Dublin City Winter Social

A co-hosted meetup of the Administrator and Developer Community Groups of Dublin, Ireland

Date: 28th February 2023

Place: Jurys Inn, Dublin City, Ireland

Author: Hemant Bhatia

Hemant – our experienced Salesforce Consultant is back with another blog. Here, he details his experiences attending the Salesforce Dublin City Winter Social, in his own words. 

It’s great to be back, and if this is your first time reading one of my blogs, then I would like to thank you for coming to this space! This blog is a special one for those who are part of the Salesforce community, it was explicitly written to recap the happenings of the Salesforce Dublin City Winter Social meetup on 28th February 2023 – which happens to be my first ever Salesforce Community group meetup. 

Apart from the excitement I had, I really wanted to connect with the other trailblazers at the event. Fortunately, I got the chance to meet a couple of my clients, whom I had previously only met virtually. Alongside my colleagues Barry and Jorgan, I got the opportunity to meet a few other young trailblazers with the confidence to make a career in Salesforce. With this, I will take this stage to tell you a few details about the meetup – expect a quick overview with some details, the event’s highlights, and some key takeaways from the meetup.

‘Not Another DevOps Platform’

The meetup was organised in Dublin jointly by our very own Jorgan Strathman, as well as Ciaran Fitzgerald from the Administrators group, and Barry Huges from the Developer Community Group. The event took place in Jury’s Inn, and the event successfully started at 7pm with the first speaker in the house being Pablo Gonzalez. I must say what a speaker he is – Pablo is the creator of HappySoup.io and is also a Business Engineer Architect at Salto. He presented the tool in his presentation: ‘Salto – Not Another DevOps Platform’ by displaying the key benefits, user-friendliness, and low complexity of the tool. The tool has a free tier available for everyone, and those who basically are afraid to read the XML metadata files can now easily read the metadata in non-code English language.

‘Beta Power’

What I really enjoy when attending events, is when a guest speaker is known for their knowledge and product. The second speaker for the evening was Eric Praud – 3 times MVP and Senior Consultant, and highly regarded for his Salesforce know-how. Eric presented the latest enhancement of Salesforce’s OOB feature: Flow. With the style of the presentation, we felt that the new feature: ‘HTTP Callout’ in Salesforce Flow really excited him, because now admins and developers could make HTTP Callouts directly from Flow – unfortunately this is still in Beta. Eric presented an amazing demo of the HTTP Callouts he made to a different website, where he managed to retrieve the Date/Time from different timezones only by passing the location of the record. Not just that, but the best highlight of the night was when Eric involved us with my favourite game: ‘Wordle’ created using Flows and HTTP Callouts! It was really exciting to see how someone with no coding experience could create something like that, just by using Flows and the new beta functionality offered by Salesforce. With the word ‘Amide’ (Wordle Solution), Eric concluded his presentation to allow us a chance to grab some pizza, so as you can imagine, I look back fondly on this session.

‘Nobody Can Beat Code’

Following the impressive utilisation of Flows by Eric was a presentation by Barry Huges and Stanislav Kosachev, so here’s a little something about them:

Barry is an active member and founder of Salesforce Developer Group Dublin and he’s completed 10 years of running the Dublin Developer group this month – now isn’t that a big commitment? He is a lead Developer Architect in Bluewave (and also happens to be a close colleague of mine). Stan is a Principal Software Developer and I recall Stan mentioning that he met Barry 10 at a similar event 10 years ago, and they’ve been friends ever since.

Coming back to the presentation, Barry and Stan demonstrated the use of Apex, Lightning Web Components, External Services and the DEV knows what else! This represented the core idea of pro-code best practices to apply within Flows. In the most fun part of the presentation, Barry almost started to troubleshoot a problem from an audience member, which I was really impressed with. How did he manage to develop a solution to a random question on the fly, without breaking a sweat? Jokes aside, the presentation ended on a very good note with very cool demonstrations by Stan. I really enjoyed how smoothly they were able to handle the presentation, demo, and Q&A session.

Key highlights and takeaways

Here’s a quick recap of the event’s presentations and discussions:

• Salto.io was presented, which is a free tier of CI/CD DevOps platform with a demo of deploying a flow using a very simple method. It can be used to help with identifying XML differences, and there’s also a paid tier of Salto can be used to deploy the differences in higher orgs.
• Features of the new GET HTTP Callout requests functionality in Flows in very simple use cases of retrieving the time/date of a country/city and a famous web-based game ‘Worlde’. This is completely declarative plus it also creates a backend public class in salesforce automatically (good for the coders too)
• Power of code and utilising the pro-code best practices to flow in multiple different methods were demoed at the very end
• We engineered 3x intermissions, the longest being between the 2nd and third presenters so people could network and socialise
• Barry Hughes announced TrailheadDX on 7th/8th March available to watch on Salesforce plus
• Link to the event details here

Speakers (In order of presentation)

1. Pablo Gonzales – Salesforce Architect – Salto.io
2. Eric Praud – Senior Consultant (Salesforce MVP) – Epam PolSource
3. Stanislav Kosachev – Principal Software Developer – Asset Class
4. Barry Hughes – Lead Architect – Bluewave Group

We’d like to extend our thanks to Hemant for recapping the event and sharing his experiences, as well as to Barry Hughes who represented Bluewave wonderfully on the Dublin City Winter Social stage. For more event updates and staff writeups, please check out our blog section here.

For more information about how Bluewave utilises the latest Salesforce tools and techniques to facilitate successful digital transformations for our customers, please get in touch with our experts today.