Hutte Trails Podcast – A podcast about all things Salesforce

Why open-source and AI is here to stay (Trails Podcast episode #13 with Alba Rivas)

• Hutte • Season 1 • Episode 13

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Join us in this episode as we delve into Alba Rivas' perspective as a Salesforce Principal Developer Advocate. We will discuss how and why AI and open-source are here to stay within the Salesforce ecosystem. Explore her journey, gain insights, and discover valuable tips.

Harald (00:01)
Hi Alba, very warm welcome to the HUTE Trails Podcast. Thank you for coming.

Alba (00:07)
Thank you for inviting me, Harald. I'm so excited to be here with you today. And hello to all the audience who are listening to us.

Harald (00:18)
So I'll kick us off with the question that I always ask first, and that is, how did you first get in touch with Salesforce, Salesforce technology, Salesforce ecosystem, and how did your career evolve from there?

Alba (00:35)
Yes, sure. So I have a technical background. I started telecommunications engineering here in Granada, the city where I live. And my first jobs were like being a developer for other technologies. I knew Python. I did things with Java and so on. And because of that, I was offered a position as a backend developer in a partner.

of the app I changed that has some applications on the Salesforce marketplace. And they taught me APEX basically at the beginning. And because the people at the company and the company program for learning was so good, I was able to get up to speed very quickly and then evolve my career from there.

Harald (01:35)
And eventually you then moved from working for an AppExchange ISV partner to Salesforce itself, right?

Alba (01:47)
Yeah, well, in the middle, I spent some months in Salesforce training company, which did courses like training courses about Salesforce development and Salesforce in general. And then a position opened in the team that I currently am, which is developer advocacy for platform. And I knew...

many people from that team because I was very active in the Salesforce community. I also was a Salesforce MVP. So when I heard about the position, I thought this is for me. I also liked like teaching, training. I was doing that by that time. So I decided to apply to the position and I got it.

Harald (02:37)
Great. And given your experience of, I think, more than 10 years overall on the platform now, working in different fields, what are some feature releases that specifically excited you in the past? Or is there anything upcoming that you are specifically looking forward to when we look at the whole bandwidth of technology that the Salesforce platform?

offers to its users and partners.

Alba (03:07)
So something that I think was a complete game changer were Lightning Web Components. Because before having Lightning Web Components available, we had to code with Visualforce, Aura was something in the middle. And when Lightning Web Components came out, they were like a much more...

open and standardized way of building front -end with like well accepted technologies in the ecosystem, in the whole development ecosystem, right? And I was so glad that I was able to learn JavaScript very well and learn better CSS and HTML and web components, which is something that's like completely standard, although we provide like a

thin layer on top of that, right? So that you can use them in Salesforce in a more agile way. But everything was like, opening up, opening up. And that's something that I really enjoyed in that I enjoy nowadays because I was a backend developer, but now I'm full stack because I spent a lot of time learning components in JavaScript and so on. And now I really enjoy doing that part.

That I have to say at the beginning was a challenge because like the mindset of a backend developer is quite different from the mindset of a front end developer, right? And you need to like invest some time at the beginning so that things stick in your mind and so that you really understand what like user interfaces.

Harald (04:37)
Mm -hmm.

Alba (05:00)
are doing behind the scenes, right? In the browser, when you execute them in the browser and so on. And yeah, that was one. And then the second one, of course, is AI. Like, generative AI has come here to stay and it's been like a revolution, small revolution, but I think it has like a lot of...

Harald (05:03)
Mm -hmm.

Alba (05:28)
potential and there are a lot of opportunities for companies to develop themselves, develop customer applications and custom workflows using AI features. And I think that Salesforce is doing a great job of trying to make things easy for customers in regards to AI adoption. Right. And I was a little bit skeptical at the beginning.

when we started to create our own AI products and so on. But now that I've been playing with them for a few months and really implementing things myself, I think it's super powerful. And there are many use cases that people can implement and for which they can leverage the help of AI.

Harald (06:22)
Yeah, I fully agree. Yeah, I also want to, you mentioned LWC and I also think I'm still stunned. I think Salesforce really was a very early adopter to web components, right? When it hasn't been mainstream, they kind of fully doubled down on it, making it their main front -end engine. And I really think it paid off a lot in terms of.

Yeah, developer experience also, but yeah, also user experience. I mean, the way they behave and the way the lightning interface evolved and is extendable with LWC is awesome. Yeah, speaking of AI, so do you see it change the life of Salesforce developers, let's say from local to pro?

developers already now? Or do you think we will take more time into broader adoption? Or do you already see now basically how the daily tasks of someone developing on Salesforce platform changes with the recently launched enhancements and AI integrations and tools?

Alba (07:42)
Yeah. So I like saying that there are like two main ways in which developers can get involved with AI. One of the ways.

It really depends. So one of the ways is like using generative AI features of the platform to create apps. And that way you can try it out for free because you don't need to have license, but using it in production, it really depends on your company. Because if your company decides to purchase those licenses or those add ons,

and invest in AI, then developers obviously are going to have to get involved with prompt builder, with copilot and model builder. And their life is going to change in some sense because they are going to be developing all the types of applications on top of the applications that they are used to develop. But...

There is a second way in which developers can get involved with AI. And the second way applies to everyone, which is using Einstein for developers. Einstein for developers is an assistant that you can use in Visual Studio Code or CodeVehicle. It is an extension that you install and it helps you generate code and learn also how to generate code. And there are like...

three ways in which you can use it. One way is prompt based and that one is probably useful for beginners, people who are learning and want to ask Einstein to generate whatever methods. But there are two more ways, which are great and that I'm using a lot. So one of them is by inline suggestions. So if you activate Einstein for developers in your org, while UI

typing and creating your code, Einstein is going to give you suggestions. And many times those suggestions are very accurate because Einstein for developers takes into account the files that you have opened in your project. So if you are using certain style guide or certain ways of programming, the suggestions, all the suggestions, not only the ones that are in line.

are going to follow that same style, but the inline ones, I found them really, really useful. And then the third way in which you can use it is to generate tests. So you can go into a method, click on the right button and click on generate test. This one, it's complex. You know, creating tests is not an easy task. So...

It's not going to be 100 % right most of the times, but at least it's going to generate some structure and it's going to make some work for you so that you can really start playing with that test and finalize it. So it saves you time and it makes you much more productive. And this is a game changer, I believe. And I think that every developer should be using Ascent for developers now.

Harald (11:12)
Great, thank you. Yeah, shifting gears a bit, I'd like to switch to the topic of DevOps, which is specifically close to my heart. And here I'd like to ask a question about open source, because personally I have been observing that open source is having quite a moment in the Salesforce open system. At least that is my perception in the DevOps field. So there are a few initiatives.

like Flexible or the Exit Scale like it was previously named or SFDX Hades or Cumulus CI which originally came out of Salesforce .org. And yeah, we see a lot of activity. We see a lot of...

let's say talks on conferences, on these community events about Salesforce in the open source, more people getting involved, launching stuff that they have built, sharing it with others. The same is true for CI CD pipelines that people might just open source on GitHub actions or other.

platforms. So I'm curious if you share that observation and in general, if you have any thoughts about open source and Salesforce and how they play together.

Alba (12:35)
Sure. So first of all, Salesforce was the first one who made that turn towards open source because LWC is open source. The Salesforce CLI is open source in all its plugins. I think not 100 % of them, but most of them. And I know that there's been an ongoing effort to open source.

all the different plugins and technology. LWR is also open source. Okay. So it's something that Salesforce is adopting as part of its philosophy and something that is like pushing internally and also externally. That's why they created a CLI that you can extend with plugins. Okay.

And similar things. So I think that that's probably one of the reasons the general ecosystem of open source around Salesforce is growing. And I can tell you that is growing because I've been taking a look at some of the statistics of the repos that you mentioned, because you told me that you were going to ask me about this open source libraries and.

I can tell you that for instance, SFDX Git Delta from Sebastian Colladon has 60K downloads a week, which is impressive. For instance, SFDMU, which is the Salesforce Data Move utility, it has 6K downloads a week. We have DX at scale. It has...

4 .3 downloads a week. And we have like many, many more plugins and like libraries, frameworks that people are open sourcing, maintaining and downloading. And many of them apply to DevOps, which is your, of course, your area of expertise. And that's great because that allows...

our customers, our partners to build their own DevOps workflows using sometimes a combination of paid and open source features. Sometimes everything is open source, which is amazing.

Harald (15:14)
Yeah, fully, fully agree. somehow a precondition for really leveraging all that is typically going git based within your Salesforce development. So as long as a team, let's say,

ships metadata directly from Sandbox to production without going through version controller. They will largely miss out on the opportunities of what you can do in terms of automation on CI, CD and so on. And so do you observe or do you think that going git based will become more and more mainstream in Salesforce?

teams like it is in most other, I would say, environments where people write code or even basically use local tools to generate code -like metadata.

Alba (16:12)
Yeah, I think that definitely that's going to be the trend. But I also think that there is a lot of work to do, a lot of education, a lot of advocacy, because many people just don't know what's available. When I go to conferences and give talks and talk to people, do some networking, many people just don't know that even the Salesforce CLI exists.

Right. Many people don't know. And for me, it's surprising because I'm like always learning the list, the latest technologies because I work for Salesforce and it's my job, but it's not that surprising for for other people. And I have many colleagues, many friends who work in different companies and they explain to me which practices are being followed. Sometimes it's not just a lack of knowledge, but lack of.

investment from the company. Lack of investment usually means lack of knowledge from the side of the company directives, right? That they don't see the value of investing in certain features because maybe we are not telling the whole story or telling the story in the way that they really see that value. So I think there is a lot of work to do.

from our side, from Salesforce, from my team. But also I think that many people are helping with this. And for instance, all these open source advocates that you mentioned before, all the people who have been building those open source libraries and yourself with this podcast are doing an amazing job in advocating the right thing to do. And I hope that every time more and more people really adopt a

Git -based development and like a proper CI, CD best practices in their Salesforce projects and implementations.

Harald (18:18)
You touched already upon events and that leads me to the last question. I think it's part of your role to do a lot of those, be it the official Salesforce events like Dreamforce or Trailblazer DX, or the more community run ones like the dreaming events which happen.

all over Europe, but not only, or yeah, I think we see them in all continents. And yes, so my last question is, what is coming up for you on your travel schedule? Is there any event that you are specifically looking forward to?

Alba (18:55)
Yes, sure. So we are doing an AI plus data tour over all the world, all around the world. And I'm presenting at several places. For instance, this Wednesday, we are doing that workshop in Granada in the city where I live. So that's something that I'm really enjoying because it's very new for everyone. And people usually have a lot of questions and interact a lot in the meetings.

And I think that they are finding that super useful. It's like a session in which we explain everything around the new generative AI features and how data cloud is supporting them. And then on top of that, or apart from that, there are two new community conferences that I am attending that are happening very soon.

So one of them is we're seeing Ohana in Berlin. I think I'm going to see you there, right?

Harald (19:58)
Yes, absolutely. I'm going with my team as well.

Alba (20:02)
Yeah. And the other one, it's Portugal dreaming in July in Lisbon. And, you know, the passion that you see in first timers, first time organizers. It's like, fantastic. I love that every time that I go to a first time community conference is like the best conference ever. So I'm sure that I'm going to really enjoy a lot. And I'm sure those are going to be.

great community conferences to attend.

Harald (20:35)
I can only share that impression. I've been to Polish streaming this year, which was also a first timer. And yeah, the spirit was amazing. And yeah, thank you very much for your time. Looking forward to seeing you not only in Berlin, but also in Lisbon, actually, where I'm happy to be a speaker this year. So I'm also very much looking forward to that. And yes, thank you very much for your time.

and looking forward to see you in person at these events.

Alba (21:06)
Thank you very much, Harald, and thank you for the audience. Bye bye.