions around the idea of the citizen developer, in my first job, I saw that Salesforce or Visualforce page and a few buttons and input fields can bring people to spark ideas about how they can improve their daily jobs. And that makes them powerful, I believe, or not in a political sense, but it allows them to talk to someone like me. I was in charge of Salesforce and tell me about their woes and pains and where they lose time and why. And sometimes that sparked discussions going up into management saying, “Okay, the process needs adjusted.”

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And yes, we were a very agile young company, so that worked very well. But because Salesforce also provided you with the reports, the KPIs, you could easily test business theses and say, “Okay, let’s try this for a few weeks and then see what numbers we get. And then we adjust.” And that was amazing to see how the system supported that kind of work.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. One of my favorite workshop experiences, and this was again, back in the Visualforce days. I was in the middle of a workshop and we were about to go into the Visualforce lesson and somebody was like, “I’m really sorry. I’m going to have to leave the workshop. My boss just emailed me and he needs me to go somehow create a page that’s only going to have these four or five fields for a contact. And I’m not sure how I’m going to get it done.” And I’m like, “Well, if you want to stick around, I’ll show you how you can do that in about five minutes.”

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
As somebody who had this passion for gaming and has overlapped into your role as a developer and into your current job, what was your reaction when Trailhead came out?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
I loved it. Not because of the gaming aspect. Okay. Let me be clear about that. I’m now a fan of the Trailhead characters because they grew to my heart. I can name probably all of them if you give me a few minutes.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. I am looking right now at three iterations of Astro, just to-

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Yes. What I loved about Trailhead was not so much the gamification aspect because that doesn’t ring to me. At the company I was talking about, we also looked at gamification for salespeople. And wow, there was quite some offering on the platform and off the platform for exactly this. But personally, I don’t think gamification. I like games, but those are games. Gamification makes lines blurry.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
So is it a game or is it serious business? What are we talking about?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And to me it’s very, very important to distinguish, well, not to distinguish fun and seriousness, but rather to focus, “Okay. am I serious about that, what I’m doing here?” And of course, if I’m serious about that, it can have bells and wingles and confetti and whatever you need. But at the end of the day, I want you to take it serious. And seriousness is a category is a category that we could discuss for lengths here. The comic-fication, the gamification was not the thing that got me about Trailhead. But the offer, and there you were, offering something that up until then was closed behind paywalls and classes and expert-led sessions. And you opened that up and in my perception as the very first big tech company and opened that up. And not only in terms of, “Oh, here’s all our technical documentation.” No, no, no, no. You took it, put it through the trail heart machine and made it accessible for anyone who’s interested, for anyone who has the ability to read and invest time and to understand.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And that’s amazing because when I started with Trailhead, I was there, I think from day one, I think, when it launched publicly, I wasn’t in the beta phase or anything.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And I love trying to cheat the challenges as well in the early days. This was long before super badges were invented. That was the thing, the translation of all the knowledge Salesforce has about how people use their product and how they are successful, and put that into consumable, I was to say bite-size, but that’s one once again, too, too far to me. Into consumable lessons and sections, into stories, even. And that’s not, here’s how you reach that and that, but there’s a story. There’s a setting. There’s a goal. There’s everything I would expect a business analyst or anyone doing serious business to do the same way. Pick people by the hand, walk them through, explain everything they need to know, bring them to a decision. In Trailhead they’re called challenges or questions or badges, and see how they do.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. I am going to have to highlight the phrase, “put it through the trail heart machine,” for Chris Doherty. I just love… That’s just a brilliant, brilliant way of putting it.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
It’s important because voice tone, atmosphere, is very important. Let’s go back to the comic characters through the Trailhead characters. They provide an atmosphere that makes you feel comfy and cozy. Now you might not like that, but learning is always about change, about something you don’t know yet. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be learning. And going there where you haven’t been before can make you feel, for certain people, uncomfortable. And look, there’s Ruth now and Astro and Cody, it’s a comfortable space and it washed all over Salesforce. I know how things looked before the Trailhead theme was everywhere.

Josh Birk:
I know.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And, and to me what’s really, really exciting is thinking about people growing up with Trailhead.

Josh Birk:
I remember the event before we went Trailhead themed. I don’t think we actually ended up doing this, but we were talking about trying to do something that was very digital and futuristic and all of this kind of stuff. We hadn’t even started talking about Trailhead at this point. Then I remember the first time I walked onto the floor of Moscone West and everything is Trailhead. “This is really surreal.” It was such a tonal shift, but it was such a welcoming one. And I think the community just took a hold of it so quickly that it just… I always say Trailhead was for the trailblazers, because if the community didn’t embrace it the way that they did, it wouldn’t have turned into the thing that it is today, I think.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
That’s one side of the things. The other aspect is I believe the economical success of Salesforce as a company. The promise of Trailhead is you learn something that you can put to use to earn some real money.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Now, speaking of community, when did you start getting more actively involved in it and what’s your current role?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
My current role, let’s start with that one, is I’m co-leading the Salesforce Munich developer group with Christian Menzinger for more than five years now, I believe. And how did I get started? It was 2014 and Lightning was on the rise. Up until then, I had done Visualforce and I had done Apex, and before that HTML, so I had a little bit of conceptual knowledge there, but Lightning with JavaScript was completely new to me. And it wasn’t only JavaScript. It was also the Aura framework.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And what I didn’t know, like 50 meters across the yard was Christian. Menzinger sitting, thinking similar thoughts. Oh, Aura is a new thing. Would be great to have someone to talk about that because early adopters and experience sharing. And I, me then, found then the developer group on meetup.com and realized they weren’t active for one or two years. The developer group in Munich is nominally older than Christian’s and my time there. I think it’s one of the oldest in Germany, but it was sleeping and I wrote an email, “Hey, how about meeting again? Because, look, Lightning, and wouldn’t it be cool to talk about our passion?” Yeah, that’s how it went. And it went from five or six people attending our first session up to a hundred people in-person events before the pandemic hit. Yeah. And now we are very, very excited for next week because it will be our first in-person event. And we will see lots of old friends and get to know lots of new friends hopefully too. But we expect that we will need to grow community a little bit after two years of not really getting in touch except remotely.

Josh Birk:
That’s awesome.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
And looking forward to that as well.

Josh Birk:
Well, and tell me a little bit about Check Dreaming and what you’re presenting there.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
Check Dreaming is one of those you dreaming… dreaming events. Sorry. It’s called dreaming events. And I will be talking about Lightning data table from the high-level view. Okay. And I will be doing a talk with Christian Menzinger again, my dear buddy. And we will basically give you a use case, “Look, here’s the search field and here’s the data table with fields and values.” And then we will start the discussion about how to build this. We will focus on how would we go about it and in that particular case, and I will not go into details, please visit the talk. It’s amazing to see what you don’t see from the start. Everything looks easy peasy, peachy, because look, it’s a search field and a table, what gives? Well, as soon as you go into details like localization, or how do you sort things and how do you apply the search value and where do you apply it? Do you apply it in your browser or do you talk to the back end Apex? Is that the same thing or would one road lead to more perils? Or does one road lead to solution? And it’s a very, very interesting thing because as I said, from the looks of it, not a lot to do, but after being done with it, you know where you spend your days and weeks.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now I did ask after Szandor’s favorite non-technical hobby. Spoiler, it’s reading. However, what I really wanted to pick his brain about was what game is he playing right now?

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
I just finished playing Bit Burner, which is a sandbox game, idle game. And it’s about JavaScript programming. It’s actually intended for JavaScript programmers or people trying to learn coding, amazing thing. It’s written in typescript. It’s completely open source. You can get it on steam or run it in your browser. And it’s completely hackable as well in terms of it’s JavaScript, so you can learn hack it and they embrace it in terms of, well, they know what JavaScript is. They don’t have locker service or lightning web run time.

Josh Birk:
All the torture of it.

Ch. Szandor Knapp:
You can manipulate parts of it. Yeah. All the doors are open. No, not really because it’s typescript and it can do quite a few things, I learned, to protect a few things. It’s not as easy as I anticipated, but I found myself not really playing the game in the end of the day that is writing my own code because I write code professionally every day. I found myself pursuing and looking for other people’s solutions. Up until a certain path, I was thinking, okay, now I know how I would love to build it myself. And then I found, okay, I don’t have the necessary skills nor do I have the time. And then the miracle happened. I found a GitHub repository where someone much cleverer than me did this very same approach.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Szandor 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 it links to your favorite podcast service. Now this is usually where at the end of the episode, I tell you all, thanks again. And I’ll talk to you next week. Due to COVID, as I am producing this episode, it is possible that this might be the last episode for a couple of weeks. This will not be another months-long hiatus, but we might have to take a week or two long to get our inventory back together. I’m going to change it up a little bit and say, thanks again for listening. And I hope to talk to you next week. Cheers, everybody.

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