Igor Androsov Join us as we chat with Igor Androsov, Technical Architect Director at MuleSoft of Japan. Igor shares his introduction to Salesforce in 2008 and his active involvement in the Salesforce community. Hear how the global pandemic has influenced his work, leading to him joining Salesforce in 2020. Listen as he narrates his rich experiences within the Salesforce community in Japan, and how it has enriched his career.

We touch on Salesforce’s VTO program and MuleSoft tools. Igor shares his contribution to the Impact Labs and the Open Source Commons Projects, offering his Salesforce skills to aid nonprofits. He also explains how Salesforce Developers can start with MuleSoft and the available resources. Don’t miss out on Igor’s intriguing discussion on the API Experience Hub. 

Listen in today!

Show Highlights:

  • Androsov’s experiences with Salesforce community engagement and how global events like the pandemic shaped his career.
  • Salesforce’s Voluntary Time Off (VTO) program.
  • The MuleSoft tools offering insight for developers on how to get started and the resources available.
  • Androsov’s journey of learning and contributing to the Impact Labs and Open Source Commons Projects is highlighted.
  • Overview of API Experience Hub, a new tool from MuleSoft that allows users to create a branded experience for their APIs.

Links:

Episode Transcripts

Igor Androsov:
One thing that was… And it was back in the mid ’80s, like ’85, ’86 timeframe. The process itself was not fun. It was FORTRAN doing math. But what I did realize is that, before that, I always had to be next to the machine, next to some kind of equipment. And I had to be in that room, I had to be in that building.

Julián Duque:
And that’s Igor Androsov, technical architect director at MuleSoft Japan. I’m Julián Duque, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here in the podcast, we share stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we are going to talk with Igor about different MuleSoft products, especially API experience have. But before, we’ll start just as we left off, and we often do, with his early years.

Igor Androsov:
I think this goes way back when I was… I’m originally from Ukraine. And I got my start my education in Telecommunication Institute in my hometown. We had courses that required calculating circuitry like a radio, different kind of non-linear circuitry. And we had to go program. There’s some differential equations that you need to solve and we had to do some programs in it.
I really didn’t like it at the time, but one thing that was… And it was back in the mid ’80s, like ’85, ’86 timeframe. The process itself was not fun. It was FORTRAN doing math. But what I did realize is that, before, that I always had to be next to the machine, next to some kind of equipment. And I had to be in that room, I had to be in that building. But here, the computer was in a completely different place. In my town, but it was far away. But I was sitting in my university and I was typing in the screen and I was getting responses and I could compile things. And so, I realized like, “Wow, if this is a work that I could be on an island somewhere but work anywhere I want to be.” Because this could be connected.

Julián Duque:
Wait, wait, wait. So you were thinking about living the remote life way before we got to internet?

Igor Androsov:
It was way before the internet, yes.

Julián Duque:
Wow. This is amazing. I never thought about that possibility. I thought I was maybe going to be attached to an office or something like that. Never crossed my mind to be working from an island. Did that dream come true, maybe?

Igor Androsov:
Yeah. Many years later, yes. We are currently living the dream as we-

Julián Duque:
Currently living the dream.

Igor Androsov:
Yes.

Julián Duque:
Nice. Yeah, of course. To be in this spot, many things have happened, so yes. Continuing with your early career, what pretty much triggered you to start pursuing a career in technology?

Igor Androsov:
Well, I was always interested in building things. I was tinkering with all kinds of electronics even in my childhood. Building sound equipment or radios and things like that, taking things apart. Because there was no computers at the time. But when I got to United States later on, immigrating, there was certainly looking for, “What am I going to do?” And somewhat natural path was, “Let’s go to electrical engineering.” Because it was closely related to what I was doing back in my country.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, makes sense.

Igor Androsov:
It started there. There was few computer courses in the process that I took and I decided to switch over to computer science early on in university. But I had a long journey in American universities. I had to pass through several of them, transferring, before I actually graduated.

Julián Duque:
When you had your first experience coding, you mentioned that it wasn’t fun, it was just math. When this became something fun for you, something interesting?

Igor Androsov:
I think it was when I encountered personal computers. Because it was mainly mainframe type of things that I had experiences with initially. But coming to America, personal computers, IBM. At the time, I think my first computer was actually Amiga 500. That computer had multithreading and that’s why I actually encountered programming language C. I think the compiler was Lattice C, I believe. And I realized there was multi-threading. And you could do many things on the screen. You don’t just run one program, but you can actually have screen with icons and you can move them around and you have a desktop and you could actually program these things. And one of the first thing I did was actually, the computers at that time didn’t have Russian alphabet, so I actually created Russian alphabet for that Amiga, so I could type in Russian letters.

Julián Duque:
Wow, that’s amazing. That’s great. In these early days, when Salesforce appear in your life? How you started within the Salesforce ecosystem? Because I bet you have a lot of years within the ecosystem, right?

Igor Androsov:
Yes. Before Salesforce, I’ve done a lot of traditional software engineering jobs, working on various languages and also platform. Among them was always two operating system and Linuxes of various types. Salesforce appeared to me in about 2008. I was an integration specialist. Actually I was working somewhere in Florida. I think it was Universal Studios. We were building some integrations for them and I was working at Universal Studios in Orlando.
And some friends of mine pinged me and said, “Hey, we’re starting this company, which I’m going to join, this partner company. There’s this thing Salesforce.” “What’s Salesforce? That’s some kind of sales thing? I’m an engineer.” So, what started it is, they needed somebody to help with some Java code and I helped out a little bit. I actually started interview process in 2008 and I joined in 2009. And that’s the first time I encountered things like Visualforce and Apex in the beginning.
And cloud in general. I was working in the prem before, so all of the servers had to be installed somewhere on data centers. And this was my first entry into working with AWS and Salesforce being public cloud systems. And it became very interesting. And I immediately said, “That’s it. I’m just going this way.” Because I really didn’t like to be an infrastructure specialist. And this really removed all this stuff. I could just build things in the cloud and not really worry about networks so much. I could just produce value right there, build my application and deploy it, and not ask five people how to get access to this server or that server. This is awesome.

Julián Duque:
That’s great. And also, you have been deeply involved within the community as well. How you started with that path, working, organizing a community and getting into this?

Igor Androsov:
Yeah, that’s an interesting segue. How it began is, as I mentioned, I joined a partner company called Appirio. My early projects were actually in Japan. And so, I was based in Japan for a few years as an expat. I came back to United States in 2013. And right around that time, Jeff Douglas, who you probably know well-

Julián Duque:
Of course.

Igor Androsov:
… was also working at the same company. And he pinged us like, “Do you want to start a group with me in Tampa, Salesforce developer group?” Because there wasn’t any at the time. And I said, “Sure.” That’s how we started. I was a co-founder, co-creator, and he was co-leader and leader. Initially, that was two of us. And then of course, Jeff joined Salesforce a few years later. And then, I became a single leader of the Tampa developer group. That’s how it started. That’s kind of the story.

Julián Duque:
Ah, that’s beautiful. And as an anecdote for all the folks that are listening to us, you were the first person from the Salesforce ecosystem that I met in one meetup in St. Pete, Florida.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah, that’s true.

Julián Duque:
If I am not wrong with that.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah, that was a long time. I think it was maybe 2014 or ’15.

Julián Duque:
I think ’15 because I moved to the US in 2015.

Igor Androsov:
Okay. I believe why I was there is you were doing a Node code school or something like that, some Node.js type of meetup. It just so happened to be, at the time, I was part of the mobile team at Appirio and we were building mainly a lot of native applications on iOS and Android. That was my world, like building apps on mobile phones. But they were always linked to Salesforce. We had to build APIs and some of the projects started to cross over to Node and I had to start doing Node. I was learning node rapidly in Heroku, building APIs on Heroku with Swagger and Node.js. That’s why I was there, to pick up my knowledge and also learn about ecosystem.

Julián Duque:
That’s beautiful. And then, when I joined Heroku, we met again. And now, we were more close to the Salesforce community.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah, absolutely. I remember you came up to a couple of meetups as well in Florida.

Julián Duque:
Yeah. We are missing you here. You are a great asset for the Floridian North Tampa developer community.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah, certainly. I miss those days of Trailblazer community times. There was a lot of fun going to the Dreamforce events. We had to take a long break, for me personally, due to pandemic. But we’re essentially restarting now, so it’s good.

Julián Duque:
You joined Salesforce in what year?

Igor Androsov:
I joined Salesforce in 2020. It was right before the pandemic started. We actually didn’t know it even existed because it was in January of 2020 and I started in February. I roughly came in at the end of January. I was a speaker at a Japan Dreamin event, Trailblazer community event here. I happened to be invited, so just before I joined Salesforce, I could speak freely as a developer group leader before I handed over to my other co-leader back in Tampa. And then joined, and a month later lockdown happened. Since then, we were on an island here in Japan.

Julián Duque:
Nice. How was the change to coming back to Japan? Are you also part of the community in Japan? Is there a strong Salesforce community or it’s different than what’s going on here in the US?

Igor Androsov:
I would say yes, it’s a pretty strong community. There are actually a number of different groups. I believe in Tokyo, it’s a very large city, it was probably allowed to have as much as 25 different Trailblazer community groups of all kinds, including architects, developers, there’s admins, there’s women in tech or women admin group or something like that. There’s a lot of groups and it’s very active. And there’s quite a few MVPs from the Japanese community. They do regular meetings in major cities all over Japan like in Osaka or in Tokyo obviously, that’s most of the activities happening. But of course, as an employee, I participated in those events, but quietly. Because when we’re speaking as an employee, there is obviously some legal stuff that we need to take care of.

Julián Duque:
Yes. You have, if I’m not wrong, around 27 certifications. And also, you are 24 times a Trailhead Ranger if I’m correct.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah, I guess it’s counting the internal badges as well.

Julián Duque:
Oh yeah, of course. For the folks out there that don’t know, we also have some badges that we get for content that is not publicly available. You got to this place. Do you have any recommendation for the folks out there that are studying learning with Salesforce and they are maybe trying to get some way to study? Or, how to organize their time? Because it seems you have put a lot of effort in this.

Igor Androsov:
I would say, definitely commit to lifelong learning. If you’re in an industry like ours, IT, anything to do with development software, today especially with AI and generative and everything else that’s going on, we’re bound to be in a journey of life learning. And as such, you just basically consider committing time that you can, whether that’s 10 minutes, 20 minutes every day, and do some learning. Whether that’s Trailhead badges or perhaps some other learning platforms to pick up skills and knowledge. Those would be critical.
Also, I only do things and learn things that I’m curious and interested about. Trailhead was really a turning point for me back in like 2016 or so. As I mentioned, I was part of the mobile team. And I primarily walked away from Salesforce development for about four years of my career. Still working for Salesforce partner, but primarily focusing on iOS native applications and API development. But Trailhead came on the scene in 2015 strongly, and I sort of realized that, “Now I can really keep up with all the things that’s happening in Salesforce.” Because before that it was very difficult to do and it was getting hard to keep track of things that you need to know to be effective developer. And here, new feature came along, a new badge, you could just do hands-on. And it’s like, “Okay, that’s how it works.”

Julián Duque:
Yeah, this is an ever evolving, an ever-growing product, so it’s very, very difficult to-

Igor Androsov:
And now it is [inaudible 00:14:58] go. You could probably do anywhere learning, right? Airport or anywhere, you have a minute, at coffee shop, you’re waiting, you just do the badge.

Julián Duque:
That’s the key. See, that’s the key in there.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah.

Julián Duque:
Let’s get now into the present. What are you doing right now? What are you working on right now?

Igor Androsov:
I’m working at MuleSoft. When I joined Salesforce, I joined a MuleSoft Asia-Pacific team. It was part of Salesforce and that was my understanding, but I actually didn’t know I joined two companies at the same time. It was integrating, so I had to do onboarding on Salesforce with Salesforce Ohana Way, and then onboarding on MuleSoft the Muley way. So, it was like this baptism by fire.
Obviously, MuleSoft was a bit new to me. I did integration before, so Java integration isn’t new, but MuleSoft as a platform was slightly new. I’ve seen it and used it in a few customer engagement prior to joining, so I had some idea. But certainly didn’t realize how vast it is as a platform and how complex it is.
I’m a part of the customer success group. I help our customers to do best practices and implement MuleSoft platform, build MuleSoft integration in the best way possible so they can have a good adoption.

Julián Duque:
Beautiful. And now in MuleSoft, besides that, are you working on any specific product or just with the architect team? What’s your favorite part of working with MuleSoft right now?

Igor Androsov:
There’s a lot of things happening at MuleSoft as well as Salesforce. And basically, keep track of some of the products is a fun way for me to gain specialties. Because in CS, as architects, being on that vast platform, we try to specialize. We have some specialties in different product line. We have for example, a runtime fabric specialist, which is Kubernetes based container, deployment, or perhaps there’s those that specialize in API development, design.
I’m interested more on developer side. Because MuleSoft, another little bit of a shocker for me, after 10 years working on the cloud and Salesforce, I didn’t realize how blessed I was not dealing with networks and all kinds of infrastructure stuff. Coming up with MuleSoft, you inevitably, even if you’re a MuleSoft developer, you get to touch these things even in a cloud way. Because, depending on the deployment, you might need to know AWS or Azure or Kubernetes to be able to effectively run this platform. This dynamic, although interesting is also challenging for me. Because, as I said, I dropped my infrastructure skills years ago, just coming out of [inaudible 00:18:04]. I forget that. So, there was a bit of learning. That’s kind of a fun part.
And another great thing about Salesforce that I enjoy a lot is our BTO, ability to contribute skills for good. Those projects are actually development projects that I still get to do, development on the platform that we choose to work on these projects like Salesforce or maybe Heroku or at MuleSoft. It’s basically a choice.

Julián Duque:
Are you working on any specific BTO project right now?

Igor Androsov:
Yeah. I’ve been part of, what we call Impact Labs, and also the Open Source Commons projects, which is building open source products and packages for our nonprofit community. As you know, like 1-1-1 model, Salesforce contributing 1% of product, 1% of time, and 1% of revenue for good. And I’m also part of this initiative of contributing my Salesforce skills, developer skills, helping nonprofits to do that. I was part of the Impact Labs’ climate justice projects from 2022 to this year, and we continue evolving that package, which called Grant Content Kit. It is on GitHub, open source, and part of the Community Sprints that we have at Salesforce. And this is a continuing, ongoing process. The project that will start now in the same Impact Labs is actually called Salesforce Accelerator AI for Impact. And I’m excited to be part of that, which is bringing all the generative AI into the mix.

Julián Duque:
Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe we can add all of those resources to our show notes so our listeners know more about that. I’d be wanting to get into the open source grant that we have. Maybe we’ll need to get some time to talk about that. Why not have a full podcast episode about open source here at Salesforce?

Igor Androsov:
Yeah, that’d be great.

Julián Duque:
Yes. As a Salesforce developer that doesn’t know anything about MuleSoft and wants to start learning or using any specific MuleSoft product or start implementing MuleSoft, what could be a good first step?

Igor Androsov:
I would say, if you are a Salesforce developer, you are a coding person meaning you do Apex on Salesforce, then your track will be most likely leading towards Anypoint platform and Anypoint studio or Code Builders. Now, new tool have been released. Certainly try it out.
There are a number of resources out there. We have released a few Trailhead badges recently that allow you to do hands-on challenges which will get you started on something like an API design. If you haven’t done that before, that would be probably a starting point. Because MuleSoft is after all about designing APIs and implementing APIs. And so, you would have to learn syntaxes like RAML or OpenAPI Specs, Swagger type of stuff. The next step is obviously implementing it. There are certainly a lot of resources. There’s also books that people wrote that I’m aware of, like the MuleSoft for Salesforce Developers. If you into book learning, that might be a path to do. I would suggest-

Julián Duque:
That’s from a couple of teammates. Sharon and Alex wrote that.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah. I would suggest to really dive into hands-on and try it out. You could sign up for free as a 30-day sort of platform and you could deploy your applications and CloudHub. Obviously on your local machine you could still run, if you’re using old Studio which is Eclipse, you could still run the same applications locally and certainly experience how it works and what it is happening. That’s one path to go about it.

Julián Duque:
Nice. Now for folks that have way more API experience and they want to showcase all the different internal and external APIs they have and do some API management, what other tools MuleSoft can offer to these folks?

Igor Androsov:
MuleSoft, I would say, on Anypoint platform, which is what the platform called officially. Anypoint platform, it is a full lifecycle development tool set, from API designer to API manager. All of these tools are mainly on the web, so you interact with them through the browser. You could do all the API management and manage your runtimes, implementations, monitoring on the web, as well as offload them to your monitoring tools. Now, from a developer side, right now, obviously Studio is our a default development environment, which is Eclipse space. And as I mentioned, Code Builder would be the tool to use for the future reference, including what’s upcoming, the generative AI, the Einstein Code generation. You could basically type your requirement for your API and it would just simply build it for you.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, the ACV as it’s called internally. I really like what we are doing on the web IDE aspect, both for Salesforce code builder and Anypoint code builder. Great tools. You mentioned before offline, another tool that is pretty new, which is API Experience Hub. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Igor Androsov:
Sure. Within MuleSoft ecosystem, on Anypoint platform, we have always had and still have API portals. That is how you discover the APIs. I can build the best API, but if nobody ever finds it and use it, then it’s pointless, right? Yes, it’s awesome, but no one knows about it. So, people to know about it, we have this tool called Exchange, which is original API portal. There’s public portal and private portal that you can do with this. And every API you develop and build, for each API, there’s its own portal. If you choose to enable it, there’s a portal attached to it even.
But that is very restrictive. It’s debranding and everything on this site is the same as MuleSoft offers. You could change a few things, colors and logo, but that’s about it. A lot of customers want to have a branded experience, their own pixel perfect experience on web. For that, we have this new tool, which is what you mentioned, API Experience Hub, which provides exactly that experience. What it is is, actually one of those situation where we being a part of Salesforce ecosystem and part of the Salesforce company, it is actually crossing the boundary between MuleSoft and Salesforce. Because Experience Hub actually deploys experience site, if you’re familiar with digital experience on Salesforce. But you build it all inside MuleSoft Anypoint platform. So, Anypoint platform actually has included the site builder tool like you have on an experience cloud. It’s been brought in inside Anypoint platform. And so, you can design and build this portal on your own. Really with a few clicks, you can build a very nicely styled, templated portal. And then, it deploys it and runs it within your Salesforce org as site. That’s, I would say, short description.
And obviously, as you do more with this tool, you would need to have some Salesforce experience now, not just MuleSoft. Yes, you do it on MuleSoft, but now it’s crossing over to different platform.

Julián Duque:
That’s amazing. For the folks out there that have cloud experience, they can start using API Experience Hub. That’s a lot of experiences in one sentence.

Igor Androsov:
Yes. This is kind of a midway, out of the box experience that you could build, which also could be somewhat restrictive. Prior to that, I think MuleSoft still offers this product called ACM, which is API Community Manager, which is a predecessor to Experience Hub, which is completely built on top of Salesforce. So effectively, we install a managed package. Even today, we do that as well from Experience Hub, but ACM was a completely managed package you install in the org and connected to your Anypoint platform. And therefore, you start exposing APIs.
But that experience, we found, with a lot of MuleSoft customers I should say, brought a challenge. Because as I said, it’s crossing over to the other platform. If you are having primarily a MuleSoft team who’s familiar with Anypoint platform, they’re comfortable with it, they’ve never seen Salesforce, and now suddenly they’re brought into the experience. How do you build this portal? How do you build lightning web components in this? If you want to create a custom flow, for example, for approval process or something like that. Now, you need a Salesforce admin, a Salesforce developer to do that. That experience still exists for customers who choose to go that route and build really, really branded, almost like their own site in a way. But that does require both skill sets in the team that implements that. And that has been challenging for many customers.

Julián Duque:
That means Experience Hub is not a drop-in replacement for Community Manager. Those two can still be a solution for having a portal.

Igor Androsov:
You would have one or the other. I wouldn’t imagine you would have both. But obviously the Experience Hub is a new iteration on this, and it will continue to evolve to get more feature and functionalities and more customization. Right now, it’s somewhat limited. It’s a first release this year. I think it was earlier this summer. So, this will evolve. This is mainly for fitting in that gap where customers want to have, “I don’t want to customize too much, I don’t want to build custom lightning components, but I want to build my own branded site that looks like my company.” That’s where they’re coming from.

Julián Duque:
Got it. I thought it was maybe going to replace the other product, but it sounds like that’s not the reality. Well, Igor, now changing a little bit the subject. While you are not working on integrations or earning new badges on Trailhead or new certifications, what else do you do? What do you do for fun?

Igor Androsov:
For fun without Salesforce you mean?

Julián Duque:
Without Salesforce, yes. As a whole.

Igor Androsov:
Sure.

Julián Duque:
I know you have a lot of fun with Salesforce. I can tell.

Igor Androsov:
Yeah. I have a lot of different… I would say before the pandemic, there was a lot of different things I was involved in and liked to do. And I still like them. But since pandemic, a lot of things have changed. I always like to travel. Would try to do things with nature and hiking type of stuff, anything to do with ocean. Also, I’m a scuba diver, so I do diving at different places when I get a chance. That had to stop during pandemic because a lot of these places were not open, and travel wasn’t an option for the last three years I would say. But hopefully, now it could restart again. But those are the things that I enjoy. More recently, right now in Japan, we are having a harvest season, so there’s a lot of things happening. We are about to harvest rice soon. So, I’ve been exploring a lot of local cooking and flavors and just enjoying cooking for the family and making different dishes.

Julián Duque:
That sounds great. Now there is no excuses to go outside, there is no more, at least we hope, no more pandemic or lockdown, so you can get back to traveling. And if you get back to this part of the world, let me know, so we can get together again and have a cool conversation in real life.

Igor Androsov:
Absolutely.

Julián Duque:
Igor, thank you very much for your time, and thank you for sharing your story. I’m looking forward to having you in the Salesforce Developer Podcast in the future.

Igor Androsov:
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting.

Julián Duque:
That said, if you want to learn more about the show, hit on developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear all the episodes and read the show notes. Thank you everybody, and talk to you the next time.

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