Description
In this fireside chat, five of Gearset’s 2024 DevOps Leaders — Cristine Otero, Deepak Veera, Jeremy Foster, Lauren Krcatovich, and Nikhil Reddy — team up to share their thoughts on the evolving landscape of Salesforce DevOps. Learn about pivotal career decisions, essential tools, and how to foster a DevOps culture. They share invaluable advice for those beginning their careers and practical strategies to improve work-life balance, too.
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Transcript
I'm Nicola, community manager at GearSat, and I'm very lucky that I get to work a little bit with these five incredible DevOps leaders who are all part of our GearSat DevOps leaders program. We've got quite a lot to cover, so we can very quickly, starting with Nikhil, just run through your name, your role, your company, and how long you've been part of the Salesforce ecosystem.
Sure. I'm Nikhil. I'm from Amazon. I'm a senior TBM, managing the Bybit Prime side of the organization over there.
I've been using Salesforce for a lot since twenty fifteen.
Hi. My name is Lauren, and I'm with Cision. I've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for only two years, and I manage our CRM development team for the US and Canadian instances.
Hi. I'm Jeremy. I work at the pilot company, Pilot Flying J Travel Centers. I'm the manager of our Salesforce development team, and I've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a little over eight years now.
Hi. My name is Christine Otero. I'm a senior Salesforce developer, with the MathWorks on their CRM team specifically, And I've been on the Salesforce platform since twenty fifteen.
Yes.
My name is Deepak Bira. I work as Salesforce revenue cloud consultant. So I work a lot in CPQ for those that are familiar.
Seven years or so, on the platform. I think all that's been consulting and investing in revenue cloud.
Brilliant. So, Nikhil, you have been part of the Salesforce ecosystem for almost a decade. Yeah. What changes have you seen in Salesforce DevOps?
Oh, I've been using DevOps since twenty sixteen, so we started from change sets to multiple other tools, gear set, then all other tools, and again gear set. So we have seen a lot of changes that happen.
It's just not in the past, there used to be just dedicated team just doing that and people don't know what what was releasing and everything. So there's a lot of changes that we have seen, the pipelines, automations, and user interface changes. I've seen the new flow changes that you guys are building, which was painful because flow was just a, flowchart now. When we go, it looks like a code now, it looks like an actual one. So there are a lot of improvements which are making user friendly and everyone can, deploy right now, not just a particular person who knows about the DevOps. So there are a lot of improvements and I think there are a lot to come to, so it's going in a nice and fast way.
Okay. What about you, Jeremy?
And Yeah.
We've been using Gear Sets since about twenty nineteen and fortunately, have not used the change set since then. So, it's been really nice. We started out with just manual compare and deploys. I'm sure a lot of users have.
And then, as of about two years ago, we've developed more robust pipeline integration. So it's been a huge change for our team instead of having to manually rebuild a change set and get it and have to go through the iteration of redoing that over and over. We're now into a pipeline phase where all of our changes are committed, and we all use PRs and have validation run. It's just a lot smoother process.
That's changes in Salesforce Dev DevOps, but what about within your own careers? I think quite a few of you had quite interesting roots into, what you're doing now. Christine, do you wanna start us off?
Sure. So, I started out as a front end developer. I had no, like, Salesforce exposure back then.
I was just primarily working, like, frontline customer support for websites, and, their CRM system happened to be Salesforce. So that's when I started tinkering as an admin and decided, okay, this is my time to definitely shift gears and jump into the Salesforce ecosystem because it was more in alignment with my interests and haven't looked back since.
That's good to know. Deepak, you, started in philosophy.
Yeah. I didn't, I joke with people. I didn't go to school wanting to be a Salesforce consultant. I don't know if any of you did.
But I think I've I've met some other people from the humanities here. I didn't go to school to be a developer.
I thought I wanted to be a professor. I wanted to teach.
But somewhere along the way, I realized that Sally wasn't so good being a professor, so I thought I'll do something else. So I think Salesforce has been great. I feel like I can incorporate and this is true too, I feel like I can incorporate some of my passions, my interests into my everyday job, and I think that's been rewarding.
Brilliant. Lauren, what about you?
Yeah. So my background has been in as a business analyst and then moving into more of a product operations role.
And for me, that background around understanding, like, system development and some of those core principles, especially around operational practices, best practices to stay organized and ensure that there's consistency and alignment between teams, whether you're developers or if you're a product owner or business analyst. All of those, concepts are consistent.
And so for me, moving into that dev ops management role has been a really smooth transition even though for me it was a scary one at first when the opportunity presented itself.
But it's been really great to be a part of that and see all of the development changes and, like, see how Gerasa has been able to really help kind of go back to that standardization, the concept of organization and alignment between a global team to ensure quality code that your end users can use and meet those business expectations.
Great. And, Nikhil?
I did not even like Salesforce when I moved to Salesforce at that point of time. I was a PLC developer, and I was integrating a lot of other systems.
And every other system was easy to integrate except Salesforce, and no one was supporting me to help it. So, I had to learn it to integrate it myself, and that's how I felt like it's, interesting because they listen to customers' voice and they, added any limitations, garnered limits, increased expectations, over there.
And just like also Deepak mentioned, the payables look greater in Salesforce world than the PLSQL world, and it's, and it's growing faster. So I just moved into Salesforce.
Cool. So you so you didn't really like Salesforce to start with.
Did not. But you've chosen to stick with it almost a decade.
So has there been any tools or practices that have sort of been vital for Salesforce DevOps that helped you?
Yeah. Absolutely. So, I started using Gertrude since twenty twenty, but before that I used Change Sets as well. I used another third party tools, over there, and also custom native tools, which we didn't which our old company don't wanna invest too much money on that.
But the more customer, Salesforce was improving more on the Lightning side than the Classic side, and that's the entire customer, echoes that Salesforce is in in developing it in the same way. Gatsby did the same thing. In twenty twenty, Gatsby was not like this, not how it is. I we are using there were no pipelines, and there were a lot of other third parties which we which already had the pipelines and integrations and everything.
And currently right now, we don't use Git. We use CodeCommit, which is another painful tool for GitSet.
And it, listen to our voice and they integrated core company, which is faster pipeline movements as well. So there are a lot of improvements I'm seeing and the, the DevOps, again, is an important thing for every company, and it depends upon how they're using it. So, I mean, I can talk about it for, like, longer time. I don't wanna waste the time over there. But, yes, DevOps is necessary for us, and it's it's really good that everyone is using most of them are using right now based on the DevOps report.
So Cool.
We'll we'll come back to that. Jeremy, has there been any tools or practices that you think are vital for Salesforce DevOps?
Yeah.
You know, when I first started, we were using, you know, IntelliJ and XL Connector were about the the most tools that we had had used with it. And then as we've grown and have have moved companies, we embraced, Gearset and started using that. So it's it's been helpful to shift our process with, with the DevOps practices and, getting everybody familiar because we've used Bitbucket and GitHub and different applications like that. So being able to formalize how you move your metadata and how everybody works in the same environment has really helped streamline our process and embracing those tools and and learning them through applications like Trailhead and and DevOps Launchpad.
It's it's really been helpful if we sort of broaden it out, what But if we sort of broaden it out, what about DevOps culture?
What does that look like to you, Deepak? You're a consultant. You must have seen quite a few different examples.
Yeah. I think I think it's cool that we're asking or this question's even presented. I don't think a few years ago, we would have known what DevOps culture was or what that really meant.
So I think here we are at a conference where we're talking about DevOps, not just a two d sort of checklist.
One thing I found is we work with companies of varying sizes.
It is not the small client that lacks the DevOps process. I think I've seen some very large companies that lack any sort of formal process for DevOps. I think putting together some semblance of structure and process and guidance and then offering that to the client as a discipline has been really it's been a big value add.
So I think I think gone are the days where it's simply a a to do checklist item, but I think this is a a way in which clients are actively asking for, you know, what sort of best practice do you have, what does center of excellence look like for us to have a diverse practice internally.
Great. Christina, I think this one's quite dear to your heart. Yes. DevOps culture.
The the concept of DevOps culture is very close to my heart because, it often time in the traditional sense, you can often time, like, allocate specific, like, resources to kind of manage that. Right? Which can often put make bottlenecks and pressure and put that pressure on those specific resources to handle all the DevOps for who knows how many team members. Right? Thirty, a hundred, two hundred developers.
So my, approach to the culture is that everyone should be a contributor.
Everyone should have ownership of the of the DevOps process, and everyone is accountable for it. Because in the end of the day, the person that's contributing would know what's wrong, right, with their PR along the, along the way of the pipeline all the way through up to production. So, really, that's, something that I've really, advocated for within my team that we should all share and bear the load.
Nice. And, Lauren, have you done anything at Cision to shape a DevOps culture?
Yeah. For us, just to piggyback exactly on what Christine was saying, collaboration has been key to creating that DevOps culture. And then also just, like, putting it back out and promoting it amongst our business units and then our other different stakeholders at Cision, making them aware of the way that we work and the way that we approach the work to solve those complicated business problems.
Making sure that we're collaborating specifically with our product owners and our product teams has been really helpful for us to really promote that, exciting culture of change and helping us embrace the new technology that we're applying and and implementing.
And if we think about this Salesforce culture and then within this ecosystem, there's quite a culture for certifications. I wonder, Jeremy, if that's something that, you buy into?
Yeah. I I think there's value in certifications as far as kind of putting a a stamp on the knowledge that you've learned. Like, it it is good personally, I feel it's good to build for a career advancement.
I think proving in your working life that you know the knowledge is a little more important than necessarily having that certification.
So that's where I'm a little on the fence that, like, I don't necessarily evaluate a new hire or the work that someone's doing based on the certifications that they have, because I've seen both sides where, you know, you have a very certified individual and they really lack the core understanding. They were good at taking the exam, or they memorize the knowledge versus someone that maybe has a single cert, but can do all of the work that you give to them. So I think there is the value in having those for your career, like, to put on paper to to show what you've been able to do. But I think as an individual and when you contribute your work, it really shines through in the knowledge that you have.
So would you say, Jeremy, the continuous learning?
Is that Yeah.
Jack, one of his episodes, I was on that, and I was gonna say he'd hit me if I didn't bring this up.
But, that was a key thing for me is just, since college, we we had a freshman course, and they advised us if you wanted to go down the computer science path, if it's for video games or because you think you're gonna get a great salary that you're gonna, you know, burn yourself out or you're gonna hit a wall at some point.
But to really get value out of it and really be successful, you need to always be learning. And I think that's true for everything we do, but especially in environments like this and with applications that are free to enhance that learning. There's no reason not to. So I think learning is good, not necessarily that you have to have certifications, but they're helpful.
And, Lauren, as a manager, would you do you buy into that sort of continuous learning?
Yes. Absolutely. And for me, it's really important that my team has that professional development and that I encourage not only myself to take on new opportunities to continue to learn, but my team also takes time out of their week. We carve out at least five to eight hours, you know, across the sprint cycles that we have to allocate that time for future development and ongoing education, opportunities for them to not feel like they're they don't have time in their day to learn new technology or take a trailblazer course or whatever it may be. So it is really important to me that I support my team in in getting that time, into their biweekly sprint cycle so that they can dedicate to continuous learning.
Is there any specific resources you'd recommend?
Oh, man. Well, Trailblazers is our go to, quite honestly.
I know our team really relies on it. It's just a really valuable tool.
We've also started taking some, like, CPQ trainings offline through a different, provider. So there's a lot of options out there. It's hard to choose just one because they are all incredibly helpful, and I've already seen so much growth for a lot of my junior developers from taking those courses over, you know, the span of just a couple of months.
It can be tricky to sort of balance all that continuous learning, you know, trying to carve out those hours with your day job, and then also we all have personal lives as well. Christine, how would you rate your work life balance?
So currently, I would rate my work life balance at a nine. And, really, the key, to achieve this is establishing healthy boundaries, not only for your, you know, at work, but also in your personal life and adhering to these boundaries because oftentimes I don't this is not applicable to me, but oftentimes, folks will try to, work a little a couple extra hours later, right, when they're not supposed to. Right? If it's not something super critical urgent, then it can wait until the next day. Just keeping that healthy, structure, and adhering to it can really improve the quality of both your personal life and your professional life and make you even more, productive. So definitely keeping that line there is very healthy.
Deepak, have you got any strategies for not Oh, gosh.
I'm not a good person to ask.
I I usually joke that's work life synthesis is sort of the way it plays out. I don't I think I I came across a quote recently that I thought was really insightful. It said, you know, true wealth is, is attention, not necessarily even time, because even with time, it can be distracted. I think that that was helpful for me. I I think even with time, I find myself always thinking about work or stressing or whatever is coming up the next day. I think I'm sure we all do.
I find it beneficial to have a hobby. I think it's as simple as that sounds, something that I can tune out and do something else with, not just, because if I'm just laying there, I'll probably think about work. Right?
So that's just my default state, it feels like sometimes. So actively doing something that's, like, outside of work, I find it's helpful to do something, outside or something, like, actually tactile, or I'm not just sitting at a computer all day. So that's just me, but I think a hobby would be my recommendation.
Nikhil, how is your work life balance at Amazon?
So it's it's how do you prioritize your work with yourself also. I I agree with what Deepak and Christine said about, you need to set the boundaries, expectations, and you also need to set your boundaries and expectation with yourself as well. Like, hey. You should not oh, let me complete this in next fifteen minutes and then go.
And that fifteen minutes will go for next one hour. That the one hour goes to next two hours. And, immediately after that, you feel, oh my god. My work is so much.
I'm burned out right now. So I think setting the right expectations with yourself as well and having some focus times just to work on some people will be in all day meetings, and they they tend to work in the late nights or something like that.
So that you have your focus time just to work in the in the hours that you're working and all these kind of things will give more work life balance.
And sometimes I still, understand that, there might be a critical project and you have to burn yourself. I mean, that's, you cannot stop that for sure.
And taking breaks in between or having a hobby or taking a day off or about it will help your, peace keep your sanity over there.
Definitely important.
I think we've probably got time for one more question.
What would you say is the best career advice that you've received through your career?
Let's start with Lauren.
For myself, I feel like it was embrace, embrace challenges and be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
A lot of like, for me, this role that I'm in, I wasn't a hundred percent certain about it. It was out of my comfort zone, but I had a lot of mentors and colleagues at my organization who were just, like, like, my biggest cheerleaders and said, go for it. It's gonna be an amazing opportunity. And they were right.
And so at first, yeah, it was uncomfortable, and it was challenging, and it was different than anything I had done before, but it has been also the most rewarding experience and role I've ever had. And so, that has been really helpful for me and my perspective about, like, my career and, you know, what my future may hold.
Great. What about you, Jeremy?
Yeah. I'd I know we had mentioned it earlier. I think always be learning has been really impactful to me, but, at least from what I've seen across the variety of jobs that I've done through my career, I think it relates better to the actual full quote of, a jack of all trades because most people just ended up jack of all trades and master of none.
But the full one is jack of all trades and master of none is oftentimes far better than a master of one.
So master of none is oftentimes far better than a master of one. So I've seen a lot of utilization out of that of, like, don't specialize in just one thing. Like, sure, it's good to be a master at certain things, but make sure you're willing to grow and and embrace change, embrace other opportunities, other tools. Like, you'll see a lot more significant change and potential greater opportunities out of having that open mindset.
I didn't even know there was a third line there, so I learned something here today.
Most people don't know the full quote, and I I think it's very impactful to know the the rest of it. Yeah.
Absolutely. Christine, what about you?
So, definitely, the I'm sorry. What was the Best career advice. Oh, yes. So, the best career advice that I have acquired over this time definitely has been to learn to advocate for yourself.
It is oftentimes, right, you you just are focused on your work and getting things completed, and then you lose sight of how much value you really add to your team, to the company. And if you don't advocate this for yourself, it it it depending on your situation and your company, it may it might go unseen. Right? So really learning to be professionally advocating for yourself and really just promoting yourself amongst your team that this is how much you contributed, knowing your value is just that's the best career advice I've received.
Is that just within certain conversations that you would have or or is it, like, every week? How how do you do that?
So practice? No. I'm not saying go out in every single day, like, saying no. This is how much I do.
But just, just keeping a track, right, of how much value add you you you give. And then, during performance reviews, right, just making sure that you, eloquently list out. Right? Okay.
This is how much value I'd give to the team. Or during, we do lots of retrospectives. So we often call out fellow team members that have done gone above and beyond, right, for that particular sprint or that particular release. So that's ways that we can definitely, advocate for ourselves, advocate for our team members on the extreme value that everyone pitches in.
So that's how we can communicate that.
Brilliant. Deepak, best career advice you've received?
Yeah. I think it's a Socrates quote that said, have fun and stay curious. I'm kidding. Socrates didn't say that.
I I just made that up right now. But I, struck out the philosophy bit. No. I I don't know.
The stuff that we do is fun. I don't feel like decisions that we make day to day dictates whether people live or die. Right? I think we can have a sense of gravitas with what we do and still be curious and light with it.
I think going back to question about, you know, continuous learning, I feel like in this industry that's necessary. Right? We don't stay experts for long. It changes so fast.
So I think it is easy to be burned out. It is easy to be bogged down by the load, I think, unless we have fun and be curious about it. So I think that's something I, as, you know, plain as maybe, has been quite profound to me. So yeah.
Great. Thanks for that. And you caught?
Yeah. Pleo.
And, Nikhil, finish off with you. What's best career advice you've had?
Whatever everyone said here, mainly what Jeremy said as well, like, be a jack of all trades. You just need to learn at least on the surface level. Like, since you guys are all in the Salesforce ecosystem knowing about what are the new releases that are coming, what are the new technologies that are coming. I mean, I did not even know until late that the change part of account, engagement and everything. So you need to just know about, how on the surface, like, how the technology is changing and adapting to that.
That's the best career advice I got, because if there is a stable stability in the entire, coding or work stream that you're doing, that means it's not gonna grow anymore. And any and we still did not use AI anymore in this meet in this call yet. So that will, if you're stable and if you're not learning continuously, it will learn and it will take your job.
Do you how do you stay up to date? We're running out of time, but very quickly, how do you stay up to date with new things that are going on in the Salesforce ecosystem?
So mostly, I use, different websites, that Salesforce spend, Salesforce experts. It's released notes that, every spring, summer releases that they release as well. So those are the main things that I keep on. And sometimes trailhead for sure when you get chance to do that. And Superbadges are the best ones to be, you know, learning about more Salesforce.
Excellent. That's a lot of time, but, thank you so much to our panelists. We've got Nikhil, Lauren, Jeremy, Christine, and Deepak. Thank you very much.
