David Reed @aoristdual@mastodon.technology

I just completed "Sonar Sweep" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2021 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/1

I wish federated tech ecosystems and open protocols received 1/10th the excitement and investment that blockchain-based flimflam gets.

Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries is now available through Salesforce.org MetaDeploy, as part of the #OpenSourceCommons program!

https://install.salesforce.org/products/dlrs/latest

It's a good time to read Night Watch again.

"You took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favor," said Vimes. "And to protect the innocent. That's all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. You're an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government."

I have to constantly remind myself: if the unit tests are hard to write, consider whether the code needs to be refactored.

(Adding another 12 mocks doesn't scale).

I'm really interesting in moving my cloud service consumption into options that are paid, private, self-hosted, federated, or OSS.

Gmail -> Fastmail (?)
Plex -> Jellyfin
Dropbox -> ?
Twitter -> Mastodon
Slack/Discord -> Matrix (?)

It's the Memorial Day weekend of writing documentation.

I was part of the writing team for this trail and I'm so excited to see it live! Learn how to use CumulusCI to build #Salesforce apps like #NPSP and #EDA.

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/trails/build-applications-with-cumulusci

Thesis: building email notifications into a Salesforce app is a code smell.

I'm offering a +150 bounty for great answers this this question on Salesforce Stack Exchange. Who has clever solutions for monitoring sharing recalculation operations?

https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/296325/how-to-make-sure-organization-wide-default-sharing-update-is-complete-via-an-api

Weekend project: I wrote a tiny Rust client library for the Salesforce REST API and a CLI driver.

It's not very good Rust (yet), but it works!

"We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy." (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War II.40, trans. Jowett)

This is not the Athens of the Peloponnesian War and Pericles is not on the ballot, but it's still a good day to be sound judges of policy.

Vote, and in doing so apply "that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action."

I'm proud that my organization and my team do really well at this. But it's sad to see people having a tough time in settings where those conversations don't happen, and I shudder to think of the software that comes out of it.

Leadership should empower their engineers to bring their expertise to bear as part of a conversation about how to build their systems.

One-way flows of information tend to produce silos that are inimical to good, well-rounded, and effective output.

One of my greatest frustrations is watching developers try to implement "requirements" that make no sense or are technically flawed.

Dev: "I want to do X".
Me: "X is impossible, but you can achieve your goal with Y."
Dev: "I can't; my requirement is to do X".

Some thoughts on good exception handling patterns in Apex. https://www.ktema.org/2020/02/26/on-writing-good-exception-handlers/

Threaded platforms are great for discussion (Twitter/Mastodon). They're terrible at presenting authoritative information. Cf. any software project that's developed via forum - "To install, digest this 100-page thread".

Building knowledge without threading is a challenge, but it's a worthy one because it lowers the barrier to entry for those seeking to make use of what you've created.

One of the things I like most about
Salesforce Stack Exchange, and which is most challenging for new users, is that it's not a threaded platform.

Stack Exchange insists on having a single source of truth - a complete question, a complete answer.

Committing to doing work in Arch + vim + Rust has been super effective at getting me to learn things and solve problems.

Really can't get audio to work on this Chromebook, though.