Three (and a half) things we learned this week

Last time we put out a selection of quickfire, vaguely-interesting things we’d caught floating around in the Salesforce world, it seemed to go down pretty well. So at the risk of ruining a good thing, why don’t we give it another go, hey? Here are three (and a half) more things that I learned this week…

1) You can play Blackjack using Flow

Now, please note that I said this post was going to comprise things that I learned this week. That’s important, because this little beauty has been out there for a while, but I finally got round to checking it out myself. And it was as good as I was hoping.

One of our London Administrator Group members, Sean Dukes (and his colleague Luke Kozakewycz) put together this blog, outlining how (and why!) they built an entire Blackjack application using Flow (and Lightning Components).

Do check it out to learn about a really fun use case, and you’ll even pick up some Flow best practices (and learn clever stuff like using primes to shuffle the deck) along the way. Or if you prefer your learning experiences to be more audio-visual, here is a recording of Sean and Luke’s presentation at Dreamforce. 

2) Salesforce really are listening

…And no, we don’t just mean via Einstein Voice. [Editor’s Note: This relates to a terrible joke told in this post. Please do try to keep up.]

You know the whole thing where Salesforce were going to revamp the IdeaExchange and listen to their customers more? Well it seems like it might actually be happening. I don’t mean the actual technical revamp – clearly that will take some time to work out and bring to reality – but the idea of listening and hearing the community’s concerns with the current ideas platform, and questions about how the new one might work.

How do I know this? Because after we posted our blog about the proposed shake-up to the IdeaExchange, Jennifer Sacks – one of the hosts of the Dreamforce session on this topic – jumped into a Twitter conversation with Daniel Ballinger to understand his questions and potential concerns with the new vision. It was a fruitful discussion with a few others getting involved too, and to me it showed that understanding what we think really is important to Salesforce in this initiative. Good on ’em.

3) Astro doesn’t necessarily mean Astro

Once more the community are able to vote on which cuddly critter they want to represent the upcoming release. If you really care what the logo options are then, (a) you shouldn’t, as that’s not what this piece is about, but (b) they’re below, you dork.

No the reason I wanted to mention this is that I didn’t think we were going to be voting on logos anymore, and actually that all release logos were going to be variations on Astro from now on. That’s definitely what this post from last year said, isn’t it? You know, the time when they ruthlessly sacrificed the penguins which had been democratically elected by the people?

For those of you who hate clicking on community links due to the ever-present, and very real, fear of ‘oh no which user am I going to be logged in as this time?’, here’s the key quote from that post: “Moving forward, our approach is to utilize three specific Astro variations that already closely align to the three seasons we release. For each release we will then add a modifier on to the Astro character to make that years release unique and timeless.”

Did they just change their mind? Did the critter production line workers threaten a revolt if their produce was not put on the market? Who knows? And frankly, who cares? Remember that you can kill off the critters now anyway, should you choose to.

3.5) The ‘and a half’ thing

I think it’s important to never stop learning, and I believe it’s especially important to never stop learning about yourself. Get to know yourself better and you’ll like yourself more. You’re a decent human. We all think so, and so should you.

The reason I mention this is that I ended the last ‘three and a half things’ post with a little insight into my life, my world, and my mindset. So why don’t we continue that theme, and do the same again?

Because this week I learned the following about myself: I am a hoarder. A hoarder of Salesforce dev orgs, I mean.

Yeah I know that doesn’t make me unique or special. We’ve all got a bajillion of the things. I get that. No, the thing that brought home that I was an org hoarder is that when I received those emails from Salesforce saying ‘log in to this org before December or we will remove them’, I blindly did it.

I didn’t stop to think about whether I needed those orgs or not (chances are I probably don’t), but I wanted the decision about whether I kept them or not to be mine and mine alone. So I logged in to them all, and now I’ll have them for at least another year, or whatever it is. I don’t need it now, but maybe one day. Classic hoarder behaviour, I’m sure you’ll agree.