#DF14 Was A Huge Success

As you all know, last week was Dreamforce ’14. I had a fantastic time and in my mind, it was a huge success. With 145,000+ registrants, it was also the largest Dreamforce ever. Getting so many people together is one of the true highlights of the event. Sure, there is a ton of fantastic news and great learning opportunities, but it is also one of the best networking events I have ever attended. Being able to meet so many fantastic people is one of my favorite things about Dreamforce. As you may know, I enjoy being active on Twitter and this week I was using the #DF14 and #DevZone hashtags quite often. Some highlights include:

Monday

Being a relatively new member of FinancialForce.com, I didn’t really know what to expect when attending my first Community Day. It was amazing! Jeremy’s keynote on Everyday HCM and the power of the ERP in the cloud was very cool to hear and I am personally looking forward to what I will be working on over the next few months.

The MVP team is always treated extraordinarily well and this year was no different. We had the pleasure of going to 1:AM, an art gallery in San Francisco dedicated to street art. We learned about some of the local murals, the history of graffiti, and we were even allowed to “tag” the side of their building. It was a unique, fun experience and I am very thankful to be apart of it.

Tuesday

I spent a majority of my time in the #DevZone, but this session was one of my favorites. Learning how Salesforce builds their mobile apps was really cool and it gave me a ton of great ideas for work in the future.

I have worked with Scott Geosits for several years now. His talks are always fantastic and his piece of custom branding Communities was no different. He started off with some explanation, did a quick demo, and then broke down the code. I love sessions that go through all the steps and dive into the technical details.

Wednesday

Wednesday started off early with one of my favorite events at Dreamforce, the Salesforce StackExchange breakfast. While I originally proposed the idea, I have to give a huge shout out and an even bigger thank you to Daniel Hoechst (@dhoechst). He really help set everything up by finding a better location for a much larger group and getting all of the messaging out to the attendees. It was a fantastic time and I hope everyone came away with some new friends and some Salesforce StackExchange swag!

One of the highlights of the week is always the Developer Keynote (even more so than the main keynote in my opinion). Such great information from Lightning, Heroku, and more. Huge shout out to the developer community for recently passing 1.8 million Salesforce Developers! That is fantastic and I love to see us grow! If you ever have any questions, please consider the Salesforce StackExchange.

Being able to speak at the 3rd FinancialForce.com DevTalks was a great experience. Speaking on Paul Hardaker’s work on ApexMocks felt great, especially considering the fantastic Q&A time I had after the talk. I really hope this session was able to drum up some interest because it is a fantastic framework. This is something I could really see the community getting behind.

Thursday

The final day of Dreamforce kicked off strong with Carolina Ruiz Medina presenting on Apex Flex Queue. It speaks highly of her presentation style that the room was almost full for an 8:30am session the day after a huge party night! Highly technical talks like this are great and the community came out to show their support.

In keeping the trend of great technical sessions, Andy Fawcett did a fantastic topic on Advanced Apex Enterprise Patterns. His talk was 100% full and had one of the largest walk in lines I saw at the entire conference. I think this speaks heavily to both Andy’s influence in the community, but also the need to have more advanced technical talks. As the community grows, Salesforce developers are going to push the platform to higher heights than ever before. We need to provide a more diverse cross section of advanced talks to give developers coming from other languages more opportunities to learn. Some of the topics I attended, while useful for a beginner who has no programming experience, were a bit too basic for anyone who understands software development. In this instance, I would have loved for Andy to have double or maybe even triple the amount of time he had to cover all of the great stuff included in the Apex Enterprise Patterns. I guess I will just have to read his new book, Force.com Enterprise Architecture to learn more!

Meet the Developers is always a fantastic session. It is surprising to me how it isn’t completely packed. Some fantastic conversations get started and it is just a great experience to hear what is happening and what the dev team is thinking about some current issues.

While Dreamforce is fun, it was nice to get back home. Now it is time to start working with everything I learned out in San Francisco! I can’t wait!


Dreamforce has always served as a big refresher for me. It is truly invigorating to see the community out in force and hear all of the wonderful things everyone else is working on. I look forward to putting out some more quality content soon using some of the information I obtained while out there. The biggest news was the announcement of the Lightning Framework. I will be focusing on that over the next few weeks, but for a sneak peak:

If you had a great time at Dreamforce ’14, make sure to preregister for Dreamforce ’15, September 15-18, 2015.

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