Meet “Matt McGuire”

Tell us more about yourself

As Canada’s highest certified Salesforce professional, I have a storied career building out B2B, B2C, and public sector use cases and creating a single 360° view of the customer across Salesforce products and other enterprise systems for many happy clients. In addition to the core platform, my expertise also spans CPQ, FSL, Vlocity, integrations, and complex apex development.

How did you first become interested in Salesforce development, and what inspired you to pursue a career in this field?

Like so many other people, I found Salesforce by accident. I was an MS Dynamics Developer at a company that just made the decision to switch to Salesforce, and I was given an option to be trained or given a nice package so I could leave and find my next Dynamics role.  I was told I have a few months to think about it.

At lunch time I searched for Salesforce jobs and found dozens of postings with very few applicants.  I then searched for Dynamics jobs and found far fewer postings each with many applicants. It was immediately clear to me the smarter career decision was to stay and learn Salesforce.

What advice do you have for beginners who are just starting out with Salesforce development, and how can they get started on the right foot?

The two areas where Salesforce developers should focus are Apex and LWC. At this stage in the game I wouldn’t put too much effort into learning VisualForce unless you need to output a PDF document, and I wouldn’t really bother with Aura Components at all.  Beyond this I would stress the importance of learning when to use FLOW and when to use Apex for your transactional processing.

What are some of the most important skills or knowledge areas that Salesforce developers should focus on in order to be successful?

Salesforce development is unlike development in other languages and platforms because of the strict governor limits required to ensure everybody has access at all times to the appropriate systems resources in the multi-tenanted Salesforce servers. Becuase of this, the best thing that a developer can do is learn proper design patterns and how to write maintainable and scalable Salesforce code.  The best resource for this is a book by Dan Appleman called Advanced Apex Programming in Salesforce.

How do you stay up-to-date with the latest Salesforce technologies and trends, and what resources do you rely on for learning and development?

The Salesforce Trailblazer community includes an endless amount of knowledgeable experts. By being active in the ecosystem and being connected to other Salesforce professionals, I am among the first to hear about exciting new features or potentially breaking changes such as the recent API version deprecations. I also tune into Salesforce release webinars to hear about the release details but I take much greater pleasure in following the active conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn where these things are being discussed by fellow professionals who are working with these tools every day.

Finally, what advice do you have for anyone who is considering a career in Salesforce development, and what do you see as the future of this field?

Anyone just starting out as a Salesforce developer has to learn proper design patterns in Salesforce.  The design patterns in other languages just don’t work in Salesforce because of governor limits and the unique nature of how static variables work in Salesforce in a transactional context.  Expert Java developers who jump to apex can quickly find themselves in trouble by opting to use their old design patterns rather than learning what works best in apex on the Salesforce platform.

One other piece of advice is to sit for certification exams! I can’t emphasis how important it is for developers to secure Platform Developer I, Platform Developer II, and JavaScript Developer I certifications. The knowledge tested in these exams is crucial to standing out from the crowd and furthering your career as a Salesforce developer.

As for the future of the platform, it’s exciting to think about where things can go from here.  I’m expecting to see some different artificial intelligence APIs introduced in future versions of salesforce. Natural language processing (NLP) APIs that give computers the ability to understand text and spoken words the same way that humans understand it would be a game changer – I personally think this was a big part of why Salesforce paid so much money to acquire Slack.

How do you know Sally?

I met Sally in August 2021 when we were both contracted to the same project.

Sally and I were contracted to the same client and started roughly around the same time, spring 2021. I had heard a lot about her skills and knowledge and when I had an opportunity to be moved to the same project she was on later that summer, I jumped at the opportunity. Before I had joined Sally was the only developer on the project and I was impressed at her organization, her processes, and the features she had developed. Sally had created numerous impressive LWCs on this project and I knew she was someone I would be able to learn from. The icing on the cake was finally being able to meet her when our local lockdowns lifted the following year.

We’re no longer on the same project together but it’s been amazing to watch her grow in the Salesforce ecosystem, building a profile and influence and becoming someone that other people look up to, because they see the same incredible talent in her that I see.