Where has all the deep technical Salesforce content gone?
I was browsing Twitter/X on the way back from the Salesforce World Tour London and noticed this post by Christian Szandor Knapp that caught my eye.
This post really tweaked my curiosity and got me thinking. I gave a short reply and received some replies back, but as you can see the thread got me thinking — why is there less deep technical content?
ChatGPT, the Rise of Generative AI and the Demise of Twitter
Firstly, I want to address Andy’s suggestion in detail and also address the demise of Twitter. I fully agree that some part of this lack of content will be due to the rise of GenAI, such as ChatGPT, and people wondering if it is worthwhile.
As a creator of deeper technical content (both historically and also figuring out how to do so best at the moment), there is definitely a demotivating factor that comes from seeing the social media scape peppered with “how I earn $xxxxx daily from YouTube using AI” and seeing the general plethora of such content. When someone can simply send a prompt to such a system and get a detailed response that saves them trawling through a blog post, why wouldn’t they?
However, I personally think GenAI has less of an impact on such deep technical content and believe it is due to a number of other factors. One of those is Twitter/X in general has had less Salesforce people posting and interacting on it in my experience as they move to other platforms like Reddit, Discord, and LinkedIn. Enough has been written about that, but I do think more people have shied away from it and sharing content on it. But I don’t think these two factors cover off the deeper why.
A Change in People’s Circumstances and Roles
When I first started blogging around Salesforce and reading other’s Salesforce content, most of those creating content were “generalists” and covering a variety of roles. I may have been listed as a “consultant” but I was really a developer, admin, architect, and business analyst in one.
As Salesforce has grown, there has been a much clearer definition in the number and variety of roles that exist in the ecosystem. This is highlighted by the fact the certification site breaks down the available certifications into 7 roles:
What does this mean? Well, for starters, people are more likely to look at only a portion of the platform and how it interacts instead of the platform as a broader piece of technology.
Secondly, many generalists who produced deeper technical content have likely moved along in their careers and now have roles that provide less free time for investigating, researching, and publishing such content, as well as the job type where it would be more common to find such topics. I know from my own personal experience that as I have moved up a career ladder, my time spent managing has increased, and the time I have available for investigative play in programming has decreased.
So why aren’t newer authors filling this gap? This goes back to the specialisation of roles. Generally speaking, developers on a project now tend to be focused on just coding in a specific set of circumstances. More can be done with declarative tooling. And significantly, there is less new stuff to find.
Covering Old Ground
I like to say that when I was first developing on Salesforce, it wasn’t hard to do cutting-edge work because the edge was everywhere in my daily activities. Many of the problems that I worked on that led to technical blogs and content have now been solved very well. Some examples are:
- Trigger frameworks — they were less common and are now de-facto
- Messaging queues — I and many others wrote custom object and scheduled batch-based processing and messaging queues. Platform Events solves this
- Test data creation — Between test factory patterns, the
@TestSetupannotation, theTest.loadDatamethods, sandbox seeding and other tools, this is well-covered - Performant permissions management — SOQL has a number of enhancements now alongside more detailed Apex methods to handle this
These are all examples of things I know a lot of technical content was produced about, which are all now well-solved and do not need yet another post about. Some of my top-performing content of all time relates to things such as improving Apex performance, but again a lot of that is now well covered elsewhere.
As the platform has grown, the contents of what is considered easy has grown as well and thus the edges have moved further out and diminished significantly.
Smoother Edges = Less Content Opportunities
Another thing I think has happened is that the edges of the platform have become a lot smoother as well. What I mean by this is that over time the strange behaviours in the technical aspects of the platform have been ironed out and so there are less places where deep technical content can occur.
Included in the smoothing of the edges is the improved content from Salesforce itself. As the developer relations team has grown, alongside the documentation teams, and Trailhead, a broader set of content has been produced that has covered some of the more complex areas.
An example here is identity flows. Many years ago, I was working down the CTA path and, as part of the preparation for the review board, had to ensure I understood all the various identity flows. At the time, I had to draw the diagrams out, do some testing, and figure out edge cases myself. Now, that is all very well documented in detail on multiple Salesforce-owned sites.
I think it is fantastic all this official content is out and I am extremely pleased that Salesforce is now a lot easier to do a lot more. But again this does mean there is less stuff that other content providers can create to cover things off in different technical detail. I see a lot more now around best practices and learnings than deeper investigative work that shows new and interesting things.
Best Practices Based Content
There are many great blogs and channels out there covering best practices for Salesforce. Some of this content is based upon learnings on the platform and some is based upon porting knowledge from the broader software development ecosystem into Salesforce. Whilst I personally think we need to be careful saying “x pattern works in Java so let’s port it over to do proper development in Apex”, I think this fits into deeper more technical content, however, it doesn’t necessarily fit the bill for what I think is missing.
Firstly, best practice content should always come with a caveat of “this is my opinion”. There are few definitive best practices on Salesforce when it comes to Apex, and most of those have instances where they need breaking, so anyone reading such content should be aware.
Secondly, whilst the content is educational, I would not class it as novel. Novel content focusses on doing things not done publicly before and sharing the learnings — especially if the application is not production usable. As two examples, I have written ML models in Apex and VR systems using Apex and Visualforce. Neither of these have any real practical applications, but the art of getting them done helped me find some useful things I could share with people that could then be applied elsewhere (such as the loop performance).
Do Stupid Stuff
Both of these examples are the things I talked about in my interview on the Salesforce Developers podcast as “Weird Apex” but are really summed up nicely as “doing stupid stuff”. And I think this is where I think some of the missing deep technical content is.
I have seen people:
- Control a drone fleet with Apex
- Integrate a coffee machine with Salesforce
- Integrations with microcontrollers and Lego
- Interactive learning experiences integrating with audio and video
- VR experiences
And a bunch of other things. I see there are still people doing things like this such as Tic Tac Toe on Salesforce, but these are fewer between than they used to be and there are definitely less than at Dreamforce and the like. Play is how we learn and I think we are playing less perhaps? Or is just less play being shared?
So What’s the Solution?
Short answer — I don’t know. This blog was really just me writing out all my thoughts on the matter. From my side, it has made me think about the sort of things I might start playing with and doing to try and see what I can learn. I definitely don’t feel I haven’t learned anything recently, but I can say it has not been a lot of new and novel Apex or Salesforce related things.
What do you think? Is there a lot of new and novel deep technical content out there I have just been missing?