Spinning Code

Experiments with AI Coding

I recently spent some time generating some simple programs with AI coding tools. As a technical architect and senior developer, I am watching the emergence of AI coding tools carefully. I know that the robots are coming for the coding parts of my job. Watching this generation of robots is important to long-term understanding of the field.

To be clear I have been experimenting with Github Copilot and Salesforce’s Agentforce for Developers since they were released. Most of my earlier experiments were failures. The tools wrote trivial code terribly and simply couldn’t understand more complex requests. They made me slower, not faster, so I put them aside for a time. But they are evolving fast and were worth another look.

I learn by doing. So I set about creating a few tools that were on my mind to see if I could get good code out of the LLMs. Or at least if they could save me enough time to be worth the learning curve to get good at using them.

Project 1: Simple OpenWRT Status Call Out

I recently updated my home wifi router to run OpenWRT. When I bought the router I selected one compatible with that OS. After realizing T-Link would never fix some security issues in the firmware I made the switch.

Our internet service from Breezeline has always been spotty; sometimes bad enough I need to relocate to get stable service. One of the things I want to know when I’m working elsewhere is: has my internet come back up yet?

I have a programmable router, I’m a programmer, therefore this is a problem I could solve for myself.

But I’ve never written code to work with OpenWRT. Worse, I generally work in high-storage environments. I mostly do side projects in Python or NodeJS, but my router doesn’t have the storage needed for those run-times. OpenWRT recommends C or Lua for scripting. I’ve done my time in C. Jumping through all the hoops required to make C do something this simple did not feel like fun. So Lua it is. Too bad I hadn’t written code in Lua before…enter Copilot.

Throughout this project I used the current defaults – which meant GPT-4o was the selected LLM.

Initial Code

I actually found Lua by asking Copilot. My first prompt was just:

Generate a program for openwrt that sends a post request to an API endpoint at spinngingcode.org

And it generated a reasonable looking Lua script. Since I don’t know Lua, or at that point why Copilot chose it, I dove into a little research into the language. After a few minutes I confirmed that, yes, this is the right use case for Lua. I also confirmed Copilot made reasonable choices in how the code was written.

I went on to ask Copilot to change call outs from curl to a library, add features to pull in the network status information from the router, and other adjustments. It consistently generated code that was close to correct. I did have to tell it to adjust details after validating them against my router’s actual setup and commands. It took some time but on the whole I was able to make steady progress. Eventually I had a good-enough solution.

Tests

Automated test generation has been a promise of these tools since they arrived. It always feels like something that’s easy to do: read code, write test. Which is, of course, the 100% wrong way to write tests. However, the point of the exercise was to see what I could get the tools to do, so I gave it a try.

It took several tries for it generate valid tests. The first time I asked, it wanted to know what framework to use (a fair request), but generated a useless hello_world test file. On subsequent tries it switched frameworks without asking, and took several tries before generating something that looked valid.

Too bad it wasn’t valid.

The test framework I picked, luatest, was a bad choice. But with little experience in the language I didn’t know that. When I finally had it refactor to busted, I got tests I could setup and run…and they all failed cause they were still all wrong.

I spent more time getting a valid test setup than primary code – eventually I gave up. It would have been faster to do the research and figure it out from scratch.

Code Review

All in all, Copilot gave me a reasonable piece of code for the primary request. Using Copilot was far faster than I could have done the research to write something equally good. It still needs a lot of supervision to get it right, but the refactoring requests seemed to go okay.

The code commentary Copilot provided in the response is detailed and accurate, where I checked it. It’s chatty so I didn’t check every piece of commentary just every line of code. The code itself came with passable comments about what each block and function does. And functional decomposition was vastly improved over previous experiments I’ve done with Copilot.

It had to make up a few details, like the actually API endpoint name (it picked https://spinningcode.org/api/endpoint – okay sure reasonably good fake answer that is clear but also obviously wrong), but those were good enough for the limited details I gave it.

Outside of the automated test disaster, the biggest issue was that it did nothing to encourage secure design. Copilot recommended no security for that endpoint, nor does the commentary flag that it skipped security suggestions.

Project 2: Simple PHP Status Server

Since I have PHP on my personal server, I decided that PHP was the right choice for the server side of the router project. Despite being a little rusty I am much more comfortable with PHP than Lua. I have standards and expectations about how to write and organize good PHP code.

The prompt I provided:

I have a Lau script that looks like this:

[a copy of the then current version of the Lua file]

Now I need a PHP application that will listen to those calls, record the data into a CSV file, and includes a page that displays the last 100 lines of the csv file.

It managed to generate valid PHP code that matched my request – sorta.

Code Review

The PHP it generated is not to my standards – not even close.

It lacked security checks, was poorly organized, and had borderline useless comments. If you look at the repo there are both a lot of generated refactors and then a lot of hand edits cause that’s web facing code, security matters, and I could fix it faster than debating with an AI.

I made some effort to get it to highlight the important information I wanted, but it struggled to regain the context from the OpenWRT requests that the Lua script was built around.

Unlike the Lua script, the PHP saved me little or no time. It was terrible in this context even with lots of attempts to refine the code. This piece of code I’ll probably maintain by hand.

Project 3: Data Migration Scripts for Salesforce

One of the hardest things to get people to fund sufficiently for a Salesforce project is the data migration. They are hard, boring (well not for everyone – I have undying respect for people who like these projects), and super time consuming. So we are always looking for ways to do them faster.

A few years ago I proposed a training exercise for data migrations that involved taking the data from my SC Salary Data repo and loading it into Salesforce. It’s a great training project because there is lots of data and it’s real-world messy. But it’s also simple: just two or three objects depending on the data model you choose. So I decided to test if I could use AI code to generate basic scripts to clean and load this data quickly.

For this project I made two changes to my approach. First, I switched the model to Claude 3.5. Second, I decided to treat the LLM like a junior developer and lead it through the project more intentionally. Part of this second change was driven by my initial experiences with the other projects. I assumed from the start that the code would be sub-standard, but that I could encourage Copilot to make changes to meet my expectations – just like I do when working with a human.

Code Review

This project was startling successful. The first stage was to have it create a script that prepped all the data into a simple SQLite3 database (it does some clean up, but not all that’s possible with this data). The second stage was to have it create a script to load the data. That second stage became it’s own repo because I wanted to include a Salesforce SFDX project to setup the objects and fields I wanted correctly.

I generated probably 90+% of the code in that repo with the LLM. The Python to load the data, most of the Salesforce Metadata to create objects and fields needed, even the read me file I generated in large part with the LLM.

Frankly this is a project I’ve seen developers struggle to get right, and with a little guidance the LLM was able to do it. It probably needed as much guidance as a human would have (a very junior human developer), but the iteration cycles were much faster. I am not convinced when all is said and done the project was faster – it took a few hours to complete each stage – than my doing it solo. However, it required far less mental engagement from me than if I had written the code unassisted.

This project went well enough I’m using it to help drive a conversation about how to change our approach to migrations in general. There are major differences between what I did and I do in a migration of a database with thousands of tables targeting hundreds of objects with millions of records. But I was impressed enough to want to move on to fill those next gaps.

Conclusions

LLM generated code is improving fast, but it is still generating low-quality code by default. Unlike experiments I ran a year ago, it now generates functional code that is equal to the code that a brand new developer could write.

Generated code is not to be trusted, particularly in production or public facing settings. If you don’t ask for security, you don’t get security. It organizes code as if it’s following train of thought, not in the order that well structured code should follow. And it does not write tests worth having without significant effort.

Good AI driven tools can make good developers faster. They are not good enough to replace a good developer – yet. Developers will need to learn to work these tools into the process, but we need to be aware of the gaps and how to close them.

I expect the quality also depends deeply on the quality of the code in public repos on the internet. I believe the terrible quality of the PHP I got vs the reasonably good Lua and Python is because there is lots of terrible PHP out there used to train these models. As long the LLMs write code that conforms to the average of the examples online communities will need to sweat the details of what is out there.

Reset Security Token for Salesforce Integration User

In the Spring ’23 release Salesforce added the Integration User License. They provide 1 or more free licenses to all Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance, and Developer Edition orgs. They can be a little tricky to setup, but are incredibly useful for integrations since they give you a free way to connect 3rd party applications where “best practice” had previously required buying a full license for each integration point.

But because they have no user interface access there is no clear path to reset the security token (in fact Salesforce says you cannot do it, although it’s listed as on Roadmap). There is a way to get this done, it just requires that you have Login As permission.

Go to Setup -> Users, and find the Integration user for which you need to reset the security token.
Click Login next to the user.
You will be logged into org using the Salesforce Classic Interface. Which you may, or may not, remember how to use for this process.
Click the User Menu in the top right corner
Click My Settings
Click Personal
Click Reset My Security Token
Click Reset Security Token

And from there Salesforce should email you the new token.

It is worth noting this is not best practice. Best Practice is to use the OAuth JWT Bearer flow or the OAuth Client Credentials which don’t require the tokens. But not all tools are setup to use those flows, so the tokens are still useful.

When Salesforce completes providing a direct mechanism it should be better than this process, but until then you can happily reset tokens as needed.

Architectures for Constituent Portals Part 2: Selection

In part 1 I talked about the kinds of architectures you should considering when planning a Constituent portal. In part 2 I’ll give you some guidance about how to pick the right architecture for your project.

Reminder of the Options

Part 1 provides a detailed review of the directions that data can flow, and the types of architectures you can use to support your solution:

Data can be outbound to constituents, provided by individual constituents, or exchanged among constituents.
There are all-in-one solutions, two-system solutions, and solutions with an API or data proxy layer.

Three patterns, three potential solutions: it’s temping to think they align 1:1 – but then a whole second article would have been a waste of time. But it is important to keep them in your mind as you determine the best-fit for your organization and use case(s).

Portal Architecture Considerations

To make the right selection you need to balance your overall data ecosystem, staffing, budget, audience interest, as well as projected growth over time. I keep wanting to create a simple decision matrix, but an easy solution eludes me still.

Audience Engagement

The first major consideration is how will your audience actually engage with the portal. This should drive not only how you build it, but if you build it at all. Lots of organization believe their constituents are all waiting for a great portal to see all their information, update their addresses, and even communicate with each other. This is rarely true. None of us is short on things to do online – you need to be clear about what makes your portal worth their time.

When you align your project to your audiences interest, a portal is powerful, useful, tool that can make a huge impact. But if your audience isn’t interested in what you offer them, you just spent a bunch of money on a web site no one uses. There are times when the most effective constituent portal is none at all – because you can use those resources elsewhere.

Think carefully about how many of you constituents want to log into your portal enough to:

Remember it’s there.
Care enough to take the time to log in.

You spend something like 40 hours (probably more) a week thinking about your organization’s work. They spend 40 hours (or more) a week thinking about their employer’s work, also their families, friends, all the companies and nonprofits they interact with, politics, meal planning, shopping, and whatever else – there isn’t much time left for your organization.

Think about the features you can provide that are valuable to your audience and the best way to deliver those. For example, organizations often want to give people places to update their address or payment information. But think about the last time you moved, did you want another place to change your address information? Another common ideas is that nonprofits want to make delivery of annual tax receipts cheap and easy. If successful that means a wave of use once a year that might save your on mailing costs – of course you can also ask for a gift in that mailing so it might not actually be a net gain.

Questions to ask:

What problem does this portal solve for my constituents? Do they care if I solve it?
What is the best way to deliver our solution to our constituents?
Will my constituents be willing to log in at all?
How will this portal empower themselves or to support our work?
How many people need to use the portal each week, month, or year for it to be successful?
Do we expect that number to grow over time?
Will likely traffic be spread out, or come in a wave?

Technology and Data Ecosystem

Your portal does not exist is a vacuum. Your organization has lots of technology kicking around these days, and you want the tools you select for this project to build on your overall technology landscape. When I make a recommendation to a client, I spend a lot of time asking them about the tools that are already in place and how they are used. I’m looking for tools that could be the basis of the portal, reveal the expertise of their staff, and would work well with Salesforce (or other technologies I’m part of introducing). I am also trying to understand some of the history about those tools and how they came to be.

If there are other complex systems, and they are working well, that’s a sign that an organization can probably handle more complex architectures. It’s also a sign they probably know how to benefit from that complexity. But it’s also a sign their staff may be consumed with what they have. If they have all simple systems I am going to be inclined to keep my solution equally simple.

Questions to ask:

How many interconnected data systems do we have today? Do they work well, or are we struggling to keep up?
If we add a new system will it enhance our digital presence or pull attention from other critical systems?
Are the solutions we are considering related to technology we already use, or are they entirely new?
What kinds of resource, limits, and features does my main CRM provide?
What other technical resources do we already have in place that we could leverage?
Did past projects go well, or leave a bad aftertaste?

Staffing

Your solution will require staff support. Even the simplest of systems will trigger requests for help using it. The more complex the solution, the more skilled your staff need to be to make sure it runs smoothly – and the more staff you need to support it.

You staff bring two things to the table: time and skills. They need to have the skills to support your solution, and the time to use those skills effectively.

Please do not just plan to push your staff harder, you need to find ways to remove other tasks from their plate or add people to your staff if you want to avoid burn out.

If you use an all-in-one solution, you probably just need people who understand that platform, know how to engage with your user constituents, and can work with to provider’s support team. The more systems you need the more platforms your team needs to understand, and at least one person needs to have a deep understanding of how the whole thing works.

You also should consider aligning your technology selection to what your team either knows, or wants to know. Most of the time you want to play to your team’s strengths not ask them to develop a whole new skill set from scratch.

Questions to ask:

What roles do we need to have for your portal to work?
What work do we want done by our staff vs consultants?
- Who will answer support requests?
- Who will respond if there is an outage?
Do our current staff have time for new responsibilities? How can we reduce their workload to offset new requests?
Can we hire more staff?
What technologies do our current technical team members already know? What are they interested in learning?

Budget

Obviously all this will cost money. There will be some combination of license costs, hosting fees, implementation costs, support contracts, staff salaries, and other expenses. Just because a sales person says their solution works “out of the box” does not mean it’s free to get started.

You need to account for the implementation cost: how much will it take to setup and train people on the new system?

You also need to plan for maintenance costs: what will it cost to keep it running every year?

In very broad sweeping terms my experience is that most of the time an all-in-one solution will be cheaper and faster to implement than a two-system solution. But all-in-ones often have higher annual operating costs. Those operating costs are likely to grow linearly with audience size. A two-system solution, while more expensive to setup because of the complexity, will often have a lower annual cost and lower price escalation curve.

When you are considering your options, those are the two budget figures to make sure you understand. What will it cost to setup? How much will it cost over the first 5 years? And what factors will impact those two figures?

Different organization can tolerate different cost structures. If your organization prefers to invest up front and have lower long-term costs, you should make a plan to optimizes for that. Other organizations want the lowest upfront risk, but can tolerate higher costs – particularly if they are linked to a successful and growing solution.

More complex systems are also riskier to build. There is a greater chance of hitting problems that require extra budget to resolve.

Questions to ask:

What will each of my main choices cost to implement?
What are the 1, 2, and 5 year costs likely to be?
What factors will drive costs?
What is my organization’s budget tolerance for up-front vs long-term costs?
How firm is the budget? What are my contingency options for overruns?
What are my options to control costs if there are problems?
What can our staff realistically do vs what do we need to pay consultants to do?
If we learn the portal isn’t working, what will it cost to cancel our contracts early?
If my traffic will be in small bursts, will I have to pay extra for those bursts, or pay all year for services we’re not using?

Closing Thoughts

There is no one right answer to these questions, and they lead to complex matrix of decision making.

Take the questions I’ve posed, and have a robust and honest discussion about them. Ask your own questions. If you have a consulting partner you trust, have them test your answers and add their questions as well (sure, they are incentivized to get your to build it, but they should still have insights you want).

To make your final selection I suggest you write out a 3-5 year plan – this is a thing consultants can help you do well. Test it with your internal team before taking it to leadership. Make sure you understand it, and that your team understands it, particularly if a consultant wrote it.

I’ve been down this road a few times, and seen organizations make great decisions that led to successful projects, careful decisions that led to portals no one used, and wise decisions to walk away from their vision for a new plan. You need to be open to all possible paths.

Good luck!

Mom’s Christmas Cookies

My mom passed away just over a year ago. We went through Christmas without her last year for the first time, but there is still a different feel this year.

One of the ways both my sister and I remember mom is through her baking. There were several classic cookies, and similar treats, she made every year. Neither of us makes the whole collection, but we both have settled into a couple favorites.

For me they have become something I take around to share with friends. Which had led to lots of requests to share recipes. Since mom shared the recipes freely I figured I’d do the same for the ones I make all the time.

Fudge Nut Bars (without nuts)

These are really a year round favorite, but at Christmas usually our households will go through several trays.

Ingredients

Bars:

1 Cup Butter
2 Cups Brown Sugar
2 Eggs
2 Tsp Vanilla
2 ½ cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3 cups rolled oats

To make bars GF:

Replace flour with 2 ½ cups all-purpose GF flour.
Add 1 tsp Xanthan Gum
Make sure to use GF oats.

Topping:

12 ounces chocolate chips
1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
2 tbl butter, melted
½ tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla

Instructions

Topping:

Mix chocolate pieces, condensed milk, butter, and salt in double boiler (or heat in microwave using 30 second bursts). Stir until smooth. Add in vanilla when done heating.

Bars:

Preheat oven to 350°

Cream together butter and brown sugar.
Add eggs and vanilla.
Add dry ingredients to creamed ingredients.
Spread two-thirds of mixture on bottom of 15 x 10-inch jelly roll pan, pressing into all the corners.
Cover with topping.
Drop remaining oatmeal mix on top and swirl over topping.
Bake at 350° 25-30 minutes.

Christmas Tree Almond Press Cookies

These require a cookie press, and can actually be made in many colors and shapes – but in our family the almond ones were nearly always Christmas tree shaped. See picture at the start of the recipe.

Ingredients

1 ½ cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
4 cups flour
Green food coloring (Wilton Kelly Green was Mom’s clear preference)
Decorations if desired.

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400°

Cream butter until very soft.
Work in sugar, then egg, then vanilla, then almond
Sift together dry ingredients and add gradually.
Color as desired. Don’t fear over mixing, make sure the color is what you want and evenly distributed.
Form cookies with press on an ungreased baking sheet. Decorate if desired.
Bake at 400° for 8-10 minutes.
Cool for a minute on the tray, and then transfer carefully to a wire rack until cool.

Architectures for Constituent Portals

One of the common needs, or at least desires, for CRM users is to link their CRM to some kind of constituent portal. There are several ways you can architect a good data pattern for your constituent portal. The trick is picking the right one for your organization.

This is the first in a series on what your choices are, and now to select the right one. The architecture you select will drive the implementation cost, maintenance costs, and scalability.

The Purpose of Your Constituent Portal

Before deciding on the architecture of your portal, you need to have a clear understanding of its intended purpose and expected scale. The purpose of the portal will also dictate the direction(s) data flows, and the scale will help you plan the long term costs.

If you can’t clearly state why you need a constituent portal, you don’t need one.

Different organizations have different reasons to create portals. Companies that sell products may want a warranty or support portal. Nonprofits often want a donor portal that provides tax receipts and allowed recurring donors to update their gift information. Member organizations want a place for members to see their benefits, update their information, and renew their memberships. And so on.

The purpose of your portal will determine the direction that data flows through it. There are essentially three directions that data can move.

Outbound Data

You can send data from your organization to your constituent. That could be things like receipts, memberships status, or product warranty information. Anything that is data you have, that your member might need to see, but not update.

Data Exchange

You can allow constituents to update information. That could be address changes, support requests, donation schedule updates, event registration details, and more.

Data Network

Your third option is to allow you constituents to exchange information with each other. This could be a any form of member community where they engage with each other.

When planning a network, remember you have to plan for content moderation and acceptable use policies.

Primary Portal Data Architectures

To support your portal, whatever the data flow is, there are three main data architectures you can choose from, each which a different strengths and weaknesses. The more complex your architecture the more options you will have for what it can support, but it will also increase costs and maintenance efforts. Bigger is not always better – sometimes it’s just more expensive.

1. All-in-One Constituent Portals

In an all-in-one solution your constituent portal is part of your CRM. For obvious reasons this is the type of portal that your CRM vendor wants to sell you. In Salesforce land this means Experience Cloud. There are also many nonprofit-focused CRMs which include one in their solution. When your portal is part of your CRM you get a bunch of advantages:

Data all lives in one place. There is no data sync to worry about setting up or maintaining.
You have one vendor. That means you can centralize your support arrangement and billing.
They are often fastest to implement. They are designed to be fast to market to help make them the obvious choice.
They generally do not require a developer. Again, your CRM vendor really wants you to select this path, so they clear as many hurdles as they can.
There is only one technology stack. By leveraging the technology of your CRM your investments in learning that technology carry over, at least in part, to your portal.

There are also downsides:

New template system to learn. The CRM’s portal likely has a different template system than the CMS on your main web site. That may be hard to make match your primary online branding.
The vendors make a lot of assumptions. To provide that ease listed above they make assumptions about how data flows, security, user experience, and how other elements should work – those assumptions may not match your ideal solution.
Costs often scale linearly. There are usually license costs that are scaled based on user count meaning your costs grow as the portal grows at more or less a 1:1 rate. While there are price breaks and other incentives this is the right expectation to have for estimating.

2. External Constituent Portal

In this pattern an external constituent portal moves the user experience from within your main CRM’s sphere of influence into a separate platform. In my career I’ve mostly built these with Salesforce as the CRM and Drupal as the portal platform – it’s a powerful pairing. The strengths and weaknesses here are more or less the mirror of the all-in-one portal.

Your web team may already know the technology. If you use the same technology as your web developers use for your main web site(s) they already know who to handle design and branding.
You have greater control over the User Experience. The assumptions that go into the portal are yours not the ones imposed by the CRM.
You have greater control over security, along with data flow and formats. Since they aren’t built around assumptions you don’t control you have greater control and freedom.
Costs typically grow more slowly. It is less common to have per-user license costs in this context so the cost curve is likely closer to logarithmic.

The downsides:

You have to handle data synchronization. The two systems means data has to pass back and forth.
You have two different vendors/platforms. When you had one system everything was centralized, now you have two different systems handling constituent data.
This design typically is harder to implement. All those short cuts your CRM provider had in mind for you are gone. Even if you use a purpose built solution it’s going to take more time and effort.
This approach generally requires a developer and/or data architect. To implement this pattern you need someone who understands both platforms – ideally both for setup and support.

3. External Constituent Portals with Data Proxy

In some situations it makes sense to insert a data proxy, or API layer, between your main CRM and your constituent portal. This creates a layer of abstraction, security, and data augmentation that can benefit a lot of organizations. While this is the most complex of the three main architectures it is one I find is frequently overlooked – in part, I suspect, because no one partner benefits from selling it.

This setup certainly isn’t for everyone, but when it’s the right fit it makes a huge difference. It also creates a significant number of iterations – all of those arrows could be one directional or two directional.

An extra data layer makes the most sense when data from your CRM is going to multiple places and/or needs to be augmented by an external data source. For example think about an organization that provides trail maps for hiking or paddling. All that data geocoding those trails does not need to be in your CRM, but you probably want to know which members are interested in which trails so some trail data is needed there. Meanwhile in public you want a great deal more information all linked together. An organization like that may have a portal for members, a web site to find trails for non-members, apps for iPhone and Android, and perhaps a public API for other people to use to build their own web sites with. That’s a lot of API calls all with different data sets, all of which need to be very fast.

Your CRM is designed to be very stable and reliable – it is not designed to be very fast. What’s more, you often have limits on the number of API calls you get in your package (with extra fees charged if you go over). By inserting another layer between your CRM and other services you can bypass these limitations.

There is another added benefit to this design pattern, and that is increased security. By creating an additional layer in your system you are able to create a separation of concerns between the various systems. Each should have access to only the data is absolutely needs from any of the others.

How to Pick?

There are lots of considerations that go into selecting the right architecture for your project – which is why that’s getting it’s own post soon.

Tips for Salesforce Exams Part 2 – Taking the Exam

This is a second in a two part series on taking Salesforce Certification Exams. We’ll be talking here about taking the exam. You might also find part 1 on studying useful.

For this discussion I’m assuming you have picked your exam, studied as best you can, and now it’s time to take the exam.

Scheduling a Salesforce Exam

In my article on studying I recommended scheduling your Salesforce exam a week or two after you had prepped your flash cards. Of course it’s not exactly that straight forward. You need to pick the location and timing that works to your best advantage.

Location

Salesforce exams can be taken in a testing center or from home. Before COVID I took my exams in-person at a local testing center located at a university – it was re-assuring that if there were issues I could discuss it with staff in person, although it never came up. When COVID arrived, like everyone else, I had to move online – and my local testing center never re-opened to non-students for first health and now security reasons. Currently I’d have to drive over an hour to reach an in-person location so I continue to take mine online. All that is to say I have done both, and both can work just fine.

The exact rules for at home tests have shifted a few times, but generally they have all been reasonable (at least since they dropped the two camera requirement). I do get interrupted by support if there is an internet connection flutter, or if an hour or so in my mind – and more importantly eyes – start to drift a bit. But on the whole my home is less distracting than dealing with the challenges of driving, parking, getting checked in, and all the other logistics of an in-person location. If you have potential distractions in your home, like kids home from school, bad wifi, lack of a room you can close off, and other things those in-person logistics might be a great trade for you.

On the whole, I prefer taking tests from home. That said, the most important thing about the location is that you are comfortable enough about the setting that you can stay focused on the test.

Time

The location you select will drive the dates and times available to you, but both have limited options. Plan ahead if you want a specific time and day – I’ve had to put off exams a week or two just to find a reasonable time of day to take the exam.

For online exams I have found there are 5 times of year to avoid: late December, and late in a Salesforce quarter. December that’s because people who work at partners often have to take one a year and procrastinated. As for the quarters, I think that’s because those same partner companies have exam vouchers that are about to expire so they push people to use them up, and Salesforce staff are meeting performance deadlines. Sometimes, I have no idea what’s driving the demand, but there will suddenly be no open slots.

Generally, you want a time when you’ll be awake and sharp. If taking the test from home, that should also mean it’s a time your home is quiet. Pick a time when your partner, or school district, can watch the kids – or everyone else is sleeping. If you are a night owl, and like taking exams in the middle of the night (US-time at least), you’ll have more choices. Personally I like late morning: I’m through my coffee, dealt with whatever fires have started me day, and still have lots of energy.

Remember Your Basic Test Skills

Most of us took lots of standardized tests in school. The test taking skills you should have been taught for those apply to Salesforce exams. Salesforce exams are, fundamentally, the same things as objective standardized tests you took in school – who knew all those test taking skills would actually be job skills?

Change Answers Carefully

Turns out that the thing about never changing answers is wrong. But that doesn’t mean second guess yourself. Change the answer when you know it’s wrong, if you’re still just guessing move on. Sometimes as you proceed through the exam you’ll notice later questions that give away the answer to one you guessed at – that’s a great time to go back if you marked it or have the time to find it.

Eliminate Wrong Answers and Guess Wisely

Depending on the exam you will have 3 or 4 answers available to you – you are looking for the best fit to the details of the question. Writing wrong answer is incredibly hard, usually some of the wrong answers are really bad. So if the answer isn’t immediately obvious look for a few giveaways to bad answers:

Products that don’t exist. If part of the answer is not a thing – that’s not the right answers.
Not being part of a pair. Sometimes there are a pair of answers that are very similar, in my experience it’s one of those two so ignore the others. In those pairs the difference is usually from a detail of the question. Go scan for a condition that would trigger one or the other.
Answers leveraging information that’s not part of the exam outline: Right answers must be part of the exam outline, wrong answers can include other things. If you’re taking an exam where Person Accounts aren’t part of the outline – the answer with Person Accounts in it is wrong.

If you can cut out the bad answers, and get yourself to a 50/50 guess you’re in a good place on most exams as long as you are not always guessing. Your goal is to pass, a few mental coin tosses that keep you moving will keep you in range. You don’t need 100% to pass, so don’t worry about a few wrong answers. As long as your guesses are rare and you’ve eliminated a few answers, you’re golden.

Answer Every Question

If you have no idea about a question, guess randomly. Just pick an answer that sounds plausible and move on. This is not the SAT where you can lose points for the wrong answer. A right answer is one point. A wrong answer is zero points. A blank is always wrong – and still zero.

Read the Answers First

I don’t do this for all questions, but some questions are long, and include extra detail you don’t need to select the right answer. When I see I long question I read the answers, try to eliminate at least one, and then scan the question for details that matter to the remaining answers. Even if I still read the whole question I am extracting the important bits not all the details of why Cloud Kicks wants to encourage adoption or improve security. More than once I’ve been able to eliminate all but one answer, select it, and move one without even reading the question.

Know Your Timing

Like with so many things in life, timing is important. Before the test starts know how many questions you have and what’s your total time. The test will tell you when you start, but you want to have a sense going in how fast you need to be moving.

Most exams have 60 questions and give you 105 minutes (1 hour 45 minutes). That’s a whopping 1 minute 45 seconds per question (for context on the SAT allots 1 minute 11 seconds for the reading and writing questions, GRE it’s 1 minute 30 seconds). So pace yourself.

The test’s clock, which you can and should hide, is in hours and minutes not total minutes. If you aren’t great at time math on the fly, give yourself markers about where you should be at the 20 (> 1:10 remaining), 30 (>52 minutes remaining), 40 (>35 minutes remaining) question points. I slow down as the test proceeds, so I actually like a larger margin earlier in the test so I can be running over time in late questions.

Note Your Weaknesses

You are given a scratch pad for the exam: either a physical piece of paper in a testing center, or a text box online. As soon as you sense you are struggling use it to record your weaknesses. No details, not whole questions, just topics to study later.

You aren’t allowed to keep or copy the notes directly, so you need tags you can use to memorize enough information to go augment your study later. I usually haven’t needed it, but when I took Integration Architect recently I realized a few questions into the exam there were multiple references to things I hadn’t studied – oops. In my case it was PushTopics and Change Data Capture. I wrote just that much in the notes, so when I got to the end I could quickly memorize the need to create flash cards covering those topics to my deck. I failed my first attempt, augmented my flashcards with the topics I’d missed in my study, and passed easily on the second attempt.

On several other exams where I was close to the line, noting those topics helped me stay calm because I had a plan if I needed to do more prep.

Salesforce Exam Specific Skills

The biggest thing I’ve found that’s Salesforce specific is thinking about the context of the exam to help guide guessing. When guessing, try to think like Salesforce, and know some basic rules for the exam you’re taking:

Admin Exam: never say you’d contact support, and always say you’d check the App Exchange.
Platform App Builder: never say you’d write code, pick the declarative answer.
Platform Developer: You still aren’t calling support, never have a DML in a loop.
Architect Exams: use a recent – but not latest – Salesforce technology to solve the problem.
AI Exams: Be ethical.
Advanced Exams (Advanced Admin, PD II, etc): You might need to contact support to enable features or change settings in rare use cases. Generally know your negative use cases – when not to do something you’d select on the basic exams.

Most Salesforce exams have a similar pattern that can help you guess. Ask around your network for people who have taken the exam you’re attempting.

Generally there are some overall messages Salesforce wants people with that certification to have secured in their heads. Figure out what those messages are, and leverage them to help drive success.

Good Luck!

That’s the advice I have to offer. Good luck on your next Salesforce Exam. And if for some reason you don’t pass the first time, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and schedule the retake. There’s no way through but forward.

Tips for Salesforce Exams Part 1 – Studying

Salesforce certification exams are a fact of life for many of us in the eco system. Whether you are a consultant who needs to add at least one a year or taking your first exam it’s important to have a plan for how you approach your next test. Getting through Salesforce Exams generally requires a mix of memorization, understanding key concepts, and good test taking skills.

Currently I hold 13 Salesforce certifications and have survived 12 exams to get there (there are a couple two-for-ones to be had among the Architect exams) and I passed all but one on the first try. This is by no means makes me exceptional – my current manager holds somewhere between 35-40 certifications, I lost track a test or two ago – but it does mean I’ve taken enough to develop a routine that works pretty well.

What I’m offering here is an outline to what I do. From talking with friends who have mimicked my routine it seems to work well for others as well.

I should note: I am not a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA). This guide is not meant to help you pass the CTA exam or project, although it should help you with everything that comes in earlier phases of that journey. If I ever decide to put myself through the CTA process, I expect I’ll write a bit about that process, but in the meantime I’m not qualified to speak to it. I am also not currently on an exam advisory panel – take the exams not write them.

Choosing a Salesforce Exam

Before you can study for an exam, you need to decide which one you’re taking. You want to study for the right exam after-all. When picking exams there are many considerations, but let me dispel a couple myths:

There is no one exam that will land you a job. Certification is useful, and for some jobs essential, but employers are looking for more than just certification. So a specific certification might help, but it’s not enough by itself.
There is no one path through the collection of certifications. I think historically there might have been a reasonable path through the certifications that made default sense. But at last count there were more than 40 certifications out there. Salesforce adds several a year.

You need to figure out what certification benefits you the most. The benefit could be helping improve you resume. It could be helping your employer land new deals (but make sure they give you tangible credit for helping land those deals). Sometimes your employer told you have to take one this year and just need a pass.

Salesforce Exam Career Tracks

Salesforce organizes certifications by career track. There are exams for admins, developers, consultants, architects, and more. You don’t need to confine yourself to any one of those areas – I have certifications from four categories. The career track the exam is aimed at helps you understand the kind of information you can expect and it’s level of complexity. But you should not use it as your sole guidance.

Administrators are expected to know how to do the work of setting up Salesforce, so the questions are focused on which settings enable which features.

Architects are expected to make strategic decisions about which features to use, so the questions are focused on understanding the when to use a feature based on its technical characteristics. Consultant exams are similarly focused on when to recommend features, but are generally easier that architect exams although they do add in information about understanding the role of a consultant. The nonprofit and education consultant exams also expect you to know information about how those kinds of organizations work.

Developer exams expect you to read and understand Salesforce-related programming languages, know how the code will operate, and what errors to expect. Except for Platform Developer II, which requires a super badge, they do not currently expect you to write code.

Salesforce Exam Difficulty and Pass Thresholds

When you select an exam, you need to understand the intersection of difficulty and the passing threshold. Some exams are just plain harder than others. But Salesforce has internal expectations about ensuring that a reasonable number of people who attempt the hard exams also pass those exams. While I don’t know what those numbers are, the place they are most obvious is when you look at passing threshold.

Each exam has a defined percentage score to pass. When it is in the 70-80% range, you’re looking at an exam where the questions are right about on target for the audience taking that exam to pass at the rate Salesforce wants. When you see thresholds in the 60% range, the test is much harder – so Salesforce lowered the bar instead of making the questions easier.

If you know an area really well, and see a low passing threshold, that’s a great exam to target if you just need to pass one. If you don’t know that area well, be warned that’ll be a hard exam. Conversely, an exam with a high pass threshold has easy questions, which many lull you into a false sense of security as you take the exam.

Associate Exams are designed to have high pass rates. Architect exams are designed to have a lower pass rate. With most exams falling between those two points.

Understanding the required pass threshold can help determine how, and how long, you need to study.

Preparing for a Salesforce Exam

Salesforce exams are a lot like standardized tests from high school: nearly all multiple choice and conquerable if you memorize a bunch of information. It helps to understand why the platform does certain things to support guessing, but mostly you need to know what the system does.

Knowing that, once I’ve selected a Salesforce exam to take, I prepare in two phases:

Review official materials and create flash cards
Study the flash cards

Salesforce provides a break down of the content of each exam in both the exam guide and the official Trailhead Trailmix. In theory they include everything in those you will need to pass the exam – mileage here will vary. The lower the exam level, the better this material. For the architect level exams sometimes there are gaps you’ll need to fill to understand what information they are testing.

My first step in preparing for an exam is to review the exam guide, and all the information on the trailmix. I make my own flash cards from that information and then my second step is to study those flash cards until I take the exam. That’s all there is to it – memorize a bunch of stuff.

Exam Outline

The most important part of the official materials is the Exam Outline. Test creators are required to make sure these outlines are correct. There may be extra information or gaps in the Trailmix, but the outline is required to be complete and correct. Use the outline to help guide you as you create your flashcards.

What About 3rd Party Study Materials?

There are several sources for 3rd party study materials. Usually these services cost a few dollars, and they have what my friends at Salesforce call “disturbingly good” information about the exam content. It’s disturbing to Salesforce cause sometimes it’s often good enough to imply someone violated the rules while taking the exam. These third party materials typically come in three forms: courses, practice exams, and flash cards.

Courses

If the support of a course helps you, great. They don’t help me, like most students I can easily disengage when in online courses. For me, they are a waste of money – and as far as I can tell the success rate of people using just a course to prep is very low.

Practice Exams

Practice exams can be extremely helpful. Until I switched to making my own flash cards I used to use these a lot. Practice exams give you a chance to see questions similar to those you will see on the exam itself. More importantly good practice exams, like the ones from Focus on Force, will give you reference information for where the answer came from in the source documentation. That helps you understand why you were wrong.

You should plan to take the practice exams several times – maybe a dozen or more – before you’re ready for the real thing. You need to take them until you are 10-20% above the pass threshold of the exam. While these exams are often good, they also often a little behind the current Salesforce exam – so you should expect a performance gap between what you scored on the practice exam and what you will score on the real thing.

Flash Cards

Flash cards are, in my opinion, the best solution. I know, we all hate flash cards: they were boring in high school and they are boring now. What they are is effective. If your goal is to pass an exam that requires memorizing a bunch of “stuff” flashcards are where it’s at!

Make Your Own Flash Cards: Yes Really!

I make my own flashcards for most exams. And with one exception I passed on the first try. That exception: I accidentally skipped a section of the prep materials and so was missing several cards I needed.

There are a few reasons I make my own flashcards:

They are cheap: a pack of 100 note cards costs $0.89 at Staples right now. I usually need two packs because I generally create about 120 cards and make a dozen mistakes writing them out so we’re taking $1.78 + tax per exam. The Focus on Force Admin Study Guide,which has their flash cards, currently costs $24 – not at all unreasonable but also way more than a buck seventy eight.
Writing them out helps me remember what I’m reading: This is actually the bigger factor than costs. Writing things down helps us remember stuff. By putting in the effort to figure out what cards I need, and writing them out, I remember the information better. Also a few times I used sets from Focus on Force (they were good), and it was tiring to write theirs out so I printed them – which added costs and effort.
Writing your own allows you to personalize: the sets from Udemy, Quizlet, and elsewhere reflect what anyone might need to learn. When you create your own you include what you need to learn. Sometimes I add a few cards that are things I find along the way that I need in my work and aren’t likely to be on the exam. I almost always leave out some information I already know very well.

Risks

Creating my own flash cards brings it own risk. I do not have the level of insight that the 3rd party content creators have when they create their content. I also risk including extra material I don’t need for the exam or my work, which wastes my time memorizing. Still, on the whole, I favor creating my own flashcards over buying someone else’s.

The Right Amount of Studying

Salesforce Exams are pass-fail. A pass is perfect, and failure is disaster – there is nothing between those two points. That means the ideal amount of studying is when you study just enough to pass the exam by one question.

No one wants to fail an exam because they were unprepared. No one should waste time over studying – we have better ways to spend our time.

I have actually threaded this needle a couple times and passed by a hair’s breath. That is a scary feeling because any good test taker knows generally how it’s going as they proceed. When you’re right on the line it’s hard to know which side you’re on.

I used to study a lot, particularly when I used a practice exam based approach. It worked, but it took a lot of time to take all those practice exams. With the flash-card based approach I take as long as I need to create my flash cards, and once I’m convinced my deck is complete I schedule the exam for a week or two out. For exams with a high pass threshold, or are in an area where I am weak, I give myself two weeks. For exams with a lower pass threshold, particularly if it’s an area of strength for me, one week is plenty. During that time I run through the deck once or twice a day.

By exam day, I’m ready to go. As long as my deck has what I need, I’m good to go.

Taking A Salesforce Exam

Part 2 focuses on exam day, taking the exam itself, and recovering from failure when needed.

More Advice from a College Professor’s Spouse

Two years ago my sister’s oldest child went off to college. As a marker for that occasion I wrote up some thoughts on what I think college student’s should know. In a little while my sister’s youngest child is headed off to college as well; so I decided it’s time to write part two.

Since my wife is a college professor, and I’m framing my understanding as being her husband, I need to be clear: these are my thoughts. They are not hers. They are not those of her colleagues, or any of our other friends who are college professors. Yes, my ideas are influenced by being friends with those folks, and I hope they agree with me. But in the end, this advice is mine. If you want advice from a college professor — well college students have easy access to those and should politely ask them directly.

Also, for some strange reason it turns out that older child actually reads this blog (despite complaints that the posts about work are boring — love you too bud, they get the most traffic). So, Ben, open invitation to write a rebuttal or addendum to support your sibling and any other college students who stumble in here.

Read the Syllabus

While most of this post covers new ground, this point deserves repeating. It was top of mind two years ago, and is top of mind now. When professors talk about things their students do wrong this is what they talk about the most. Yes, the syllabus is boring — trust me I know, I’ve edited plenty of them. Yes they are often oddly long. But they are critical to success, and contain important information like what books to buy, when to read them, and what your deadlines are. So suck it up, and read them! There do exist courses and professors where you can get away without doing this, but it will never hurt you, costs you 15 minutes a course at most, and could save your tail.

Take a Variety of Things

Use college as a time to explore new ideas and different fields of study. When I think about the courses I took in college, it’s hard to know how I would have predicted which were going to be valuable to me still 20 years on.

I took a course of censorship taught by a Russian language professor. That course forced me to think about ideas of self-expression, our laws, and forms of protest. It also gave me ongoing interest in the impact of the work of Robert Maplethorpe and other controversial American artists. And that interest has left me space for my understanding to grow and change over time.

Ceramics helped me learn to think critically about my own work. It’s a class I cite frequently when working with less experienced developers to help them improve their work.

Non-required CS courses taught me skills I use almost every day at work; more than most of the required courses.

Religious Studies courses forced me to write in a formal way about creative ideas; a skill that serves me well on a regular basis.

I wouldn’t have told you any of that was the important take away when I registered for those classes. I took other classes expecting great things, but that failed to deliver for me. So if the class looks vaguely interesting, consider taking it, even if you don’t expect it’ll help you later.

Pay Attention to Courses You Can’t Take Later

There are a few things I didn’t take, like English Comp., because they were only open to first and second year students. I wanted to take some of those classes late in my time at Hamilton, but was locked out. It was totally my fault because I didn’t plan ahead. Plan ahead!

Don’t Use All Your Accommodations

This is probably my most controversial piece of advice: Don’t use all your learning accommodations.

I want to be clear, I support forcing colleges to provide needed accommodations. Learning accommodations are critically important to the success of many students, and colleges should make everything available to all students who are entitled to have them. But that’s the college’s side of the relationship. While college’s should provide them, students should think critically about which they leverage.

Some accommodations are absolutely critical to all who need them.
Some accommodations are critical to some students in some courses.
Some accommodations are offered because we don’t teach kids good learning techniques when they struggle.

If your accommodation is in the second group reflect on whether or not accommodations in the courses you’re taking will support deep learning. When your accommodation is in that last set, seek out better ways to overcome the challenges. You can tell the difference, in part, by asking yourself how the accommodation actually helps you learn better, not just complete an assessment better or feel like you’re learning faster. Use the support you need not the support that makes learning feel easy or comfortable. Learning should be hard. A little friction in the learning process helps you learn better.

Understand that when you finish your BA the number of accommodations available to you will drop significantly. Typical work places are held to a very different standard than educational institutions. Again I believe they should meet their legal obligations, but deadline extensions or “extended time” may come with consequences for just asking. And graduate programs rarely offer any for non-physical disabilities (just because the law says they should, doesn’t mean they do so without consequences).

To thrive after college you will need to find tools of your own to overcome many of the challenges that lead to adjustments being offered in a classroom setting. You might as well start looking for those now.

Learn How to Learn

The most important thing to learn in college is how to learn!

The exact facts and figures you learn in college aren’t really the point the exercise. They are interesting, and can provide you important insights, but the details won’t last. If you go on in a field you’ll deepen your knowledge, and likely replace large portions as the field advances. If you don’t go on in a field you aren’t likely to use exact facts, figures, and formulas. The take aways longer term come in the form of general concepts and stories to help you, hopefully, remember deeper truths.

We live in a world of constantly advancing knowledge. You will need to learn some of that new information after you graduate. You will need to learn some it without the benefit of formal instruction. Make sure you know how to learn independently, without support of professors or formal direction.

You also need to know how to sort good information from bad information. In college your professor will do a lot of this for you. Later it’ll be your job. Good information doesn’t always agree with you, good information sometimes reveals truths that deviate from your world view. Sometimes what’s true forces us to rethink how we act, think, and vote. Be sure you know how to sort the good from the junk.

Say “Yes” to Things

When in doubt, say yes to offered experiences. Try things you’re unsure about, go places you worry will be boring, listen respectfully to speakers who offend you, go to concerts of artists you’ve never heard of, and generally take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.

One of the most memorable talks I attended in college was by Oliver North. No one made me go (that Russian professor made me go see Stanley Fish, which I’m also glad I did even though he was painfully boring and I disagreed with his pro-censorship argument), it just seemed like I should attend. Listening to him try to justify his crimes was insightful for me. Not because he convinced me of his views, but because it helped me understand the signs of failure; 20 years after his disgrace it was all he talked about. He had supporters in the room, but that was all they were interested in too. It was a night focused on a disgraced past.

The same was true, although to a lessor extent, of F.W. de Klerk who I got to listen to as he justify his role in apartheid before he became a reformer. Desmond Tutu‘s talk was a stark contrast as he focused on his then-recent work and how to build on it, not the work that had earned him a Nobel Prize — that was old news to him. Jimmy Carter‘s talk was fascinating (and somehow also almost as boring as Fish), and like Tutu looked forward not back. Hearing all those talks gave me insights I wouldn’t have had if I’d just heard Tutu and Carter (the ones I agreed with) speak. All North had to cling to was defense of his past, trying to repaint his image. And because it lacked the semi-redemption of de Klerk, his failures rang out all the louder from his defense.

So go try things you don’t know if you’ll like. You might discover new interests, enlarge your world view, and generally make your life richer.

That’s my advice in this moment

Take it or leave it, that’s up to you.

Good luck with college. Go, have fun, and learn great things. The world needs more people who are ready to learn what’s coming next.

Writing for Developers and Consultants: Listening

My first few articles in this series have been focused on the messages we send to others – mostly our written messages. This time I am focusing on Listening as key skills when communicating with others.

Listening is a skill. In general in our lives we are expected to know how to listen, even though most teaching is informal.

If you aren’t listening to your colleagues and clients (friends, family, etc.), which can include reading carefully the materials they write, how can you communicate back to them clearly? And when they can tell you didn’t listen closely, why should they listen to you carefully?

The Importance of Listening

Listening when other people speak, or reading their words when they send you an email or chat message, is how we learn about other people’s needs. As developers and consultants we need to understand the needs of our users and clients. If we don’t understand what they need, we will provide the wrong thing.

Active Listening

Listening is not a passive activity. If you are simply allowing someone’s words to wash over you, but not engaged with their meaning you are missing critical details of what’s being communicated.

Active Listening is a skill you can teach yourself and improve on over time.

When we speak we communicate with more than words. Our body language, tone, pace of speaking, and a host of other details go into how we communicate our message. When we actively listen, we are absorbing all those details to make sure we’re getting the whole message.

Active Listening involves also reflecting back that you’re paying attention to the speaker. You can use your own body language to send none verbal cues that you’re paying attention. You can also make affirming noises, and other auditory markers that you’re following along. And when you start to speak you can paraphrase their comments to demonstrate you understood the previous person’s contributions.

Active Listening in an Age of Video Meetings

Most materials you’ll find on Active Listening focus on in-person discussions. That’s in part because people have been talking about Active Listening for decades and the technology is still playing catchup.

But you can bring Active Listening skills to video meetings — most easily if you have your camera on.

While affirming noises and other auditory responses can cause audio filters to struggle – clipping one speaker’s audio to provide your supportive sounds – there are still ways to make sure people know you’re listening. When you camera is on, looking at the screen closest to your camera, nodding or shaking your head, making (work place appropriate) hand gestures, and other visual cues can be helpful. Using the reactions features of most systems to give thumbs up, applause, and other indicators can also help send the message that you’re paying attention.

The hardest talk I ever had to give was an online conference early in the Covid Pandemic. I had no real-time feedback from the audience at all. I was not told how many people were listening; I could not see any chat messages: no input at all. It was just me, staring at my slides, trying to maintain good energy. Eventually I got questions read to me at the end that suggested at least someone was watching – but for most of my talk I felt like I was talking to an empty room.

Give people input whenever you can without being distracting. Helping them understand they are being heard will make it easier for them to communicate with you.

Listening as a Form of Respect

Truly listening to another person is a marker of respect. You are demonstrating that the other person is worth your time and energy. If that’s not obvious to you already, think about the difference between a friend who is looking at you while you’re talking vs that same friend looking at their phone; which makes it clear your friend cares about you?

At work the same is true with colleagues. If you are looking at your phone, reading email, looking at social media, or any number of other activities that pull your attention away you are communicating the person isn’t as important to you as all those distractions.

We all are guilty of this from time to time. I have been pushing myself recently to admit it to other people because it gets me to stop.

For example, the other day just as I as starting a call, I got a message from someone else that I found very frustrating – and was time sensitive. I started to reply while also starting the call. I wasn’t really respecting my colleague’s time. So I apologized to my colleague, asked for a moment to reply to the message explaining it was both time sensitive and distracting, and then I focused on our call. I was both more focused on our conversation two minutes later, and I avoided annoying her by constantly looking away at the other message. Because she listened to me, it also meant we could restart our conversation by commiserating about distracting messages that pull our attention away from meetings.

Communicating well requires full engagement in the work, but in the messages you send and in making sure you receive messages as well.

As I said in my first post on this topic, communications skills for developers and consultants is an enormous topic. The plan for this series is evolving as I go. If you have suggestions or requests feel free to leave me a message.

Knowing When to Ask for Help

One of the skills everyone needs to have is asking for help. Whether that’s in our work, our education, or our personal lives, we all need help from time to time. We are focused on work here, but this same basic rules apply in all aspects of our lives.

The right time to ask for help is, like so many things, a balancing act. Struggling through a complex issue can be a great way to learn something new. But often we can short cut that learning by simply asking the right questions at the right time.

On the flip side, if we ask too early not only do we risk missing a chance to build deep understanding, we also risk frustrating colleagues by asking them to do our job.

One short cut for when you need to ask for help is if another team member asks if you have already asked. Generally, I want to have called for support before my PM suggests it. By then they are frustrated that I haven’t already solved whatever the issue is solo.

Signs You Might Need Help

Given my current role and skill set, I’m often the person who gets called when a project goes sideways. That means I see a lot of places where someone didn’t call for help until they were in crisis. While that’s going to happen to us all from time to time, it’s better to call for help when the problem is small. If you want until the project starts burning down around you, it’s way too late.

You might need help if:

You have absolutely no idea what to do next.
You are about to re-design a large portion of your project to get around a challenge.
You have spent more than a day pounding on a problem without success.
You are avoiding working on a task, because you don’t know how to get started.
You are about to use a mode/tool/technique that everyone says is a bad idea.
- In Salesforce that can mean things like:
  - loading data in serial mode
  - setting batch size to 1
  - using view all data in your tests.
- In Drupal that can mean things like:
  - hacking a module
  - loading data in the theme layer
  - writing raw SQL queries

What to do Before Asking for Help

As I said before, asking for help is a balance: you can wait too long, or you can ask too soon. The real trick is hitting the sweet spot.

There are several things you should always do before taking another person’s time.

Google It! I kinda can’t believe I have to say that, but not everyone bothers.
Make sure you can explain the question clearly. If you don’t know where you got stuck, how can I help you get unstuck? And thinking it through might make the answer obvious.
Develop a theory. When asking for help, it can be useful to pose a theory about an approach. Even if you’re wrong it may help me understand your thinking.
Try a few things. Experimenting with what’s going wrong can help you formulate your question, and may help me short cut my research if you have eliminated obvious issues.
Explain the problem to your dog, cat, rabbit, stuff animal, etc. As someone who spends time being a human rubber duck, I can often tell when someone tried to explain it once already.

Where/Who to Ask for Help

For me, the hardest part is knowing who to ask.

As a consultant I try to avoid asking questions in places clients may see it. Our clients pay for us to be experts, they do not want to see us asking questions in public – particularly if the question has a simple answer.

As a Salesforce MVP, one of my favorite perks is the MVP Slack channel, where we ask each other questions that run the full range of complexity. While access to a community that hard to access, and that advanced, is a privilege there are other ways to find similar groups like your local user group.

I love having a good internal network of people to ask for help. Most of the places I have worked at as a consultant have had some kind of information place to ask questions and help each other out. If you work in a consultancy find or create such a back channel.

If concerns about being seen by clients isn’t relevant to you, check out this list of 7 Salesforce Communities to Join recommended by Salesforce Ben.

Help Build a Helpful Community

The final thing to know about asking for help, is that it’s important to offer help as well. A good question can be valuable to someone else who has the same issue in the future. A good answer is helpful to both the person who asked the question and the person who looks again in the future.

But offering answers, even if not perfect answers, is a great way to learn and encourage others to seek help. Any time I post a question on Stack Exchange, I try to hunt around for one or two to answer as well. That both allows me to pay it forward, it also helps encourage the tone that people can be experts in one thing while still needing help in another.

Smart people need help, and should be comfortable asking for it.