2018: My Year in Review

In this post I would like to share information about what I managed to achieve in matters related to professional life in 2018.

Two Salesforce certificates

In the first half of the year, I focused on gaining 2 certificates, which I passed in April (Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant) and in May (Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I). Despite the knowledge, it required some preparation due to the specifics of the questions that appear on the exam. So I have 5 certificates now and this is not my last word 🙂

Learning about Amazon Web Services

Around the middle of the year, I decided to become familiar with Amazon Web Services. Their popularity is constantly growing, and because they perfectly integrate with Salesforce, I thought it was worth looking at. I signed up and went through the course “AWS Certified Developer – Associate”. Quite intense, almost 15 hours of video with topics from IAM, EC2, S3, RDS, SES, SNS to Lambda, DynamoDB, Route53 and KMS.

Although I do not plan to become an AWS expert, it was worth getting to know these aspects.

Change of work

In August I changed my job. I have finished working at Billennium and started at PolSource. I am, of course, working as a Salesforce Developer on international projects.

Trip to Gran Canaria

In the second half of the year, our family flew to Gran Canaria. Two weeks spent in a warm country thanks to remote work (I work 100% remotely) was a great escape from the cool autumn Poland. The return was not very comfortable due to temperature jump from +20 C to +2 C …
But I think I have already found my place for retirement …

Learning Python

I decided to learn Python. I know PHP for years, but I’ve heard that Python is good at webscrapping (parsing pages) and also has a good library that allows to connect to Salesforce.
In one of the projects, I used Python as an ETL tool to migrate data from an external system to Salesforce. It worked great when transferring data and written scripts allow for a quick repetition of the process if you notice any data problem.

In another, this time a hobby project, I used Python (and MySQL) to collect and group data on playlists of hits from many radio stations. Python allows to run multiple threads, which significantly speeds up time-consuming operations.

Learning GIT

So far, I’ve known GIT at a fairly basic level, which is not much more than the pull, commit and push. I wanted to get to know GIT much more, hence I bought a great course by Maciej Aniserowicz. He discusses the practical use of branches, merge, rebase and many others.

Jira management

I have had contact with Jira many times, but it has always been from the user side. I took tasks assigned to me, and after solving them, the only thing I had to do was change the status.

I wanted to get to know Jira a bit more from the administrative side, how to configure it properly and then manage it. And this time the course found on Udemy was useful – 11 hours of video of well-arranged materials allowed to get to know the topic.

In addition, Atlassian has a lot of materials on Scrum, Agile and project management.

Salesforce Lightning

Until recently, I wasn’t familiar with writing Lightning components. A lot of projects were carried out in the classic UI, and those using Lightning did not require development on the UI side.

I had to take a bull by the horns, I went through a few tutorials and I can boast of several written components in Lightning technology. Certainly still a lot of learning in front of me, but at least the topic does not scare me anymore.

Salesforce projects

Last year, apart from standard development, I had the opportunity to take part in the implementation of several projects related to integrations:

  • Salesforce integration with Outlook
  • Salesforce integration with Sharepoint
  • Salesforce integration with Zendesk
  • Salesforce integration with Calendly
  • Salesforce integration with Zuora
  • Salesforce integration with Gmail (custom one, to meet specific requirements)

Books

In addition to listening to numerous (technical and not only) podcasts, I was able to find time to read 11 books. And although it’s not just about quantity, this year I hope to read more. Well-chosen items broaden horizons.

Summary

Does it mean that everything that I have planned has been accomplished? Everything did not, but on the other hand, there were things that I had not previously taken into account: Python, Jira, change of work.

And although I have predefined what I would like to achieve professionally in 2019, I will keep it for myself and hope to share it next year.

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