Use your hobbies to fuel your Salesforce learning

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Discover how to use your hobbies to fuel your Salesforce learning journey. Ellie Matthewman (Lead Salesforce Engineer at LendInvest) shares creative ways to use personal projects to build your Salesforce skills. Ellie also answers the classic Catch-22 question: ‘How do you get experience if nobody will recruit you into a role to get that experience?’

Whether you’re passionate about gaming, gardening, or any other hobby, learn how to turn your passions into powerful learning tools.

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Transcript

Hi there. Thank you for coming along to my session on using your hobbies to fuel your sales force learning. This is, something I'm quite passionate about.

So let's get started. First of all, an introduction. And my name is Annie Mathewman. I'm the lead sales force engineer at blend invest.

I've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for about twelve years. So you've done your math. That's right. I started when I was nine years old.

I started out as a Salesforce admin and have myself taught myself development.

And if you're wondering, you know, as I'm talking through things today, does that actually work? Can you actually do that in the real world? I'm live and prove that it does. For my first development role, I had no actual real life experience in development, only what I'm talking about today. So yes, one hundred percent. This works.

But what is it that we're trying to actually achieve today? What problem would we trying to solve?

It's a classic catch twenty two. It applies to not just the Salesforce ecosystem. It applies across all kind of experience whatever role you're in. I mean, that's how do you get experience in something if no one will recruit you into that role where you actually get experience.

You wanna get your first admin role, but everyone's asking for two years of experience. How do you get that? You're trying to move from an admin to a developer, but you can't do development in your current role. How do you get that experience.

So that's what I'm gonna talk about today.

And the answer to that is personal projects.

They're fantastic. They're well known across the Salesforce ecosystem.

But as it says in the name, it's personal projects. So it is done. In your own personal time. The first thing I'm gonna talk about today is why should you do them?

If you're doing them in your own time, you could be spending that time with your family, going out, meeting with friends, drinking, enjoying a good meal. So why spend your time on this. So I've put together some points on that. Before we get started there, and just like people to think about, what they currently have going.

So obviously, I can't see you raising your hands, but if you can think about, do you actually have a developer edition that's effective that isn't there for a trial head module that you actually go in and you try things out in.

Do you have more than one? I've got five on the go, at any one time, normally.

And if you're sitting there thinking, actually, no, I don't have one of these going. It makes your first port of call. Get yourself in developer edition org. They're free. They can last as long as you keep them active going.

And they're just a place where you can just go in and play around without being worried that you're gonna break something. So if you've got one, fantastic, if you've got more than one, even better if you don't have one, go and have a play around in one. It's amazing what you can do just with playing around.

But why should you do this? Back to the wise, What's in it for you? So I'll put together five key points about why you should do this because a lot more than this five. This is just the five that I've put together.

So the first one I've got is hands on experience. You're actually physically getting hands on with the sour sauce. Showhead is a great resource. I love it.

Don't get me wrong, but it can only take you so far. It often tells you what to do, but and doesn't necessarily explain the whys or some of the little niches, and quirks that get around it. So you can take what you've learned in a trailhead module and extend it and actually try it in a a real life scenario of your own rather than the scenario that trailhead has given you. Similarly, we have the the releases three times a year that introduces new features, etcetera.

You can read the documentation on it as much as you like.

By actually getting hands on in an org and trying it out, you'll actually be able to understand how it works in a real life situation before then trying it out in your in your org that matters, but an org where you can get things wrong.

And by doing these hands on projects, it actually gives you that hands on experience in those areas that you wouldn't normally get.

The next reason is you just pull control of it.

So you it's your project. You do it how you want to do it. You can design it, implement it, customize it however you want. You decide your boundaries. You can really push the boundaries. So there might be some things that you want to try, but the company you're working for won't let you do it. They think it's too risky, but you want to see whether it's actually physically possible, try it in a personal project.

The only thing you can do is actually restrict yourself. So one of the examples I'm gonna go on to show you later is that one where I've actually restricted myself to say, I want to achieve this all using disk configuration, using clicks, not code.

So I'm really seeing what I can do within, as an administrator, to achieve what I want to achieve. So it's you have full control, and you can decide where the boundaries are, push them, for them experiment with things without the risks involved in a a real situation at work.

The next one is your problem solving skills. So by working along these personal projects, you will face problems.

Thforce is amazing for having these little quirks that no one realizes isn't really you try to use it. One of the things I often say is the things you think be easy, end up being ten times harder than you expect, and the things you think are gonna be hard end up being a two second job. But you don't know it until you actually try it So by doing these personal projects, you realize where those hurdles can be when implementing something you think is gonna be easy. You also learn where to go. To get help when you don't know where to go. So you kind of learn certain Google phrases to use or stack overflow or websites you can go to to get that help and what could be trusted, what can't be trusted, troubleshoot, and find solutions on your own, really honing in those problem solving skills so that when you again, you get it into the real world in an actual company environment where where you are much more restricted and time urgent.

You've already got those skills. You already know the places you can go to when you get stuck.

It really hones those skills for you.

The next one is you do get to experience the end to end development of, of a project, and this is obviously particularly important as as a dev ops. Something as we are that we're looking at that that end to end development going from the very beginning inception of around requirements gather in and and designing the solution to actually implementing the solution. And then you can really push it as far as, you know, making sure you're implementing testing and actually using DevOps tools to push it from different places, scratch rolls, etcetera.

So you actually can have a go at that interim development on your own. And, you know, there may be areas you hate, there may be areas you're not as good at, but it gives you a fully formed figure of what it's like getting a ticket from the beginning to the end, which means if if you're in a a business where, you know, you're just a developer and you've got your own QA team and you've got your BA team and you maybe even have a dev ops team, you at least have a better understanding of what they are going through of the problems they're facing. It helps collaborating with them and communicating them a lot better because you you're, like, you're understanding some of the terminology that they're using that you might not have previously been aware of So it just helps with the whole team. I mean, obviously, if you're on a a business where you're the only one, it helps with that significantly as well. But it just gives you that comprehensive approach from from beginning to end.

And finally, it's it's great for portfolio building.

The projects that you work on, you can then build into your own portfolio. That means when you're talking to potential employers, or clients, you can demonstrate the work that you've actually done, which you may not be able to do, if you've only work, you know, work expir work experience work environment. Get my words right.

And it actually shows that you've physically done it. You know, Trail headbadges are great. Notifications are great. Don't get me wrong, but it adds that extra string to your bow that actually, not only have I got these super badges or these certifications you've actually gone out there and you've actually solved these problems and shown how you can actually achieve it in the real world.

Along with that, it shows you that your dedicated to your continued alert continued learning, which in itself is just a great thing that employers look for at people that are constantly wanting to better themselves, to learn.

So it's really great for that.

Hopefully, those five points are done enough to motivate you and go, yes. Now I want to go out there. I wanna start personal projects, and then you get to the point.

Alright.

What project am I gonna do?

So the next slide is all about ideas and and what projects you could work on. When I started coming up with this session a few months ago, literally within thirty seconds of starting it and doing a little bit of googling on it. I come across this LinkedIn post, from Emily talking about personal projects. She suggests five ideas, and she asked everyone else for other ideas as well.

And those are quite good at responses. So I'm gonna share some of them with you today. We have in the bottom left corner, Michael Rebek, talking about, he saw one about a diaper poopy tracker. For their baby, which I think is fantastic.

Luckily, it doesn't apply to me anymore. My children are grown up. Don't need to worry about that. But it's it's a great idea.

The other one for this time of year that's great is in the top right someone created a Christmas card app. So they could track whom they'd received cards from, who they'd sent cards to, etcetera.

So there's some ideas.

The other thing that this shows is that people are out there doing these personal projects, and that means that if you're not, you are gonna be falling behind the pack. So if you want to kind of really show yourself as someone at the top of their game, you need to be doing these personal projects.

But there's a few ideas there, but again, these are personal to these people. And if you're into golf, maybe the gold quantity stands out.

The person I am none of these really micked it to me. I don't bother with Christmas cards.

My children are acting like these now. Thank you.

So the next place I went to for ideas was check GPT because let's face it. It wouldn't be a tech conference if I didn't mention AI at some point. So I asked JBT about ideas for personal projects that I could do and sell our stores. And here are the results that it showed.

I won't read through them all, but Some of them might appeal to you and some of them you might look and go, yes, that's what I want to do. I'm really into books. I want book collection. I want to can run my book club through it, book reviews.

Brilliant. And if that's the case, fantastic, go for it. But check GPD doesn't know me, doesn't know my hobbies.

None of these really relate to anything that really would motivate me to spend my free time doing this. And that's why I I tried to get using your hobbies because that's where I've gone from my personal projects. I've thought about hobbies and what I could do around those hobbies that would actually inspire me to actually do these projects rather than just think about them.

Today, I've got three projects I've worked on that I'm gonna talk with you. They are ongoing projects. Some of these projects may never end, somewhere start and never get around to finishing.

You know, it's all about time, how much time you put into it, etcetera. The three I'm gonna go through today, the top one's a bit of a cheat. It's not specifically around my hobbies, but it is an example of the portfolio building that I talk back earlier, and how easy that can be done in Salesforce.

And really into board games, as you see, so one of them is around an application around login board game plays. And the final one is around NFL Football. Talk more about that when I get to that example.

So the first one, like I said, it's not necessarily about hobbies, but I'm a bit of a geek, I enjoy the tech side of it. So I'm I'm I'm taking that side of it.

And this all got came about because of a trailhead project that I did. So you can see there I've got the Buildger Personal Portfolio on Salesforce.

I completed that project about three years ago, and it's all about building your personal portfolio on Salesforce using an experience site. I'd never used an experience site before doing this project.

So when I did the trial head, first of all, I learned about experience sites in general. But then after I finished the trial head, I then extended it further. And what I've now got live is is a much more extended version than what I built in that project.

If I quickly show you what I built, it's like I said, it's a public URL, so anyone can access this. It's built just on a Salesforce experience site. As you can tell, by the URL, it's got site dot com in the name. I've used standard navigation at the top to create my menus, then I've got, to like these different navigation in the middle.

But again, this is all just standard out of the box. There is no code involved. There is a little bit of code involved around, an oral component for the template. That's how I've got the footage at the bottom, but ninety percent of this is all just using, standard out of the box.

It's not code. That's just a rich text. Again, this is an navigation area. And if I click through to here, here you can see I'm foliant fantasy draft app that I'll I'll go through later.

This is just using rich text components again.

But there's no code really involved in that apart from the order component.

But I've got me a chance to practice experience like customization, experience site pages, experience site navigation, and, you know, custom lightning components, like I said, the oral components for the theme.

So this, at the time of of working on it, no experience site. It's no experience site experience, bit of a tongue twister there. And it really gave me a chance to understand how experience site works, making them public, navigation, etcetera.

So what I would recommend, if you haven't done it already, is to go find the trial head project and start working on it because it's a fantastic one to get your portfolio started on.

That's my first one. The next one I'm gonna show you is my board game zone.

When I say I'm into board games, I am really into board games. Those are genuine pictures of my shelves behind me.

But hundreds of games.

And, this project is about understanding what I can do using config. So like I mentioned earlier, this is one where I've actually pulled the fences in and said, but I don't want to use any code to achieve anything in this. I want to to do this all using config.

Again, the point of doing this is for me to learn. So there's already broad game out there that you can use to log plays. My husband already uses it.

So this wasn't about producing something that doesn't exist out there. There was this was just about understanding how I could achieve it in Salesforce and using functionality in Salesforce to achieve things.

One of the good things with personal projects is ninety percent of them, you're gonna get into how you data model your data in they're all going to involve data modeling and understanding how you want that to work.

For this project, I use the data import, because, I could have used an API as a developer to pull all my board games in from the website that we used to track it.

But this is all about admin. So I used the data import wizard to import all the games that had been exported via CSV from now.

I used flows to make things work within it. And one of the things, again, I mentioned earlier, new releases, new things come out.

I've specifically used the new data table component. I think it went, in generally available spring this year, so it gave me a chance to play around with that component, understand how it works, etcetera, without worrying about spending too much time on it during work time or breaking things. And then because I'm log in place, I also did some work around reporting and and dashboards because if I'm log in place, I may as some reporting out of it. So what does that look like?

Here we go. We've got here you can see all the games that I've imported or listed out, then down at the bottom of the screen on the utility bar, You can see this is my flow component, so you can search for a game in there. The date, free fields to today's date, but you can obviously change that. And then this is where we're using the data table component.

I won't take that any further because I have also embedded the flow within the game page. So here you can see, because it's in the game page, it's actually pre filled, the game. Again, it's defaulted to today's date. Now I can select the players using the data table component.

The flow continues. There's functionality, but for now I'm just gonna say I won the game. Why not? We're just gonna skip through the other players.

And then once that's all done, you'll get that it's successfully logged. If we finish and the page updates, you can see at the bottom, the play is now logged down there.

And then you've got the play information here. You can see it update is the total played in the most recent play using roll up summaries. But like I said, this is all done using config used in flows.

Moving on to the dashboard. Here you can see, the dashboards I've created. It hasn't got the most recent log on, so I quickly refresh it. And then we should see that ticket to write log listed at the top. And, obviously, I've done lots of other dashboards just to understand which games have played the most, who's won the most, etcetera.

So that's an example of of finding out what I can do with config.

And restricting my boundaries, but also, playing around with new features that are available in the most recent releases.

Now that's the board game plays example.

Moving along, the NFL I am a huge NFL fan See, I'm a go to games in London. I'm a Greenbow Packers fan.

And this next project is actually what I'm incredibly proud of I will try not to talk too much about it because I could talk for days about it. It's probably an own its own talk all in itself. But it does show you how far you can push the boundaries. So the last one was talking about me restricting the boundaries. This one, I've gone all out. I've used everything I can to both learn and understand it.

The other thing about this project, Raj, quite lucky, is that it was an actual real life thing that we used.

So I'm part of a NFL fantasy football draft, fantasy football league.

And my husband runs that league. So he was essentially my my business in this. So it's quite good in that. He was the one actually telling me what he wanted. And negotiating with him so that it gave me that kind of practice of negotiating.

Just for a bit of a context because there's probably plenty of people out there that don't understand.

So for fantasy football for NFL, it's it's different Fantasy football in the UK. If you've ever played fantasy football in the UK, everyone can pick whatever players they want within a a budget. So if you're playing the Fantasy Premier League, chances are you've got Erling Harland in your team because if you haven't, you're probably losing, but everyone can have Erling Harland in their team if they want. In America, it works slightly differently. You draft the players in, which means that Erling Harland can only be on one team.

So it's a bit like when you're at school and you're doing PA and you're having to pick teams, and the best players get picked first. And then if you're me, you're probably the last understanding there to be picked. So that's just an explanation of of what the draft is.

I put what I practiced in this this personal project it goes way beyond this, but I use data modeling in it, obviously, as I mentioned before, most projects will involve it. But I've got integration in this So we have a website already that we use to run the league during the actual game has been played.

But I used integration so I can pull the players from that that that we can pick from. And then at the end of the draft, push the results back to the website so that, it it automatically has got which teams have got which players.

There are a lot of custom lightning web components in this at sleep customizing with proponents, it goes beyond that. There's all kinds of message channels, platform events. I've tried to use all the latest technology in it. Again, It gives me a chance to understand how to use it, where I may not have an example of where to use it in the real world until I know how it works.

Now that I've used it in this project, when I'm working on future actual work projects, I can go, oh, I know how that works. It will work for this, but it won't work for that. So though I've said custom not in web components say it's it's much beyond that. It's using some of the other functionality that comes alongside it.

And again, this is something I've built on an experience site. So I've got an understanding of experience like pages and experience like access, explain where that comes in in a minute, but this is something else where I've used things like source control.

So I've used git locally, pushed it to a git repository, I've used connected its Clayton, so Clayton can scan my code, etcetera, etcetera.

So you can see that I've kind of really tried to use the full development life cycle I've created. Did you you can get a free Jira account. I've created my own Jira board for it. And as my husband was talking about the different things he wanted, straighten Jira tickets linking that up to GitHub, etcetera, like, really pushing boundaries on this to really get the interim experience.

So a little bit about this, let me just show you it in action.

First of all, this is the internal component that sets up all the settings. So here we can see the integration set up around which, league we want to integrate it with. And also some draft settings. So there are different types of drafts available depending on on what we're doing that year in different settings. As well as the option to do things like sync the teams from the website, etcetera. So this is just the internal stuff that the draft set up.

Then we've got this externally available page. So this is available to anyone, and this means that while the draft is running, if someone needs to go outside for cigarette, someone was joining remotely.

They had a way of viewing what was going on in the draft. Here then we've got the commission of you. So this is what my husband was looking, and he was actually running the draft. He could see whose pick it was.

They could select who they'd picked, confirm that pick that then shows up for him. So he can see on his screen what's going on. He can see who the next one is. You can see it's also updated on the public page.

So that commissioner page was restricted. You had to be logged in to be able to view it. This page is a public page anyone can see and see how the draft's going, who's next, etcetera.

So there's a lot going on in there.

And, yeah, like I said, there's probably a whole another talk to talk about this. So look out for that in the future.

That's really pushing the boundaries of what you can do in a project. So, hopefully, those three examples have really given you some ideas around you know, obviously, I doubt you're either really into board games or NFL, but giving you ideas of what you can do, with your hobbies to to think about what you could create in Salesforce.

Hopefully that's inspired you. So now the next step is, okay, motivated to do it. You've explained why I should do it. Come up with a great idea about how what I want to do. How do I do it?

So like I mentioned right at the beginning, bellopur edition orbs are readily available.

Salesforce probably won't like me saying this, but you could sign up for as many as you want as long as you're using different usernames.

They last as long as you want as long as you keep logged in about every three months. You do get emails to warn you if they're gonna expire. But as long as you keep an eye on that, you keep logging in. They will ask whoever, obviously, there are restrictions with them. You can only have up to two users in them, etcetera, etcetera.

But for personal projects, I've never had a problem with them not meeting my needs.

It depends where you're going with your personal project.

So anyway, so developer edition org, there's a QR code. If I just move to the next screen, you can see that QR code actually leads you to a document I've put together with all kinds of free or trial resources that you can try.

So as well as the developer edition org that I've mentioned you can actually get developer edition org with some of the add ons included, again, that don't expire as long as you log in. So if you want to have a look at Einstein prediction builder or next best action, you can go to that link, and have a developer edition all created with that.

It's available because it's needed for a trial head project, but you don't need to be doing the trial head project to sign up for the org. Again, CRM analytics, r dot CPQ, all free, developer edition orgs that you can use to have a play around and and see what you want to do in them. On the side of developer editions, I've talked about, some other things that that you may want to have a play around with.

So Slack, you can get a limited edition of Slack for free.

We don't obviously have the full functionality of Slack, but it's there. Tableau. There's a public one that you can have that is permanently available, or you can get trial for the non public version. Jira, you can sign up for three Jira accounts.

I have no idea I assumed that you could only get trials, but no, you can actually sign free geo recamps that don't expire, again, with all the free ones you get limited functionality, but it gives you a start to understand, how to use it. Take there's a lot more than this. This is just a snapshot of some of it. If you go to your QR code, you will see a much longer list, and there's also an opportunity for you to add suggestions for me to update the list if you so want.

It's just a Google doc.

That's where you can go to get And that's it for today.

Thank you so much for your time. I really hope that you leave here inspired and have ideas about what you want to do. If you want to get connected with me, there's my LinkedIn. Thank you very much.