The COVID-19 pandemic and statewide stay-at-home orders have caused many companies, including mine, to close their offices, restrict travel, and require all employees to work remotely.

This has caused a major shift in how people interact. But what has made it more manageable is the fact that most of my colleagues and I already knew each other on some level. But what about that new hire who signed on just days after the stay-at-home order went into effect?

As a team lead now, managing a remote team including a new hire who doesn’t know anyone, I wanted to try opening our meetings with something fun. So I built a quiz app on the platform I use all day at work — Salesforce.

Building a Quiz App on Salesforce

As a Salesforce Application Architect and consultant, I spend most of my day on the platform, but I don’t always get the opportunity to try newer technologies to solve real-world problems for my clients, let alone for my own team and on my own time.

Salesforce may not be your first thought when deciding where to deploy an app, but the platform is both highly configurable and increasingly more extensible due to the release of Lightning Web Components Open Source (LWC OSS) and native integration with platforms like Heroku.

I went looking for ideas for how to build a quiz, and I came across this open-source quiz app created by Philippe Ozil, a developer at Salesforce, that was unveiled at Dreamforce 2019. The quiz app is actually two apps — a host app installed into a Salesforce org, and a player app built with LWC OSS that runs on Node.js deployed on Heroku.

The host app is where the host manages the multiple choice quiz questions and answers, real-time quiz sessions, and easy player registration with a URL or QR code. The player app is where anyone with the URL or QR code can join in the fun, no authentication required.

It looked like it would meet my needs out of the box, allow me to explore LWC, practice hosting apps with Heroku, and get better at developing against scratch orgs. Still, I knew that I also wanted to customize the branding and features a bit to really make it my own.

#salesforce #web-components #appdev #heroku #lightning-web-component