Dreamforce Resolutions

Coming back from Dreamforce is always rough. 

For a week you get to live in a fantasy world where everyone is excited about their jobs and this platform as you are, you meet so many amazing people, go to great sessions, and of course the nightlife is top notch. Combine that with the break from the daily grind, not having to do dishes or take out trash, and bringing home an extra suitcase of swag and its like a perfect working vacation you don’t want to end.

It’s easy to suffer from Dreamflu when you return; a combination of symptoms related to coming down from all the excitement, lack of sleep, and catching up on the pile of work you set aside last week.

The cure for Dreamflu is simple enough, Take Action.  Now is the time to turn all of the energy and ideas of Dreamforce into a personal or professional action plan to make sure you capitalize all everything Dreamforce has to offer.  With that in mind, here are my Dreamforce Resolutions to continue building on everything that was Dreamforce ’18.

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Conquering Flow

It’s been a running joke on this site about my aversion to Flow.  I’ve built exactly one functioning Flow in my days and though I know when to use it, I’ve always passed the work off to our developer team.  Truth is, when I see something I can’t quite master, I lean towards humor to cover it up and gloss over that knowledge gap.

I know, its stupid, but now its coming to an end.

I attended Jen Lee’s ‘Today’s the Day you Learn Flow’ session at Dreamforce and with her session building on what I learned from Kristi’s Flow Variable post, I think I’m ready to take it on.  As I listening to Jen present, I found myself thinking a step ahead, what I would do next, how I would put the moving pieces together; I felt like I could finally ‘see the matrix.’

Moving forward, I am going to conquer my irrational fear of Flow (which really is my personal fear of failure & on-going battle with Imposter Syndrome) and next time one comes up on a project, I am going to tackle it myself.

To prepare, I plan on building some PB & Flow combinations in my dev org to make sure I lock down the principals and am ready to put my skills into action when the time comes.

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Custom Metadata Types

I have no good reasons I’ve been avoiding CMT.  I’ve used Custom Settings before and CMT is the grown up, more powerful version, yet I never really explored  all the use cases where it could be applied.

While many people count Thursday as the last day of Dreamforce, Friday is packed with some amazing sessions, including, ‘Reveal Your Inner Trailblazer with Custom Metadata Types’ presented by Cheryl Feldman, Jen Lee, and Stuart McNaught.

I honestly left the session saying, ‘Wow.’  Some of the use cases they demonstrated using Custom Metadata Types with Visual Flows, formulas, and validation rules were really impressive and definitely encouraged me to start thinking through these my use cases when doing Solution Design work.

I’m really excited about using CMT more in the coming year and look forward to writing about my explorations here!

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Certifications

You’ll see a trend here…I put off a lot of things, certifications included.  While at Dreamforce I took two certification exams without studying, just reviewing the exam guides beforehand.  My thought was if I failed them, at half-price with a retake, it was the same as taking them at home with the benefit of the experience and results to learn from.

Much to my surprise, I passed both the Advanced Admin & Community Cloud Consultant exam pretty easily and am thrilled to say that I am now a 5x Certified Salesforce Professional (woohoo!).

I plan to take the Field Service Lightning Exam before the end of the year and then hope to take another crack at the Service Cloud Consultant exam, which I failed miserably in my first attempt.

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Getting in Shape

I was working the community kiosk in the Admin Meadow and I made a joke about seeing my face on the Answer Community Leaderboard and someone said, ‘oh that doesn’t really look like you.’  Yeah, 25lbs can do that.

The Sunday-Saturday I was traveling and at Dreamforce, I walked over 50 miles and ate pretty healthily (minus the late night drinks).  For the first time, I actually came home from Dreamforce a little lighter than I left.

I don’t want to let that momentum go to waste, so I’m hoping to make another run at getting back into working out (so far so good!) and hope to be a little less of me in time for Northeast Dreamin’ in 6 short weeks.

Last time I was at Dreamforce (2016) I did morning runs including burning up my legs on a 6 miler with the boss, who insisted we keep a 7:45 pace despite the previous nights fun.  I’ll be happy to get back to a 10:00 pace for now, just have to put in the work.