I attended my first Dreamforce two years ago and I was kind of surprised at how open everyone was. Product managers stood around taking questions about which features made the cut and which were deferred, they passed out their cards to people who wanted to follow up, and it seemed like every presentation included some open source files or a repo you could go to for more.
But what really struck home was that almost every presentation seemed to be speaking right to me: “If you have a successful web app on another platform,” they seemed to say, “we’re making it very easy for you to bring that app to Salesforce.” There were a lot of Angular examples that year, and as a JavaScript developer it really seemed like this was an ecosystem I could thrive in.
Two years later, it turns out that was true. Our app, DayBack Calendar, is live on the App Exchange. Though the Salesforce documentation has been occasionally opaque 😉 the people have been amazing. Even ostensibly competing ISV partners have helped us fine tune our Test Drive and start to grok the Salesforce culture.
I think there is something very fundamental to the way developers work that makes sharing come naturally to many of us. The very idea of making a tool for someone else–of creating technology–is founded upon having empathy for the person you’re building for. That empathy tends to run very strong in good developers, and it’s something I’m thrilled to have found in Salesforce–at Dreamforce and in our local Seattle Meetup. (I’m psyched to meet the Portland contingent in at Forcelandia in July!)
So with a little empathy for the next JavaScript developers that want to bring their app to Salesforce, we’ve packaged up what we learned launching DayBack and have published an open source Canvas App Starter Kit to help others get started. This is the resource I wish we’d had when we were diving in: it consolidates some of the Salesforce documentation and best practices, tackles some of the tricky stuff like window resizing and modding static resources, and includes a simpler Hello World app that may be more familiar to JS devs. We’re new here, so feedback would be great.
Having developers trust our app–trust that we’re looking out for them–is why we’ve been successful. So connecting with other developers–and helping to foster dialog–is why we wanted to sponsor Forcelandia and get involved with a developer oriented, community driven event: we’re all part of the same community. Thanks to everyone who makes new devs feel welcome. See you in PDX!