TrailheaDx – Lightning, Lightning & Lightning

Happening now! TrailheaDx: The First Salesforce Developer Conference.

What buzzwords are flying around at the event? Lightning, more Lightning & Trailhead.

Marc Benioff kicked off the conference with his charismatic keynote talking about his philanthropic 1/1/1 model and how Salesforce is truly a Customer Success Platform. Then Alex Dayon, Shawna Wolverton, Parker Harris & Sarah Franklin gave attendees a glance into the future by showing some really cool demos of the new Lightning, IoT Cloud and Platform.

If you’re not here, have no fear! I’ve listed out some highlights from the Keynote and new Lightning platform below:

Keynote Highlights

  • “Trailblazers” – Benioff called every developer, every person who has built an app on the Platform a Trailblazer. The vision is to create an umbrella of Trailblazers who can build software with clicks, not code.
  • Salesforce aims to provide the necessary tools to develop on the platform and making it an eco-system for “citizen developers”.
  • A new incubator program has launched for any start ups to get up and running on the platform.

Coming soon! New Lightning platform features:

  • Lightning Locker Service – Uses various techniques and mechanisms to add more security to the Lightning Components.
  • Lightning Inspector – Chrome based tools to debug, monitor and triage issues related to your Lightning Components that use an extensive JavaScript libraries.
  • Lightning CLI – Heroku based code lint / verification mechanism to check your JavaScript and Lightning Code to check for any issues or errors.
  • Lightning App Builder – New App builder features to customize Home Pages, Record Pages, custom Lightning Apps.

Finally, Salesforce added 10 new modules to Trailhead and launched “Superbadges” – which are basically advanced skill-based learning paths that will allow you to dive deep into each of the core skills.

Overall it was an interesting keynote with lots of new announcements & fun stuff. Keep an eye out for more details about each of the above features in detail.