TrailheaDX '18

After reading this article, I can expect to learn about the must-see sessions at TrailheaDX '18, including keynotes, workshops, and extracurricular activities, as well as tips for making the most of the hallway track and networking opportunities.

Here are our 5 Key Takeaways:

1. Attend the Salesforce DX Keynote for insights on upcoming developments.

2. Learn from leading Salesforce development shops in the Build Apps with Salesforce DX session.

3. Get hands-on experience building your first DX app in a workshop.

4. Discover the benefits of automated testing with the Lightning Testing Service.

5. Check out The Extracurricular for community-led sessions focused on real projects and code.

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Last year we had a blast at TrailheaDX ‘17. We relished the opportunity to spend time at a smaller Salesforce event that was focused solely on developers. The smaller conference atmosphere makes having detailed conversations much easier. And the session list is a lot more targeted.

Here are a few things we’re excited about at TrailheaDX ‘18:

TrailheaDX ‘18 Must See Sessions

Here are the sessions we’re most looking forward to:

Salesforce DX Keynote

First and foremost, we love the DX Keynotes that we’ve seen since Dreamforce ‘16. They are always informative and a great opportunity to learn what coming down the pipeline from the Salesforce DX high command. As always, we’re excited to hear from Salesforce VP of Product Wade Wegner. This year we’ll also get to hear from new Salesforce PM and former FinancialForce CTO Andy Fawcett. It will be especially cool to hear from Andy who has tremendous real world experience with Salesforce development as well as a good deal of insider knowledge since joining Salesforce.

Build Apps with Salesforce DX

If you’re looking for some more real world Salesforce DX learnings you can’t do much better than this triple bill with three of the leading Salesforce development shops in the US: CRM Science, Appirio, and Solera.

Workshop: Build Your First DX App

If you want to get hands on, there are at least 2 great workshop opportunities for building your first Salesforce DX app. Check out either the Wednesday or Thursday session for more opportunities to learn and direct feedback from experts as you set up your first DX project, learn the new directory structure and experiment with the Salesforce CLI.

Implement an Event-Driven Software Architecture with Platform Events

Our good friend Phillipe Ozil is doing an early Thursday session on Platform Events. We met Phillipe at a Developer User Group in Paris and are always impressed with his knowledge of both the Salesforce Platform as well as general software development lifecycle best practices. We’re looking forward to checking this session out!

Develop Test Coverage and Automate Execution with Lightning Testing Service

Automated testing is a huge part of migrating to a successful CI/CD or DevOps flow for Salesforce. We’re excited to see this session on the Lighting Testing Service that will talk about how to set up automated testing for Lightning Components.

TrailheaDX Bootcamp

This year before TrailheaDX there will be a bootcamp for those that want to jumpstart their knowledge of the platform in an intensive way. There are 8 tracks depending on your experience level and role. The bootcamp is a 3 day immersive experience that leads towards an opportunity to pick up some Salesforce certifications. If you’re the kind of learner who likes to dive in fully and immerse for a few days, it’s probably worth coming out a bit early to check this out.

The Extracurricular

Running concurrently with Day 2 of TrailheaDX, is The Extracurricular - a community led conference within the conference. The Extracurricular is comprised of a series of 3 longer sessions geared towards hands on projects for developers. It starts at 9am on March 29.

There are 3 sessions: Trials & Triumphs—A Custom Data Table Lightning Component, Salesforce, External Data and Analytics—Without Middleware, “Why Did That Do That?” Managing Application State w/ SPAs. Each is designed to focus on real projects and code. The idea is to show mostly code and live demos with minimal slides. Though the event takes place within TrailheaDX, it’s community organized so may represent a more organic look at what people are doing with Salesforce today. Speakers include Matt Lacey who, if he’s not already a Salesforce MVP, should be!

You can attend both The Extracurricular as well as normal TrailheaDX sessions.

The Hallway Track

Our favorite moments of TrailheaDX (and all Salesforce conferences) are the organic conversations that pop up from just walking around the conference. We love chatting with speakers after sessions, with people at booths in the Expo and just running into friends in the halls. We’re especially excited to chat with some of our friends at other tooling partners like Provar Testing, The Welkin Suite, Illuminated Cloud, Codescan and Clayton.io.

We’d also love to connect with you! If you are interested in setting up a time to say hello, whether over coffee or just between sessions you can email us at team@bluecanvas.io and let us know what you’re thinking. We’ll have limited edition Blue Canvas git push salesforce master t-shirts for a select few who reach out first so please do get in touch!

See you next week!

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