A Full Stack Dev’s First Impressions of the Salesforce Platform, Part 1

Introduction

What are all these Salesforce Developer jobs for anyway?

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 them. 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.[1]

To get a basic understanding, I went through two introductory learning modules offered (for free) by Salesforce. In this two-part series, I’ll…