Tag Archives: Salesforce Developer

Grow your Career as a MuleSoft Developer

Ana A. has been working as a developer on our team in Ecuador for more than six months. During this time she has achieved her Salesforce Platform Developer I and MuleSoft Developer – Level 1 certification. Let’s look at what MuleSoft does and why getting certified is a good career move.

GROW YOUR CAREER AS A MULESOFT DEVELOPER

Understanding APIs

To understand MuleSoft, it is important to understand what an API is. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s like a user interface but is not built for humans to understand, it is built for software. MuleSoft allows the software to connect with other applications. To sum it up, MuleSoft is an API and integration platform that allows businesses to connect their data, applications, and devices with others. The entire MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™ is designed to make it easier to create, maintain, and share APIs. They’ve created an entire API ecosystem around it, expanding the API ecosystem to include not only software developers but non-developers like Salesforce administrators with MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce.  

 

 

Importance of integrations

You’re probably asking yourself, why are these APIs so important? In MuleSoft’s recent survey of global IT leaders, they found that “the average enterprise has its data scattered across as many as 900 different systems, some of which don’t even belong to the organization.”  Combine that with their estimate that enterprises spend $3.5 million USD per year on integration, and you’ll see that there is an incredible opportunity for developers certified in integration ecosystems like MuleSoft.  The first step in getting the certification is to understand all of the MuleSoft capabilities, features, and tools.

 

Certification MuleSoft Developer – Level 1 (Mule 4)

There are four MuleSoft certification paths you can follow.  We are just going to focus on just the developer path. To start working on your first certification, Ana highly recommends taking the course Anypoint Platform Development: Fundamentals (Mule 4). This course has 13 modules and is composed of videos, walkthroughs, model quizzes, surveys, do-it-yourself exercises, and a self-assessment quiz. For you to complete this course, you must finish every part, then score over 70% on the self-assessment quiz. The best part of this course is that MuleSoft allows you to make two attempts at the certification for free. Ana also complemented her study with these additional resources: 


The easiest thing about MuleSoft for Ana was learning how to design an API with RAML, which is a RESTful API modeling language that is easy to learn. In Anypoint Platform, you will find the design center, the exchange tool, and the API manager. Ana enjoys working with the platform because it is very intuitive. It even lets you design and implement APIs using drag and drop components.

The most difficult part of getting certified for her was the error handling topic and order of execution. Order of execution can vary depending on the flow you’re building or if the calling flow has scope for error handling, but she was able to master the subject with the additional training resources shared above.

 

Salesforce and MuleSoft

If you’re a developer already working with Salesforce, you’ll be interested to know that MuleSoft has a Salesforce module with many connectors. It allows you to build an API that can manage a Salesforce org, database operations, or metadata operations like creating, updating, inserting, or deleting records and more. An example would be a connector called ‘create a record’ , which allows the API to create a record (or whenever an object is needed) specifying the configuration or a specific organization.

The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform also works with Salesforce Experience Cloud through a managed package called MuleSoft Anypoint API Community Manager. It allows companies to create developer communities around the APIs they are managing with Anypoint Platform. This helps them better manage access to their APIs and it helps their developer communities more easily adopt those APIs, and a great advantage is that the company can brand their APIs.

 

Training at Oktana 

When Ana was studying for this certification, she heard a lot about the power of MuleSoft, and how this could improve her career, so she wanted to try it. 

“Oktana helped me a lot with all the resources to start my training. I also had a mentor in the company, so he helped me every time I had a question. This was very helpful”.

Ana A.

Our team is constantly growing, in Ecuador and across the Americas. If you want to enhance your career with Salesforce and MuleSoft, apply for one of our open opportunities. Our training team works closely with the developers to help them achieve their certifications, just like Ana did. 

 

Tips for your first MuleSoft certification

  • Every time you finish a module in the MuleSoft course, play around with Anypoint Studio. Practice creating new flows with different connectors that you learned in the course. That way you can debug them and understand how the order of execution works for each component or connector. 
  • The exam has many questions about the order of execution, so make sure you understand that properly. 
  • Ana encountered problems installing the exam proctor software on Mac, she recommends taking your exam on a Windows system to make things easier. 


If you want to know more about MuleSoft, we recommend reading about our latest MuleSoft projects to get a better understanding of the great things you can achieve. 

Why become a Salesforce Developer in Bolivia

Thinking about a tech career? There are a lot of different directions, but the  Salesforce developer path is one that will enable you to quickly get started and expose you to numerous technologies as you work with companies to integrate and customize Salesforce. While a coding background is definitely helpful, Salesforce is a really good place to start your tech career.

You can explore this career path from the perspective of two of our Salesforce developers, Erwin and Sergio. They’re both new to Salesforce development, having joined Oktana Bolivia in 2020. They deserve an extra round of applause since their team started remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic!

In Bolivia, very few people know about Salesforce which surprises most of our team because they can see it’s a platform with a lot of potential. Because of its size and complexity, with so many different products, learning Salesforce on your own can be intimidating, but Erwin and Sergio have found that the learning materials and coaching provided by their trainer made everything much easier. 

Since childhood, both Erwin and Sergio showed a strong interest in technology, especially video game creation. This passion eventually led them both to software development. Before they joined Oktana, they had never worked with Salesforce, but had gained experience with different languages like Angular, C++, and Java. 

Similarities with common programming languages

Now that they have been working with the platform for several months, they have found some similarities with common programming languages:

  • Salesforce uses Apex, a proprietary language very similar to Java. The syntax is Java, but simpler.
  • The same happens with Lightning Web Components. They have a Java base, making their creation easier for Java developers.
  • The way Salesforce manages data is by storing everything in metadata. You can manipulate it using SOQL, which is similar to SQL.

Benefits of Salesforce

As a Salesforce developer, you help businesses by helping them integrate with a secure and scalable platform that’s easy to customize and upgrade without anything breaking. From the point of view of our Oktana Bolivia, here are some additional benefits of Salesforce:

  • Efficient: With just clicks, you can create a structure very quickly. Comparing it with other programming languages where you have to create the database from scratch, using Salesforce is much easier because the database structure is already created for you. Also, the way Salesforce organizes your information is great. If you have to make a change in Salesforce, and if you setup your metadata correctly, it is simpler to reorganize it, saving a lot of time.
  • Drag & drop page layouts: Salesforce lets you move fast by dragging elements and following defined steps which allows you to focus on other development.
  • Mobile: Salesforce offers a mobile application that lets you work like you would in the browser. When you build functionality for Salesforce, it can be made immediately available on the Salesforce app, so you don’t need to build a separate mobile app. 
  • Platform: The Salesforce platform is very intuitive. Salesforce teaches you to think about the easiest way to solve a problem, so it’s quite easy to follow this trend. For example, if you start working with Lightning Web Components, when you get some practice, you learn to create components one on top of the other and that interact within the same page, understanding how the components communicate with each other.
  • Environments: Salesforce already has everything hosted for you. It’s easier to develop in a sandbox environment, then upload it later to production. You don’t have to deploy, just take it to a sandbox to upload it later to a host and then production.

Salesforce best practices

On the other hand, working with Salesforce forces you to learn good programming practices like:

  • When you develop with Salesforce, it forces you to be more orderly and develop in the most optimal way possible, so your code is not chaotic. It’s really how you should program on any platform in any language.
  • Likewise, all the out-of-the-box tools are very well made and give you ideas of how you should develop if you aren’t working in Salesforce.

“I consider that the creators of Salesforce are THE BEST, they thought it through very well, and you learn from this.”

Erwin M – Developer

Challenges while learning Salesforce

Maybe the toughest thing is the declarative part of the flows. Salesforce has tools to automate data management. One is the Process Builder where you can develop with clicks, also with the Flow Builder, which allows you to create complex solutions all with clicks, too. In the beginning, it can be a bit complicated to select the right tool for each type of request, but with practice, you get to know everything that Salesforce offers and can do.

Plus, at Oktana, with the onboarding training and experience on different practice projects, you have an excellent base to get to know Salesforce much better. 

“There is a lot of information about Salesforce, so it is difficult to know everything, but with practice, you gradually get used to using this platform”  

Sergio Z – Developer

Why should you become a Salesforce Developer?

Erwin and Sergio highly recommend taking this career path, because it allows you to create different types of solutions, learn good practices and it’s a great way to start learning a different form of programming. Also, there is a lot of demand related to this career. 

It’s not necessary to have previous knowledge of Salesforce before starting this career path. If you know the basics of programming, that is enough. But, it does facilitate learning to have prior knowledge of web development, JavaScript, or basic Java (or C#).

What it’s like working with other cultures

Erwin and Sergio think it’s great, and fascinating, to work with people across several countries – every day they learn about the customs, food, culture, and places they would love to visit in Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and the United States. They also learn many of the similarities between countries. 

Something funny Erwin found when he started working at Oktana was that he had thought Salesforce was a simple and straightforward CRM tool, but after training and working with it, he was completely surprised by the size and potential of the platform. For Sergio, when he started working at Oktana, it was the first time he had worked with a Mac as a working tool. He thinks it isn’t as bad as some comments he’s heard from those who don’t use Macs, it has quite interesting and useful things.

It has been interesting getting started at a new job, learning new technologies, during COVID. For example, for Erwin, it was interesting several paid events around the world that used to take place in person, are now broadcast over the internet for free, allowing people to know and learn much more about Salesforce and new technologies for developing software. In the case of Sergio, working completely from home has great advantages. The fact of literally getting out of bed and taking a couple of steps to be in your work area, instead of taking a bus to go to the office, is really motivating. It’s also really relaxing too, at the end of the day, simply log your hours and close your Mac to be at home and rest. 

We’re still growing! If you’re interested in becoming a Salesforce developer in Bolivia, check out some of the Salesforce Certification articles we’ve put together and our current open Salesforce developer positions in Bolivia.