Formatting Salesforce dates in Apex is straightforward. The most challenging part is understanding how the date syntax formatting works and that will only take you five minutes to figure out. So why am I writing this blog post? Because I always forget how this works and I’m sick and tired of regoogling this and not finding good Apex specific examples.

I recently had to an opportunity to work with Salesforce’s External Objects to make a pretty sleek and simple integration. There was a lot of positives working with External Objects especially once you get the initial connection working. One of my main complaints is the difficulty of properly unit test due to the inability to mock the external object API calls.

IP whitelisting is an effective method to help secure connections to external environments. Salesforce provides a range of IPs addresses that can be whitelisted by external systems based on your Salesforce region. Salesforce recommends whitelisting the entire set of IP ranges.

When I joined Traction on Demand last year I was looking to take on more responsibility. The company had recently started an initiative to run a daily developer support hour. This hour is allocated to having a senior developer available in a meeting room so that any developer on the team can drop by and discuss their current work problems, get a code review or talk about anything going on in their personal life. At this point in my career I had a limited amount of experience running code reviews and I was excited about the opportunity to give to my new team.

Being a full time Salesforce developer, I spend 95% of my time developing in Sublime. I’ve recently been inspired when listening to Sharpening Tools with Ben Orenstein and have started to level up my usability with my tools.