Salesforce DX is a new development experience that aims to improve the core developer experience. Here are some resources to learn more about it.
With this article, gain a better understanding of Salesforce DX and its potential impact on Salesforce development. You will learn about the philosophy behind Salesforce DX, its architecture, and the resources available to stay up to date on its latest developments.
Here are our 5 Key Takeaways:
1. Salesforce DX is a movement towards improving the developer experience on the Salesforce platform.
2. The philosophy behind Salesforce DX is based on the "CODERS" principles of competitiveness, openness, developer trust, empowerment, skill reuse, and community support.
3. Externalizing metadata and org shape allows for a standard source-driven development approach and shifts the app's "source of truth" to a version control system.
4. Resources such as salesforcedx.com and Matt Lacey's blog provide valuable insights and updates on Salesforce DX.
5. The Good Day Sir podcast offers entertaining and insightful discussions on Salesforce development and the potential impact of Salesforce DX.
Salesforce DX is probably the most interesting announcement that came out of Dreamforce this year. Einstein is great, but Salesforce DX is an acknowledgement that the Salesforce development could use some improvement.
Salesforce is an amazing platform that allows developer to do a lot with very little. However, the core developer experience has not improved much from when it was first released.
Salesforce has been doing a lot of promotion around Salesforce DX. There are still a lot of unanswered questions. Our hope here is to round up some of the best resources on the web about Salesforce DX. If you want to learn more about DX, what it might look like, and the philosophy that drives it these are a great place to start.
There were a number of Dreamforce sessions about Salesforce DX including a good portion of the Developer Keynote. One of the best sessions was this in depth look at the architecture and philosophy behind Salesforce DX technical lead Jim Wunderlich and Mike Miller who leads the source driven development team at Salesforce.
The video provides a ton of great information on DX including the “CODERS” philosophy that underpins the entire project:
The whole talk is worth watching in full.
Wade Wegner is a VP at Salesforce who is spearheading the Salesforce DX project. Wade comes from Microsoft and has made his career working on developer tooling and making previously notorious platforms a delight to develop on. Witnessing Microsoft’s transformation and move towards more openness makes many of us hopeful about Wade’s influence on the Salesforce platform. He dropped by the Salesforce developer blog to do an interview and give his thoughts on how Salesforce DX = UX for Developers.
Money quote:
One of the most important changes with Salesforce DX is that, by externalizing more of the metadata and the org shape, we can shift the app’s “source of truth” from the Salesforce org to a version control system. This standard source-driven development approach has been used by developers for years, and it’s now a core part of the Salesforce developer experience.
Another great resource is the aptly named: salesforcedx.com. Sajayan Kaimal did well to grab the domain and has started to blog about the latest information about Salesforce DX. This is a good resource for anyone wishing to keep up to date on the latest about Salesforce’s plans.
Kaimal’s October 17 writeup includes screenshots and analysis about DX as well as the Force.com CLI, Scratch Orgs and the Force.com IDE’s newest incarnation.
First of all, we recently discovered the Good Day Sir podcast. It’s a fantastic and entertaining podcast with some refreshing perspective on Salesforce development. Jeremy Ross and John De Santiago are serious developers with tremendous experience setting up CI and source control for Salesforce.
In this podcast (which happens to be their 100th!) they bring some real talk about what they expect Salesforce DX to be and how it can help developers. They talk about their hopes and dreams for DX as well as their skepticism about it. They ask the question “Is Salesforce DX vaporware?” They speculate and disagree about what Scratch Orgs are actually going to look like in practice. They talk about their excitement that Salesforce is taking the experience of developers seriously. And they are especially excited to have Salesforce validate what they have been telling clients for years: source control should be your source of truth for Salesforce.
The pod is worth listening to in full. Most insightful perhaps is their analysis that Salesforce DX is a movement rather than a specific product. It will be an ongoing effort on the part of Salesforce to make the developer experience better and better.
Matt Lacey’s blog is one of the best on Salesforce development. Matt does a lot for the Salesforce community and even proposed the Salesforce Stack Exchange site. He wrote about Salesforce DX mid-Dreamforce because he was so excited about it. His post succinctly sums up some of the hopes that every Salesforce developer has about DX. Matt keyed in on this key line right away: “version control will be the source of truth.” Matt rightly notes that this is a big departure for Salesforce and a welcome step towards modern software development practices.
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