Simone Geib Join us in this episode with Simone Geib, Director of Product Management at MuleSoft, as she shares her serendipitous foray into the world of computer science. Listen in as Simone takes us back to her formative years in 1980s Germany and walks us through the trials and triumphs of entering a male-dominated field, her subsequent move into artificial intelligence, and the enriching experiences that shaped her path.

Explore the revolutionary world of cloud-hosted development environments with us, focusing on Anypoint Code Builder and the Anypoint extension for Visual Studio Code. Simone elaborates on how this tool offers developers a flexible and secure solution that fits perfectly into their workflows, regardless of location or device restrictions. She also sheds light on the integration of generative AI, which promises to transform how we approach initial flow designs. 

Remember to connect with us for more developer insights and stories, and don’t miss the chance to experience innovation and community at TDX ’24.

Show Highlights:

  • Simone’s unexpected discovery of computer science and her journey from learning MS-DOS to embracing AI at university.
  • Transition from a developer working with Visual Basic and C++ to a product manager role at MuleSoft.
  • Advantages of cloud-hosted development environments and the role of MuleSoft’s community in the evolution of Anypoint Code Builder.
  • Preview of the Einstein for Anypoint Code Builder’s generative AI pilot for flow designs from natural language prompts.

Links:

Episode Transcript

Simone Geib:
… and this guy did a really great job, and he talked about how computer science is all about maths, and it’s all logical, and everything is deterministic, and all the things that interested me and that fascinated me about maths. He made it sound so perfect for me, that all of a sudden, I’m like, “Oh, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to do computer science at university.”

Julián Duque:
And she is Simone Geib, director of product management at MuleSoft. And I’m Julián Duque, your host for the Salesforce Developers podcast, and here in the podcast, we share stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today, we are going to talk with Simone about Anypoint Code Builder, but before we’ll start just, as we left off and we often do with her early years.

Simone Geib:
All right, so I’m going to start with telling you that I grew up in the eighties in Germany. So basically I graduated from high school in 89, and so this was the time when computer science came up for the first time in Germany. I’m not sure how it was in the US, but we could have voluntarily taken computer science classes, but I wasn’t really that interested in it. I wasn’t interested in computers. We had a video gaming console at home, one of those really early ones, like green screen things where you could play football, the one that you guys call soccer over here, or tennis. But yeah, I wasn’t really interested in computers. And so the time came for me to decide what I want to do after school. So I knew I wanted to go to university, but I wasn’t really clear on what exactly I wanted to do.
I was very interested in math. It was my favorite topic at school. And so they arranged at our school this kind of career day, I think is what you would call it, and people came to school to talk about different careers. Banking was a big hit back then. A lot of my friends went into banking and there was nothing that interested me at all, but I had to go somewhere. And so I saw, oh, somebody has said to talk about computer science. Oh, well, let’s just go and listen to him so that at least I do something. And so I went and this guy did a really great job and he talked about how computer science is all about math, and it’s all logical and everything is deterministic and all the things that interested me and that fascinated me about math. He made it sound so perfect for me that all of a sudden I’m like, oh, that’s what I’m going to do.
I’m going to do computer science at university and maybe it could be a good idea to actually get a computer before I start. And so I went home and I told my parents, “As a graduation present, I would like a computer.” And so that’s how it started. And none of us actually knew anything about computers. Even my brother wasn’t into computers, and so we went to a store and he had to figure out what computers are there. So this was like, I can’t remember what it was called, but MS-DOS was the operating system back then. It wasn’t even Windows yet. And so we bought a computer and then I went to night school to learn MS-DOS to actually to be able to do something with that computer before I went to university for computer science.

Julián Duque:
That’s fascinating. I mean, usually the stories I’ve heard here at the podcast folks, start very early, but early it seems just before the university decided, okay, this is something I’m going to do. It seems that person was a very good marketer.

Simone Geib:
He really was. I mean, looking back, that guy changed my whole life, the whole trajectory of my life, and he made it sound awesome.

Julián Duque:
Nice. So it was, as you imagine, so it was that awesome as they said you or who was your whole university time?

Simone Geib:
So I went to a university in Germany in a town called Saarbrücken, and the faculty there is very well respected in computer science and on campus, we also had real good institutes. There was, for example, the Max Planck Institute. There was a Fraunhofer Institute, and there was also, not the HQ, but there was the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence, which was headquartered in Kaiserslautern, and then a little bit later on also in Nano something institute. So it was set up really well for computer science and so I started basically with no knowledge. And back then, they taught computer science in a way that they started with the foundation. They wouldn’t do that anymore today. Today they expect everybody to have the foundation, but back then, you were actually able to start with no knowledge and they did the foundation of programming languages and so that was very, very helpful.
But first of all, I kind of knew that before I started, but there were not a lot of women. So 200 people started in the same year as me, and 10 of them were women. So it was very male dominated, but it didn’t really feel as a disadvantage to me because the guys were very interested in helping to women with their studies and so it was great. We had working groups and everything. I did struggle a little bit in between with not having the same kind of experience that other people had that came into the program. But it was actually super, super interesting, and especially once I decided to go into the direction of artificial intelligence, which believe me, in the nineties was very different from what it is today.

Julián Duque:
It was way before this whole hype that we are living through.

Simone Geib:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Way before the hype. So it focused around expert systems and in fact, as part of AI, which you wouldn’t consider like that anymore, we also learned about databases, relational databases, which today you wouldn’t say anymore that is AI. So I never regretted that I did it, but it was a little bit harder sometimes starting from zero and getting the whole mindset. Obviously my math background helped me, but I had to catch up in a few things. But I loved university, especially after back then it wasn’t bachelor and master’s degree, so it was basically our final degree was a diploma. And after two years, you got what is called kind of like a pre-diploma. And after that time, that’s when I started the AI work and also I started working at the institute. And so working and studying in the same place really helped as well. And so I met a lot of people there and I enjoyed it very much. And I stayed maybe a little bit longer than the minimum required years was, but it was a very fun time and I never regretted going into computer science.

Julián Duque:
Seems you really enjoyed university and computer science.

Simone Geib:
Yes.

Julián Duque:
That’s amazing. And how was that transition to the workforce after leaving university? What was your first job or what was the first thing you did after this?

Simone Geib:
Yeah, so that was very interesting. Being in a research area for the second part of my university time and dealing with programming languages like Prologue and Lisp and working on Spark, Unix only, we didn’t really have any touch points with something like Windows, for example. And so then when I was looking for a job, it was really like, now you’re in the real world. So I joined a small software company and they did database publishing. So basically I worked with retail companies and based on the information, their product databases, we auto generated catalogs for them.
So it started with print media using, I think it was like Adobe PageMaker and programs like that. And then later on compact disks when they came up, but everything was Microsoft. So we programmed in Visual Basic and then Visual C++, the database was Microsoft Access. And then later, we started using an Oracle database. So it was this whole complete mind shift for me, again from what I had learned of at university to now learn the whole Microsoft Suite basically. So it was yet another learning experience to get into that, and I started as a developer and found out pretty quickly that that is not going to be my career.

Julián Duque:
Oh, interesting.

Simone Geib:
Yeah, so I mean I was able to develop obviously, but it wasn’t my passion. I wasn’t that great at it. So as part of my first company, I pivoted to more a project management and a team lead versus being a developer myself. So that was my first steps into an actual computer science career after I came from university.

Julián Duque:
That’s a very great segue for my next question. I was going to ask who you came from computer science to being a product manager at MuleSoft?

Simone Geib:
Yeah, so many years past. So basically my first job, as I mentioned, was at this small software company. And then in 2000, I wanted to change careers and I joined a company called BA Systems, which doesn’t exist anymore today. They were acquired by Oracle, but BA Systems was a middleware company. So I joined as a consultant still living in Germany for their integration platform. So that was the first time I came in touch with integration. It was very, very early. There was no iPaaS back then. It was called Enterprise Application Integration, EAI. And so I started working on that, I started on a very early workflow system as a consultant, and I started traveling within Europe to different customers, helping them with their integration projects.
And as part of that, I traveled a lot in Scandinavia, but then I got a project in London at the Metropolitan Police. So I helped them for about six months with their integration project, and I commuted back and forth, and then I got an offer from the professional services team of the same company, but in the UK and I loved London. So London very, very quickly became my favorite city. So I moved with BA Systems to London still as a consultant, but I found that I really enjoyed working with product managers and I enjoyed giving feedback to the product managers about the products that I was working on. And at some point it was more like, well, I don’t want to be the one to give the feedback. I want to be the one who actually gets the feedback and defines the strategy and the direction that the products are taking.

Julián Duque:
Nice. That’s a great progression,

Simone Geib:
Right, but being in Europe and BA Systems was a US company just like Salesforce and Oracle, being in Europe, they didn’t really want any product managers being based there. And at that point I was like, I’m happy in London. I don’t want to move. So I didn’t an intermediary step of joining pre-sales. So instead of being the consultant that travels all the time, I joined the pre-sales team, which obviously still visits customers but is a little bit more grounded in the area where I live. So most of my customers were in London or surrounding London. The consulting life was nice where it lasted, but it was just too much travel and too much unpredictability.
And so I joined pre-sales as an integration specialist, and for a little while I worked in the financial services team, but you can imagine being in London was really cool, working with the banks there. So I learned a lot about financial services, but keeping my goal in mind, becoming a product manager. And then in 2008, the opportunity came up to work on BA Systems integration product as a product manager with an engineering team in India. The product managers in the US struggled with the time zone and the current product manager, which was a friend of mine, said, “I want to do something else, but I know there’s really great person who is based in London who could become the product manager and work with the India team more easily.” And so that’s how I became a product manager.

Julián Duque:
And how was that first experience? It was what you were expecting?

Simone Geib:
That’s a really good question. In my mind, it was like when I’m a product manager, I can make all the decisions about my product. Obviously life is a little bit different. You have those bosses and the executives, which make a lot of decisions, but it was still, I never regretted it because still, I mean despite the fact that there’s a lot of people involved in making decisions, as the product manager, you’re the one who works with the engineering team, and that’s one of the things I really enjoy. Working with the team on what are my requirements, what do we want to have in this feature, and then they bring in, well, this is how we can do it from a technical side. And then the whole life cycle of starting with this is what we want, finding out from customers, their expectations, and then work with the actual team that does the implementation to then delivering the product. That’s a process that I still really, really enjoy.

Julián Duque:
Beautiful. And coming into the present, now you have the opportunity to be the product manager for a very, very interesting product. So let’s talk about this product. It was one of the most expected that I have seen working with some of the Mulesoft developer advocates. We were waiting for this to come up, but let’s talk about that. What is this product that you are managing right now and how it’s changing the game for Mulesoft developers and users.

Simone Geib:
Yes, with pleasure. So the product is called Anypoint Code Builder, and it’s the new IDE at Mulesoft. So we call it the next generation IDE. And basically what it does is it’s based on top of Visual Studio Code. So I don’t know if you’re familiar with Visual Studio Code, but if you have followed the evolution of IDE, so obviously Eclipse was very, very popular for a long time, but now the number one IDE in the market out there is Visual Studio Code. And the beauty of it is that you can develop extensions, or in our case, an extension pack on top of Visual Studio Code. So we developed what is called the Anypoint extension pack that you install into either a desktop version of Visual Studio Code or a cloud version. So it comes in two flavors, which is really, really cool. And then you use those extensions to design your APIs, implement your APIs, develop your integrations, and then in the same tool, you can do the whole life cycle of starting with the design, going to the implementation, deploy to a local runtime, debug test, and then deploy it to cloud hub.
You can choose, as I said, between a desktop version or a cloud version. And having Visual Studio Code as the foundation, first of all, makes it a much more modern experience and more lightweight, but also it brings in the whole ecosystem of VS-code extensions. And for example, there is a Java extension that you can install and then you can start as part of your Mule project to implement Java classes that you can then invoke within your integration. And there’s a lot of other extensions that you can use to complement what we are providing from MuleSoft to round out your development.

Julián Duque:
That is wonderful. One of the most interesting features I’ve seen is having it hosted in the cloud because usually, sure, I have Visual Studio Code in my computer and I have everything here, but if I am traveling or if I am logging in from a different computer and I need to do something, I don’t have access to my development environment. If I have that in the cloud, obviously I’m going to have a lot of advantages in there.

Simone Geib:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And we got a lot of really great feedback from our customers, having those two flavors where we are not locking you in into one or the other, but you can basically decide which one you want to use. And spinning up a cloud instance is super easy. You would just go to your Anypoint homepage and you can just spin it up there with the press of a button, and it’s really cool. It runs on, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Salesforce Code Builder, that’s the foundation for our cloud IDE.

Julián Duque:
Beautiful. Yes, familiar with it. And one of the most interesting features, especially for Salesforce Code Builder, and I guess it’s the same for Anypoint, is certain companies have security policies that don’t allow developers to install any software in their work machines with a cloud-based solution that, I mean, that security constraint. It’s not there.

Simone Geib:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. We actually talked to a customer the other day who said, “I cannot install anything on my laptop. I will just spin it up in the cloud,” and because when you develop integrations, you anyways use a source code management system. And so you can check it in, check it out either from your desktop or from your cloud so you’re not locked into either one. And in your team, some people can work on the desktop and some people can work on the cloud. It’s all completely flexible.

Julián Duque:
And it’s ACV, which is the shorter for Anypoint Code Builder, it is GA right now. It is generally available or is it still in beta?

Simone Geib:
Yeah, so we made the desktop version generally available last year, October. And the cloud IDE is still in open beta, so everybody can use it. It’s just not generally available, but the features in both are the same.

Julián Duque:
Perfect. So now you know for all of those that are listening to us right now, go give it a try. Get the extension for Visual Studio Code, which is generally available, or give it a try to the cloud version with Code Builder. How can we get access to this? How can I find either the extension or the cloud version?

Simone Geib:
Right. Good question. So for the desktop version, you just go to the Visual Studio Code marketplace and then type in Anypoint extension pack, and then you can just install the whole extension pack, which pulls in all the extensions that you need. For the cloud version, you go to your Anypoint homepage and you will see a tile there for Anypoint Code Builder, you click on get started, that opens a website, which we call ACB Central and from there you can then create a cloud instance.

Julián Duque:
Wonderful. Coming back to your beginnings, you dreamt about becoming a product manager and now you are living the dream. What is the thing you like the most of managing this product? What is your most favorite part of this?

Simone Geib:
I think it’s hard to pick just one favorite part. I mean, as I mentioned before, I really enjoy working with engineering on starting with a concept and then see it become reality. But I also enjoy working, especially here at MuleSoft with the MuleSoft community. We have these amazing community leaders and the community is a group of such amazing people. They’re so knowledgeable, they’re so nice and friendly, and they helped us a lot with our journey. Anypoint Code Builder started with a pilot and then a closed beta and then an open beta. And the community members, we are a huge part of this journey getting us to the point where we are, but also helping us promoting Anypoint Code Builder through blogs, through videos, and through all of that. So I very much enjoy that. And just talking about it at conferences, TDX is coming up in March and just telling everybody how awesome this product is and what is coming.
So all those things I think are a lot of fun. And if I may have a shameless plug as well, I don’t don’t know if you-

Julián Duque:
Please do.

Simone Geib:
… To talk about that. So we are also doing right now a generative AI pilot. So it’s called Einstein for Anypoint Code Builder Generative Flows. And it’s a closed pilot, which we started basically with our October release last year. And we’re doing a refresh when our February release comes out. So the way it works is we integrated Einstein into our UI and you can open it up within Anypoint Code Builder, and then you put in a natural language prompt for your flow. For example, I want to create a flow which listens to a new case in Salesforce, and when a new case comes in, I want to transform that and save it to a database table, just as an example. And then Einstein gives you an example flow, which you can then use as a starting point for your implementation. So you don’t need to start with an empty canvas anymore, but rather like Einstein helps you, this is your starting point, here, you have a flow and now you can add the rest of your business logic in there.

Julián Duque:
Oh, that’s exciting. I can’t wait to give it a try. How can I get access to that closed pilot?

Simone Geib:
So any customer or partner who wants to get access, please work with your account teams. We have a process in place, they can just talk to me and then we can get the process rolling. We also have a process to get internal people enabled so we can talk about it after this how we can get you enabled to try that as well.

Julián Duque:
Beautiful. I was asking for audience, of course. All of you that are customers, please go ahead and ask your accounts. So final question, while you are not managing these amazing team and working with this amazing product, what do you do? What are your hobbies or your pastimes?

Simone Geib:
Oh yes. I’m so glad you asked. So my favorite pastime is spending time with my little dog, Lily, and see her sometimes in Twitch streams where she’s in my lab and she’s just watching me do my stuff. She’s like a cute little Havanese and she’s like the most adorable little dog. And I recently a year ago started knitting and so it’s a perfect combination of sitting on the couch, knitting ahead with Lily next to me, cuddling with her, and then crafting like hats or scarves. I think it’s absolutely fascinating to knit something that you can then give as a present or just wear it yourself.

Julián Duque:
Or knit a little sweater for Lily.

Simone Geib:
Yes, yes. She would chew it up immediately so she’s not getting anything.

Julián Duque:
Just like my dog, but our cat, we have a naked cat, so definitely she will love one of those sweaters.

Simone Geib:
Right, right. Yeah, so that’s what I love most, or living here in California when the sun is shining, just going out with Lily, going for walks, it’s a lot of fun. It’s one of the reasons… I know I talked about my career a lot and never mentioned how I got to California, but basically the weather in London just got too much for me, the rain. And so I moved to California where we have a lot of sunshine and I enjoy that a lot more than the rain and the grayness of London.

Julián Duque:
Oh, nice. Nice. That’s great to hear. Simone, thank you very much for this amazing episode. Looking forward to meeting you at TDX this year.

Simone Geib:
Excellent. Yes, I will be there. I hope that everybody who listens to this podcast episode will meet us there. We are showing a few things in Anypoint Code Builder that are not out there yet. And yeah, I hope to see everyone there.

Julián Duque:
Of course. Thanks for joining and bye-bye. And that’s it for now. If you want to learn more about the show, head on to Developer.salesforce.com slash 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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