Stack Overflow just posted their annual developer survey for 2015 – http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015. I was more than a bit surprised that Salesforce development topped the list of most dreaded technologies. Now I’m not questioning their results, but you know what Mark Twain is misquoted as having said – there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, and this one didn’t quite pass the smell test for me. I know a lot of Salesforce developers at all levels, and if 73% of them dreaded working on the platform I would expect to be having quite a few conversations consisting of people complaining about the platform and how they are studying other technologies in the hope to escape those dreaded limit errors.
In the survey, dreaded is defined as “% of devs who are developing with the language or tech but have not expressed interest in continuing to do so.” I know many developers who have come to Apex from other languages. I can’t think of any of them who are looking to do something else. There are some great things about developing on the Salesforce platform, and some very annoying things as well. I can see how someone coming to Apex from another language might find aspects of it very frustrating (don’t we all?) but I think most of us find the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Enough so that we are generally very interested in continuing to work on the platform as it evolves.
Something isn’t quite right.
So I asked myself, who were the respondents to the survey? It must have been a fairly small sample of Salesforce developers, after all Salesforce doesn’t even appear on the list of popular technologies (defined as most used), so less than 7.8% of the respondents would be Salesforce devs. Of course, this could still be a statistically significant number, but it does suggest that Stack Overflow does not necessarily attract large numbers of Salesforce developers.
And why would it? Any experienced Salesforce developer is much more likely to be active on the similarly named and often confused Stack Exchange – specifically Salesforce.StackExchange.com. If you look for answers on Salesforce or Apex questions, you’re much more likely to be directed there than Stack Overflow. Looking at Stack Overflow, the tag Apex has 667 questions. Apex on Stack Exchange has 7000 questions. Does this mean that Salesforce developers who are happier on the platform are more likely to be on Stack Exchange than Stack Overflow? Are the Salesforce devs on Stack Overflow more likely to be part time on Salesforce where those on Stack Exchange are full time on the platform? Are developers who spent their time on Stack Exchange less likely to have seen the ads for the survey (which are noted as appearing on Stack Overflow sites)? I have no idea. But I’d bet there’s a selection bias at play here, and I’d bet it’s significant.
So I call bullshit on this statistic. I think it falls into the category Stack Overflow uses to describe the results where “These results are not unbiased. Like the results of any survey, they are skewed by selection bias, language bias, and probably a few other biases.”
I think there is some extreme selection bias going on here. Nothing against Stack Overflow by the way – they are very transparent about the results and potential for bias. Unfortunately, I’m afraid a lot of people will look at that number and assume it means something, where in fact the hitherto unasked question – of how many Salesforce developers actually dread the technology they are working on, remains unanswered.
As an author, I have a deep interest in the way people learn technology, especially given the way technology has been impacting education in general. In fact, I created an entire Pluralsight course on the topic: “Learning Technology in the Information Age”, in which I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of content.
When I compare articles and blog posts with classes and books, one of the key differences is that classes and books provide curation. Curation is when the teacher or author selects the material that is important and then covers it in a logical order in which concepts build on each other to promote understanding. Articles, blog posts and videos on the Internet are fantastic when it comes to answering specific questions and providing information, but tend to be very poor on curation. This is why classes and books and courses still exist and thrive. When you want to really learn a topic, especially when entering a new subject area, good curation can dramatically reduce your learning time and help you achieve competence much more quickly.
Which brings us to Trailhead. I just finished looking over four new Trailhead modules, Data Security, Change Management, VisualForce Basics and Apex Testing. What fascinates me about them is that they provide something I haven’t really seen anywhere else. They aren’t articles. They aren’t books. They are, in a sense, almost pure curation of content. Think of them as a detailed course outline. They won’t teach you everything you need to know by a long shot, but they’ll get you started and leave you knowing what you need to learn.
I like the name Trailhead. When you go hiking you have a number of options. You can read an article about something along the trail, but that won’t prepare you for the hike – you won’t know about the dangerous spots or equipment you’ll need. You can hire a guide to take you on the hike and you’ll learn everything about the wildlife and geology and so on, and they’ll be sure you’re outfitted properly, but it will cost you quite a bit. Or you can get the trail guide, that will highlight the important things you need to know about the trail, the elevation gain, slippery spots and equipment you need, leaving you to discover and learn on your own as you take the path. Trailhead is your trail guide to Salesforce. It’s not THE ANSWER to Force.com training, but it’s a fantastic resource that serves a distinct purpose.
As I headed out from Dreamforce, one of my last stops was the developer library where I saw Andrew Fawcett signing his new book, “Force.com Enterprise Architecture”. It took me a while to get around to reading it, and I thought I’d share a few comments since he was kind enough to give me a copy.
As I discuss in my Pluralsight course “Learning Technology in the Information Age”, I feel that books provide a unique value proposition – along with taking a course, they are the best way to gain domain knowledge that is curated and organized in a way that is easy to learn. So that’s how I measure the value of a book beyond the obvious standards of clarity and accuracy – by choice of content and organization.
The first thing you should know is that this is not a book for beginners. This is not the book for an admin to read who wants to learn Apex. It’s also not the book to read if your goal is to obtain one of the innumerable certifications that Salesforce offers. This book is intended for intermediate to expert level Force.com developers.
The title, “Force.com Enterprise Architecture” is a rather generic title that is accurate enough, but as you will see, tends to obscure the real value of the book. This is a good book for any Force.com developer who wants to learn to how to architect solutions on the platform. The exact approaches in the book aren’t necessarily applicable or necessary for every solution, but they demonstrate the right way to think about architecture on the platform.
That said, if you are a developer who is thinking about creating a managed package or application to distribute on the AppExchange, this book isn’t just good – it’s indispensable. It is a “drop everything you are doing and buy a copy for every member of your team before you do anything else” kind of book.
There are many books on Salesforce and Force.com, including many books published by Salesforce itself, but what almost all of them have in common is that they are written by in-house developers and consultants. As far as I know there are just two books in existence written by developers who have shipped major managed packages on the AppExchange and this is one of them (mine is the other). Andrew Fawcett is CTO at FinancialForce, and he may know more than anyone in the world on what it takes to ship a Force.com application (myself included) – so if you’re even thinking about doing that, you’d be a fool not to buy this book and study it carefully. It’s full of the kinds of hints, tricks and suggestions that you won’t find anywhere else (including the books published by Salesforce – most of their authors haven’t shipped managed packages either).
And it’s a great complement for Advanced Apex Programming – you’ll find there is little overlap between them.
On each Force.com release, developers eagerly look through the release notes for exciting new features. I’ve found that the things that excite me most often aren’t the same things that thrill others. I often get most excited about small changes – sometimes they can have a huge impact on software design patterns.
This summer, the biggest feature for me is the elimination of Describe limits. This eliminates a huge Catch-22 when developing on the platform. On one hand, good Apex code is supposed to respect field level and object security. But the previous Describe statement limit made it difficult and sometimes impossible to do so on larger applications and systems, where the number of fields processed in an execution context could easily exceed the available limits.
The elimination of Describe limits does, however, raise an interesting question. How does this change impact design patterns and could other limits come into play? Or put another way – how costly are Describe calls in terms of CPU time?
Prior to now, the best design pattern for using Describe statements involved caching each Describe call so that you could at least ensure that you don’t call getDescribe on a field more than once in an execution context. The design pattern looked something like the getDescribeInfo function below, where the parameters are the field name and SObjectField token for the desired field:
Does it still make sense to use this kind of pattern? Or should you just call getDescribe() whenever you need describe information?
To find out, I did some benchmarking using the techniques described in chapter 3 of the second edition of Advanced Apex Programming.
I found that the approximate cost of a Describe statement is about 3 microseconds. This looked pretty fast to me. Can the earlier design pattern, with its cost of an additional function call and map lookup, be any faster?
The answer, as it turns out, is no. The overhead of caching and looking up data exceeded any benefits that might have come from avoiding the extra Describe calls.
Further testing showed the same results with SObject describes as field describes.
I don’t know if Describe calls on summer 14 are fast because work went in to optimize them, or because the platform is now caching describe data internally for you, but it doesn’t really matter. It seems clear that going forward, the optimal design pattern for describe statements is to use them inline as needed.
I’m pleased to announce my latest Pluralsight course “Data Visualization for Developers”. This is not a course on Force.com – but in some ways it’s even better. It teaches the principles and practice of data visualization using Force.com as an underlying technology.
The course is published on Pluralsight.com. Free trials are available if you are not already a subscriber.
