As a full-stack developer who primarily uses React and .NET, I have traditionally shied away from platform-specific integrations. Throughout my career, I have heard of Salesforce and “Salesforce Developers” (and I have also heard that Salesforce Developers were well-compensated), but otherwise, these terms never provoked my interest. After all, why would I want to lock myself into learning skills and abilities which only allowed me to work with one specific application?
However, I had heard of Heroku, and I recently had positive experiences with their Heroku Flow product. Learning that Heroku is owned by Salesforce piqued my interest. What kind of software company would need to own a cutting-edge platform as a service company? The other examples that come to mind are all top-tier companies – Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Google/GCP, etc.
I started looking into it and learned that there is more to Salesforce than I originally thought, including components and frameworks which can be used to develop any number of custom, full-stack applications. They even have open-source!
This really blew my mind — honestly, open-source is the last thing I expected from a large enterprise software company.
To get a basic understanding, I went through two introductory learning modules offered (for free) by Salesforce. In this two-part series, I’ll take you on a brief overview of the platform, the coding tools currently available, and my first impressions.
What is the Salesforce Platform?
Salesforce, as the name implies, began as an enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, and this is the “standard functionality” that comes out of the box with each Salesforce environment. It is a cloud-based application, hosted in what they call the “trusted, multitenant cloud.” It is an application that consists of a number of differing APIs, a data model, and various clients which can access those APIs. What we are interested in is not the standard functionality, but the platform that lies underneath it.
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