Christie Fidura Join us as we take a journey with Christie Fidura, Salesforce’s director of Global Trailblazer Engagement, through her unexpected love affair with technology and the world of programming. We explore the elegance and universality of coding languages as Christie reflects on her transition from an English literature and Spanish student to teaching engineers at DuPont. This conversation reveals the hidden poetry in programming and the crucial role of technical communication in bridging the gap between users and creators.

Christie also highlights the significance of “Johnny Appleseed” figures who sow the seeds of knowledge and enthusiasm, fostering local communities. You’ll learn the importance of nurturing personal connections within this expansive network and how we enable a transparent exchange between community members and Salesforce product managers through various platforms. Tune in to this episode for a blend of personal narratives and insights into the dynamic Salesforce ecosystem.

Show Highlights:

  • The growth and evolution of Christie’s relationship with technology.
  • The warm, familial nature of the Salesforce community, the global connections made, and the significant role of “Johnny Appleseed” trailblazers.
  • Christie’s experience with the London Salesforce admin meetup.
  • The importance of maintaining personal connections in the community and facilitating direct interactions between Salesforce product managers and community members.
  • Christie’s plans for 2024 with a focus on artificial intelligence and the role developers can play in guiding companies through AI implementation.

Links:

Episode Transcripts

Christie Fidura:
We were asked to come into a room full of computers and we were asked to plot points from a graph onto this green and black computer screen. And it was the ugliest experience I’d ever had. And I thought, why? What is the point? I do not understand the point of plotting a point on this computer screen. This makes no sense to me. And that was my first experience.

Julián Duque:
And that’s Christie Fidura, Director of Global Trailblazer Engagement at Salesforce. And I’m Julian Duque, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. And here on the podcast we share stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today we are going to talk with Christie about the global Salesforce community. But before, we will start just as we left off, and we often do, with her early years.

Christie Fidura:
At the age of 12, in the sixth grade, in a little town in Virginia, which is actually… it’s part of a big county called Chesterfield. But I went to a little school called Matoaca High School, Matoaca Middle School. We were asked to come into a room full of computers and we were asked to plot points from a graph onto this green and black computer screen. And it was the ugliest experience I’d ever had. And I thought, why? What is the point? I do not understand the point of plotting a point on this computer screen. This makes no sense to me. And that was my first experience.

Julián Duque:
Interesting. I remember those monitors. The one I used had a button that you pretty much pressed and it changed the color from green to orange.

Christie Fidura:
Oh wow.

Julián Duque:
That was the full colored experience for me when I was a kid. It’s amazing. And from that, how was your whole evolution? Did you continue using computers along your teenager years? Or when do you start to consider something related to technology for your career?

Christie Fidura:
Well, you know when I was talking about plotting those points on a graph?

Julián Duque:
Yes.

Christie Fidura:
And I just didn’t understand the purpose of it. And for me, I just needed to have a bigger understanding of the point of the exercise. And I didn’t really get that in that class, and then didn’t really touch a computer again until maybe Atari video games. We had a home Atari system. I am not a great video game player. I really am terrible. I’m terrible with spatial relationships, so I really struggle with getting a character from one place to another. But I thought, okay, who are the people who made this thing? How did that happen?
And I really had this great curiosity about how you created something on a keyboard that became something on a screen. And when I went to university I studied English literature, and I also minored in, as you know, Julian, I minored in Spanish and I studied Spanish for eight total years at both my high school level and at my university. And it became apparent to me that language was the key to everything. If you could understand language, you can understand nuance, you can understand context, you can understand how people are communicating with one another. And totally as a fluke, I was one of 12 people, university students, chosen by DuPont Corporation, where my dad worked, to come in and learn a computer system and teach it to the technical engineers after writing a training manual on it.
And the technical engineers that I was working with, these were people who had been working for DuPont for 30 years plus. These were distinguished engineers. These were important people, and yet they didn’t know how to use a mouse. They didn’t know how to navigate a computer language. And I thought, this is my thing. I really enjoy not only seeing the user experience on the screen, but seeing behind the curtain, understanding how that technology got onto the screen.
And so my last year of university I started taking some technical writing courses, and then I became a technical writer when I graduated, which was perfect timing because there were a lot of new computer systems that had come out. And this was in 1992, in the early days. There were a lot of new computer systems that had come out, but not a lot of people knew how to use them, so a technical interpreter or technical communicator was a very important role suddenly. And I remember going back to my university and speaking to one of my beloved English literature professors. And she said, “I just don’t understand how a person who loves Shakespeare and Chaucer could have ended up in the role that you’re doing.” And I said, “But Dr. Cook, it’s just a language.”

Julián Duque:
It’s just a language. Yeah.

Christie Fidura:
It’s just a language.

Julián Duque:
And I love that it’s called a programming language, and it has instructor statements, like a whole special grammatics.

Christie Fidura:
Yes.

Julián Duque:
One thing I learned from my dad: my dad used to be one of those persons that started with big mainframes and the first programming languages and perforated cards, things like that.

Christie Fidura:
Wow.

Julián Duque:
And he stopped programming for a while. And at the end of his years I started learning, I think it was Pascal at the time. And he came to me and asked me, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “Dad, I’m trying to program using these language.” And he asked me to teach him. I was like, “Okay, this is what I learned.” And he was able to build a program in just one day because he already knew the structure of the language.

Christie Fidura:
Yes. Yes.

Julián Duque:
He had all the experience from like 20 years before, and he was able to apply that knowledge just because of the understanding of the language.

Christie Fidura:
Incredible.

Julián Duque:
For me, that was the eureka point. Like, “Oh my god, this is powerful.”

Christie Fidura:
Yeah. Yeah. And being a technical writer meant that I actually got to straddle that world between the people who were using the thing that was built and the people who were creating or building the thing. And that was just the most amazing opportunity for me. I would just sit with the developers and I would watch them code because, really, I think this is where my love of being with really good developers comes from, is that you could sit with two different developers and they could code the same thing. And you could see that one of them takes it to the next level. You could see the elegance of the code. You could see how clever, a little bit more experience or a little bit more understanding provided them with that ability to make the code even better or more efficient or more scalable, or whatever it is. And I would just sit with them and watch. And I thought, “These people, they are artists. They just use keyboards instead of a paintbrush.”

Julián Duque:
Yeah, that’s fascinating. And now, well, you have the opportunity to not only be around a small set of people that works with technology, but with a whole global community, which is quite a privilege.

Christie Fidura:
Amazing. It’s incredible. I just don’t know how I ended up here, but I am so grateful to be in this position because it is such an incredible place to be. And I’m not one of those people that uses hyperbole a lot to describe things. I don’t. I describe things exactly how they are, but the Salesforce community is truly unique. I started studying community. I got really interested in community about 15 years ago, and I did a lot of influencer marketing. And I thought, well, influencer marketing is just the start of building community. I could see how those two things go together. Let me look into this community thing. And I studied, as part of my coursework that I did, certificates in community management. I studied various communities and I just thought, the Salesforce community is unlike anybody else’s.
In a traditional development house you have one audience type, you have one persona to talk to, and that’s it. And usually those people are developers. And I love those people. They are my people. But at the Salesforce level it’s a whole different thing because you’ve got so many different persona. So not only do you have different cultures and different geographies and different regions and different languages and different viewpoints and different cultural responsibilities and different socioeconomic backgrounds, but then you have different persona, different roles, different people who build front ends, who build back ends, who don’t build anything, who drag and drop, who run reports and dashboards, who build reports and dashboards. This is a very diverse community.

Julián Duque:
Yes. I’ve been organizing communities since 2001, for a lot of time. And the Salesforce community is one of the most unique communities I’ve been part of.

Christie Fidura:
Yeah.

Julián Duque:
The people really loves what they do. You can feel that there is this sense of belonging. And they always try to be welcoming to everybody. I was completely new to the Salesforce ecosystem when I joined Salesforce four years ago, and foreign totally to the whole concept of a CRM or enterprise software or even the community. And I felt welcome pretty much immediately I started working with the community, which is something great. There are some other communities that are not as welcoming, and you will need to earn your space.

Christie Fidura:
Yes. Yes.

Julián Duque:
And it’s kind of hard. With the Salesforce community it’s way different. And that’s one of the things that I like the most about this.

Christie Fidura:
Absolutely. 100%. I used to run my own little community manager London meetup group. So it was a meetup group for London community managers. And a lot of times community managers work on their own in a silo. So the meetup group was great because you could come into a room where other people knew the pains, trials, and tribulations of what you were facing on a day-to-day basis at work. And I had a Twitter stalk moment back in the day where I invited Erica Kuhl, who I found out was coming to London, to come and speak at my meetup group. And Erica Kuhl is sort of the OG of the Trailblazer community. She’s the one who put it all together.
Now, we can all say that the community might have structured themselves, but Erica was the one who started to see the benefit of them and to talk about the benefit of the community upwards inside the organization, garnering support for them. And Erica talked a lot in her presentation. And this was years ago at my little meetup group. She talked about the importance of the goals of the community, the thing that made the community what it was. And she said it was peer-to-peer success.
And I think that is the most true statement I’ve ever heard describing the Trailblazer community, because you have people who really care that you will be successful. And they help you on that journey by either giving you support, giving you an answer, inviting you to an event, taking your hand when you’re at an event, whatever that might be. But people are very encouraging here. They like to see each other succeed.

Julián Duque:
Yes. You are celebrating pretty much seven years at Salesforce. Lucky number seven, so congratulations.

Christie Fidura:
Thank you, thank you. Such an honor and a privilege to be at this company. I really do love it here.

Julián Duque:
Of course. And seven years is quite a number. Who was your first interaction with the Salesforce ecosystem? Who you started with this ecosystem and community?

Christie Fidura:
I think the real very first opportunity I had to get together with the community as any sort of size was, I think that I went to the London Salesforce admin meetup group. And there were 120 people at this event. And we hosted them here at Salesforce Tower London. And it was probably the most relaxed meetup I’d ever been to. People were joking and they were laughing and they knew each other really well. And they were wearing funny T-shirts. And they had their own sort of special vibe that I had never seen before. I talked before about, when you hang out with developers, you go to a meetup group and, as the only woman, I might not really talk to that many people. I might just sit in the back by myself or try to talk to the person sitting next to me. But because I’m not a developer, I can’t really fit into that very well. But I love what they do and I love to see it.
But at this particular event I had no trouble talking to lots of people. And I thought, this is kind of like a family reunion, and they’re doing this on a monthly basis. What is this all about? So it was such a privilege. And then it started to be conference season right after that, of course. And lots of World Tour events, and running all over Europe setting up Trailhead experiences at various World Tour events and things. And I would see some of these same people. They have traveled from London to come to Germany, to Hanover, to go to the World Tour in Germany. And I think, what on Earth are you… why would you come to World Tour Germany? You’re based in London. And it’s because they wanted to be together. They enjoy interacting and seeing one another. Just like a family reunion.

Julián Duque:
Yeah,, going to different community events like the Dreamin’ events.

Christie Fidura:
Yeah.

Julián Duque:
And we just recently released one podcast episode with the organizers of DreamOle, the Spanish Dreamin’ event. I’ve been to different of these conferences along the United States and it’s amazing to see, on each of one events, even though they are on different parts of the world, a lot of the same people.

Christie Fidura:
Yes, yes.

Julián Duque:
The same people not only attending but also sharing, speaking, serving, doing volunteering. It’s definitely a global community. And when TDX or Dreamforce happened, now it’s kind of this reunion of all of these great communities in one place, which is, as I mentioned before, this is something I haven’t seen in other communities I’ve been part of.

Christie Fidura:
1000% yes. It’s incredible to see not only these… we might call them… I don’t know if you know this phrase, Julian, but there’s a phrase in American English to represent a person who builds little things as he goes. And that person’s name was Johnny Appleseed. He was an apple tree planter and he planted trees all across the United States, except he was just a mythical character. But I see lots of these Johnny Appleseed type of folks. They’ll go to a regional event, sort of like a DreamOle in Spain, and they might meet someone from Serbia or Kosovo or something like that. And the next thing you know they’re suddenly at a Serbia or a Kosovo Dreamin’. And it’s these sorts of things that are happening that are just incredible to witness. Yeah. It’s very difficult to put your finger on how enormous the contribution is, because lots of people in this ecosystem start with a spark. They have a spark and then they are supported by other people to bring that spark into life. And it’s really a privilege to see it all happen.

Julián Duque:
And let’s talk about this mythical person, this Johnny Appleseed within the community. Your current role, how can you support this person, this Johnny Appleseed? These community organizers or these people that are just serving the developer community? What do you do from your global position to serve or to help these communities?

Christie Fidura:
I think the number one thing that I do is I try not to lose sight of the individuals, despite being in a global role. And that is, it can be quite challenging but it also can be a great connector. I consider myself fundamentally as a connector. I want to connect the community with the people building the technology at Salesforce. And that is how you inspire people. And you’re breaking down the barriers between the company and the community. You’re enabling transparency. You’re soliciting feedback both ways. If a product manager can sit in a room with developers or admins and really hear about strange use cases or off-book use cases that they hadn’t considered before, they can implement that into their roadmap or they can write content to help shine light on how to get around that particular struggle. And it’s all about breaking those barriers down, as far as I’m concerned.
So a lot of what I do is to connect and to build the bridge between the community and the global developer team at Salesforce, the product managers. And one of the ways that I do that is I host a monthly webinar, which is a global event, but anybody can pitch up. I love that. And that is a monthly ask me anything with our product managers. There’s always product manager experts on the call, and anybody can dial in. Admins, architects, end users, developers, and they can ask any question they want about that particular technology, function, feature, what have you.
And having that access is incredibly valuable for people. I also build the online community, which is on our Trailblazer community digital platform. So over the past two years our little Salesforce developers group group has increased its membership exponentially. There’s now 21,500 people there sharing information, asking questions, relying on one another, and getting support from each other. I would like next to work with the product teams, to make sure that they are visiting that particular place more often. We have a real opportunity now that Twitter or X is no longer Twitter, right?

Julián Duque:
Mm-hmm.

Christie Fidura:
So instead of PMs putting out special notices or announcements or events or beta programs, et cetera on that particular platform where nobody is anymore, why don’t they come and do it in the Trailblazer community, where 21,500 people want to hear what they have to say in one group? So this is my sweet spot for next year. It’s something I really want to focus on, to talk about the value that they can deliver but also the value that they can derive. And so it’s those types of things that I’m trying to do to make sure that our community is getting what they need, basically.

Julián Duque:
Beautiful, beautiful. The ask me anythings has been a success. And I was witness of the beginning of this project and how it has evolved, and I really love what you are doing with that. So thank you very much for that specific-

Christie Fidura:
Such a fun program.

Julián Duque:
Oh, definitely. The interaction with the PMs and the community. And you can see also the same people coming in every month asking challenging questions, learning, contributing, giving feedback. As I said, it feels like a very cohesive community and a real community. People behind that cares about the product. And not only to learn about but to also contribute to.

Christie Fidura:
Yes, exactly. And when you have a program like that, the benefit of it is that it’s the same time, it’s the same day of the week of each month. When it’s that stable, people can just pitch in and see, “I’ll dial into this one. I don’t really know anything about commerce, cloud developments language. Let me attend that one.” Well, that person has just gained new insight that maybe they don’t necessarily need at work, but they’ve just increased their knowledge and their awareness of a new technology that they didn’t know about previously. And that means that people are upskilling themselves. They’re investing in themselves and continuing to learn. And ultimately it makes them more employable but, more importantly, it keeps them curious. It keeps them interested. They keep investing in themselves.

Julián Duque:
Yes. And the last thing I’m seeing that you are doing that I really love, and this is kind of new, if I’m not wrong, which is the Developer Spotlight Series.

Christie Fidura:
It’s the best.

Julián Duque:
Giving the visibility to the people from the community, what they are building, what they are doing. Being recognized by the company that you are part of this community is. That’s the goal for a lot of people. So this is great.

Christie Fidura:
The Spotlight program, it’s so surprising to me that… it’s something I should’ve done a long time ago, and I’m so happy that I get to do it now. But the whole point of it is, people are just sitting at their desk every day. What are they doing at their desk? Again, I’m pulling that curtain back between the technologist and everybody else. And we have one coming out soon. This particular developer has built an open source plugin.
That’s a person who’s built that on his own time, he’s giving it to the community for free, and he’s teaching other people about it. What’s that motivation for him? What’s that driver? How did he get there? What is he hoping to achieve, and why? And it’s just goodness for goodness’ sake. And that’s the kind of thing that I think is so important to highlight, because he’s not getting any financial gain, he’s not getting maybe any publicity, but what he’s doing is helping a whole lot of people.
And I love that mentality so much, and I think it should be celebrated. But not just that. There are other people who are in the spotlights because of the great stuff that they do. Vehinia Ferrera, she builds community wherever she goes. She went on holiday to Argentina and she gave a presentation to the developer group there. How wonderful?

Julián Duque:
Leisurely on vacation.

Christie Fidura:
So I think these are the types of people who are doing great stuff, and they should be recognized for it. So thank you for saying that, because I love this program as well.

Julián Duque:
Of course. Those are our heroes, the community members. They are definitely what makes our job worthy.

Christie Fidura:
Yeah. Perfectly said, Julian.

Julián Duque:
Yes. One last thing: at the time this episode goes live, it’s going to be 2024, so happy new year for all of those that are listening.

Christie Fidura:
Happy new year.

Julián Duque:
What’s in your plans for 2024? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Christie Fidura:
I think it’s just going to be such an incredible focus on artificial intelligence. And that’s true for every single organization, but it’s true for every single person in the ecosystem. Companies are talking about this, and they’re trying to figure out how to implement it to make efficiencies, to build improvements in, to help their customers better. And I think that developers could really lead the way here because companies don’t know where to start with AI. They just don’t. They say, “Oh, we must have it but I have no idea what that looks like. So what can we do?” So I think that developers have a really unique opportunity because they like to get in, they like to play, they like to test things out, they like to build. And I think that they have a really great opportunity to start learning some of this. We’ve got, what? 15 modules on Trailhead right now for AI, and I’ve done all of them. I think they’re all fantastic. More, obviously, to come.
But I think that our developers and our ecosystem really have an opportunity to help their companies make great decisions, and I love that. I love that. But I think, from a personal level, AI is probably very much like what you think, Julian. It is the great technology shift that I remember experiencing, going from a black screen with green writing on it in the sixth grade when I was 12 years old to my first Windows machine, and apps. And then the move to apps. And then move to internet apps. This is such a fundamental shift in the way that we do everything in our lives that I can’t wait to be a part of it, and I want to bring some of that in, whether we’re focusing on AI, developers, or whether we’re talking to them in a different way. Whether we’re featuring them on podcasts. I want other people to get inspired by what they’re doing. So I’ve got more work, more thinking there to be done, Julian. More thinking.

Julián Duque:
Yeah. Looking forward to seeing all of those builders and developers from the global community talking more about AI, showcasing what they are doing, all of their research, their open source technologies. And how can they interact with Salesforce and serve this community with AI? Making it more humane.

Christie Fidura:
Yeah.

Julián Duque:
Christie, this has been amazing time talking to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Is there any last words that you want to say to the developer community that is listening to you?

Christie Fidura:
Thank you for being a part of our community.

Julián Duque:
And that’s it for now. If you want to learn more about the show, head on to developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear all the episodes and read the show notes. Thank you, everybody. Happy new year, and talk to you the next time.

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