In today’s episode, we’re joined by Igor Kudryk – the Founder of Cloud Prism, which is a business focused on teaching Salesforce Administrators how to code.
Igor explains when he first became interested in programming, how he learned to code, and how he found studying Computer Science. Igor initially focused on Java and spent a period working with JavaScript, and he explains how this benefited him when he first came to work with Salesforce.
We discuss front and backend development and ponder whether Salesforce Developers should specialise or be full stack.
Igor explains where the idea for training Salesforce Administrators how to code came from, what the fundamentals are that people should focus on, what people struggle with, and how he sees Salesforce Flow impacting the roles of Developers and Administrators in the future.
You can find Igor Kudryk on his LinkedIn page
Make sure you find out more about the courses Igor teaches at Cloud Prism
Igor hosts his own podcast, Salesforce Stories, and you can also follow him on his YouTube channel, Apex Igor
You can find more content from us at Talent Hub, here:
LinkedIn@ https://www.linkedin.com/company/talent-hub-global/
YouTube@ https://www.youtube.com/@talenthub1140
Facebook@ https://www.facebook.com/TalentHubGlobal/
Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/talenthubglobal/
Twitter X @ https://twitter.com/TalentHubGlobal
We hope you enjoy the episode!
Ben (00:02.12)
Igor, welcome to the show.
Igor (00:04.098)
Thanks for having me.
Ben (00:05.954)
My pleasure, my pleasure. I know you’ve got your own podcast you’ve just started up, so I feel like I need to be on top form today because you’ll be judging me.
Igor (00:14.004)
No judgement.
Ben (00:16.922)
Well, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. I’ve been following your, your content on LinkedIn and, and I really like what you put out, I like what you’re doing and the help you’re giving Admins to transition into the role of Developer. So we’ll unpick that today and find out a bit more about your background. So let’s start at the beginning. You’re obviously a Developer yourself. You’ve gone down the development path, but can you tell me a bit about where your interest in computers and working in the IT field came from and when you wrote your first line of code?
Igor (00:48.234)
Yeah, sure. That’s interesting because I never was one of these people who really were from a super young age, interested in computers or doing something with computers. I was playing games as just the usual teenager, but I was never programming at a super young age. So I was doing more professionally, boxing. So I had zero interaction with programming. And I was one of these typical athletes at the school who were really, really bad at the school, really bad at programming, really bad at everything. I was just basically doing sport almost full-time. And at some point I saw that boxing is actually not a career and I was not the best boxer ever. So I couldn’t make a living out of it. And to think by the end of the high school, I was like, okay, so what will I do with my life? What career do I want to choose? And I’m originally from Ukraine. And in Ukraine, there’s one of the most competitive and biggest fields are IT and programming. So kind of naturally my choice went into programming. And that’s where I decided, okay, so I want to learn how to code. And the only thing was that I didn’t know anything about coding at that point. So the only thing that came to my mind, how can I learn coding? Okay, well, I will do as many tasks, as many practical tasks in programming as possible. And I just chose randomly, programming language because I didn’t really know which programming language to learn that I quite loved. I was like, “okay, whatever, it doesn’t really matter. I’m just going to try and going to start.” And just so that happens by watching a lot of videos, I kind of decided for Java as the first programming language. And then I found a website where you have a lot of different tasks on this website. It has, I think over a thousand tasks by this point. And I started coding. I started with a very simple one. I started watching YouTube videos and solving the tasks. And I actually liked it a lot. So it was kind of like a game. I was sitting there all the time and I was like, “okay, one more exercise and then I can go to sleep.” So it was somewhere in my high school, in the last years of my high school, and this is where I decided to actually learn programming.
Ben (03:27.254)
And do you feel, obviously you were committed because you were doing all these different tasks, but do you feel it came quite naturally? Like, did you feel you were not just enjoying it, but picking out quite quickly?
Igor (03:37.89)
This is a good question. I never felt like a natural at programming. I more felt all the time like a brute forcing programmer. I was really brute forcing the amount of tasks I was doing. So I was not, I didn’t have much of the coding background back then because I just basically skipped my whole school education. So I didn’t have previous knowledge for coding. So the only thing that I could do is just solve a lot of tasks. And I think by solving a lot of tasks, at some point you kind of see the pattern in the tasks. You kind of start to realise, “okay, so there’s some repetition, there’s some tasks that are solved in the same way”. You get more and more experience. And this is where you start feeling much better about solving tasks. And I was never feeling very natural about that. And by a lot of tasks, I mean like really a lot of tasks, like hundreds of tasks, not like 10 or 20 tasks. But at the end, I solved more than 1,000 tasks. And this is where I kind of started feeling more natural with programming because at the end, programming is quite a lot of the same patterns, the same way to solve something, and especially on the more like beginner level. And a lot of tasks, they repeat themselves and they have the same solution. That’s where I started feeling more natural after solving thousands of tasks.
Ben (05:17.662)
And then you moved to Germany and that’s where you kind of actually studied programming through education. So I believe you went to university to study and pursue programming and was it Computer Science?
Igor (05:31.614)
Yeah, it was Computer Science. So it’s actually an interesting story. I was at the school which had a lot of German language. So it was not a mathematics school or something. And I was also not really speaking German back then, but I decided to travel to Germany together with my family. And so it just happened to randomly choose a city. It was Munich and I went to Munich and we decided to go to the university just to see how German universities look like. And I went to the campus of the university and that’s me being 16 or 17. And I went to this campus and I was so impressed. I saw people going to the lectures, drinking beer, for example. I was like, “wow, is this possible? You can go drinking beer, so much freedom”. And the campus looked, it was a new one. It looked really awesome. You could just walk into a lecture. Lectures are open. Students are studying everywhere. I was so impressed by that, that I was like, “wait a second. So I am studying at the school where you can learn German. And I kind of have this possibility to learn German. Plus I already started with programming. Why not combining this two things? And can I actually study in Germany?” Turns out yes, I can study in Germany. And this is how my goal was born to go and study in Munich, exactly at this university where I saw people drinking beer because I was impressed by exactly this university. And at the end, I applied for exactly one university in Germany, that’s Munich Technical University for only one program, Computer Science, because I thought if not this university, not this program, then I don’t want to go anywhere. And I was accepted there. And I started my Computer Science degree.
Ben (07:28.346)
I love that. And when you actually started your degree, can you remember, did you compare yourself to others in the class? Because they may have come from more of a programming background through high school. Did you feel that the stuff you’d been doing online, the tests, the scenarios that you’d been doing, did they set you up quite well for that course? Or, or did you feel that you were still a bit behind the people that maybe studied it before?
Igor (07:54.19)
This is a great question. I think it’s worth to explain a little bit what is actually Computer Science in terms of Computer Science is not programming at all. Computer Science is more like that, at least what I thought about Computer Science that I’m going to program a lot. Turns out Computer Science, it’s more often actual science and more kind of mathematics or applied mathematics. So we did have a few coding classes throughout the degree and in those coding classes I was doing really good. But in everything else it was more like applied math or some kind of algorithmic thinking, algorithms, all of that different stuff and this is where I was really feeling not good or I was getting not really good grades at some point because a lot of stuff was just expected so that you know it, like databases and a lot of math stuff that I just missed from the school. I was definitely, and this is also an interesting thing, because you go and that happens to a lot of people, they are quite good in a high school or in some other environment. And then you move to the second environment and it turns out you’re not that good. So it turns out you’re kind of going from being the smartest kid in the class to being one of the worst in programming and Computer Science in general in the class. And that was my first kind of realisation. “Okay, wait a second. So coding is not enough actually to be good at Computer Science. You need all of that other things around Computer Science.”
Ben (09:43.778)
What made you stick with it?
Igor (09:48.458)
That’s a good question. I think I liked the challenge. I didn’t want to stop at half of the degree. And I really wanted to basically to get my degree and to prove that I’m not worse than those people who had a head jump, who had a good high school education. And this university turns out, this Technical University of Munich is the best technical university in Germany. So it’s kind of a hard university to get through. And that was skipping me because I was like, “OK, so this challenge, I took this challenge. I want to prove that I can complete the challenge.” In the end, I did complete the challenge with quite an average grades.
Ben (10:53.718)
Well, I mean, I think the challenge in itself, passing it was a massive achievement, right? Not coming from that background and you’re having to find your way through something you probably weren’t expecting, right? Like you said, it wasn’t just coding, which is what you’d passionately thrown yourself into, it was so much more than that. Well, so you started learning Java through YouTube and things like that. And then obviously, as you mentioned, Computer Science isn’t just programming. There’s a lot more to it. But when you left university, what would you say your development capability skill set – where were you at as a Developer?
Igor (11:28.958)
I think Computer Science gives very good fundamental thinking and fundamental understanding of all the concepts. It doesn’t give you too much of the experience, so you will not leave as a Senior Developer after university, but it gives you this confidence that no matter what, I can learn it at some point. And it gives you the confidence that you can understand a lot of really hard things and you can understand the fundamentals behind a lot of things that a lot of programming languages, like you can for example, you can construct your own programming languages if you want and you can understand what drives a lot of fundamental things that we see on the internet, that we see in programming. So it definitely helps a lot, but it does not in the direct way, it kind of prepares really well, but you still need to go through getting the experience and you still need to go through actually coding and being a Developer.
Ben (12:31.266)
So did you pursue JavaScript when you finished up at the uni?
Igor (12:40.037)
I started my first job as a Developer in the first year of my university. So because I already solved a lot of different tasks, because I had quite a good knowledge in programming, I started just applying for a lot of jobs. And back then, the market was quite open, at least here in Germany. And it was quite easy to get the first job back then, especially if you’re studying Computer Science and if you can prove that you have actually coding knowledge. So my first role was with the JavaScript and it was in my first year. And yeah, it was more like an accident JavaScript. I didn’t know where I want to go. I knew a little bit of Java and I knew a little bit of JavaScript because I learned it a little bit, but I didn’t know about anything this field. So I just applied for the job. They said yes. And I said, “okay, I’m here not in the condition of choosing between jobs because I only have one job offer. So I am accepting the job and let’s see, let’s see what goal, how it’s going to look like.”
Ben (13:50.042)
So I guess you couldn’t really have picked two better areas to kind of initially learn right, Java and JavaScript that would then lead into Salesforce. Like that was completely by chance, right? But at that point you didn’t have Salesforce on your radar at all.
Igor (14:04.066)
This is insane how sometimes in life you learn two different things that you have no idea that they that will help you in some way and they converge into this into this Salesforce ecosystem. So that was crazy because I learned Java, which is very similar to Apex and I learned JavaScript. And when I was learning both of these things, I had no idea about Salesforce and Salesforce at least was not that peak of ecosystem back then. So I never heard about Salesforce at all.
Ben (14:43.886)
So when did you hear of Salesforce? And then when you did move into the Salesforce space, were there any frustrations with the platform based on your prior experience with Java and JavaScript?
Igor (14:54.93)
Yeah, when I left my JavaScript job, I kind of thought “what I want to do next, what do I actually want to work”. Because I worked a little bit. That was my first working experience as a Developer. I worked there for a couple of months. And then I was like, “OK, this is not exactly what I want”. I didn’t enjoy the field. That was a field of robotics and IoT. So it’s not really the field that I enjoyed that much. And I was always interested into the business, into the sales business and all of that. So I started looking around and I saw a small consultancy that had a Salesforce job. I had no idea about Salesforce, but what I liked about this consultancy is that I would have the possibility to work with a Founder. This consultancy, it was half German, half Ukrainian. So they had a team sitting in Ukraine of Developers and I was in Germany. So I could kind of be a bridge between German clients and the Ukrainian Developer team because I spoke German, I spoke English, I could program a little bit by that time. And I also could speak Ukrainian and I could speak to the people there. And I could work with the CEO. That was the most, with the Founder, that was the most important for me because I want to see how the company operates. That was not a huge company. It was more of smaller consultancy boutique. And I wanted really, really to work with someone who understands business. And so that happens, it was Salesforce. I had no idea about what is Salesforce. And I got the job without having any idea about Salesforce either. So when I started working, I started learning Salesforce basically on my first day on the job. And as I already said, the Java, it’s like Apex and JavaScript is used in LWC. So I had not that big of a jump from what I already could do to Salesforce, but everything in terms of user interface and everything outside of the just writing the code itself, all the, for example, limits. That was quite new for me because when you just develop with Java, you kind of think about some kind of limits and best practices, but you don’t really think in that hard terms that you have, for example, 100 calls and that’s it, and then you will be cut off whatever happens. So this thing’s very, very difficult for me. And then the user interface and the Admin part and the flows. That was really, really hard. Even though, for example, if you take flows, they are kind of still kind of programming language, but visual, but you just have so many nuances. You have so many details in flows that even as a Developer, if you have never seen a flow, and you see the flow that is like 50 elements or something. It’s very hard to understand what it does and how you can actually modify it. So in my first role, in the first six months, I wanted to go, that was requirement of this company, and I wanted to pass the App Builder certification. And App Builder, it’s kind of not really a Developer certification. It’s more like something in between where “when do you need to use code? When do you need to use which automation tool?” And back then there were workflow rules, process builders, flows. So there were a lot of tools and I failed the certification because I had no idea about anything that was flow related. I had no idea about anything that was process builder related because I didn’t do it for the job. I didn’t have the background there. I was basically coding all the time on the job. And this is where I saw like, “okay, so I know how to code but I don’t really know the Admin part.” And I think this is something worth mentioning because that was difficult back then for me. So after failing the App Builder, I decided not to go for the Admin certifications. I decided to go for Developer I certification immediately. And I passed Developer I certification for the first try and it was actually super, super easy in comparison to the App Builder certification. So it shows a little bit that, because a lot of people they say, “oh, you have to take the Admin certification” or “you have to get your first Associate or Admin certification or App Builder as your first cert.” For me, it was much harder to get any Admin certification than getting the Dev I certification.
Ben (20:11.106)
Yeah, for sure. I can understand that. I think, yeah, obviously, it’s just the way you think, or the way you thought on the job up until that point would be different. But did you enjoy working with Salesforce, having those governor limits and things like that? Was it something you enjoyed?
Igor (20:26.459)
I definitely, I didn’t enjoy the limits part, but I did enjoy Salesforce in general. And the biggest thing about Salesforce is that you actually work very close to the business. You work very close to the business processes and you have to understand business quite well. And in a lot of cases, it depends on which company you work for. But in a lot of cases, your projects are not super big, year long projects. Your projects are more kind of a couple of months or smaller clients, maybe a couple of years, but still the clients are not that big. And then quite often it happens that you have to speak to the Founders of other companies. You have to speak to the business people, you have to speak to the Product Managers and you have to really go deep into how another company works, especially in consulting, because you have to understand what you’re gonna actually digitalise, what you’re going to write there. And this was the part that I didn’t know how much I’m going to enjoy, but this is exactly the part that I enjoyed the most. And I also enjoyed switching between different companies. At some point I had like five projects within a short period of time. And I really enjoyed it because you get to see five different companies and how they work inside, how the business processes are structured, speak to the people who are responsible for these business parts. And it’s really interesting because you see all the different industries, you talk to those people and then you write something. So you speak to the people, you write the code with the team, you produce some solution. And then you go to those people, you show them and it turns out, “okay, so this small detail that you thought is not important, this is actually super important for their business because they do it that way.” And I love this part. I love this part of being really, really near to the business itself and not being high in high abstraction, just being a coder, just develop some backend functionality.
Ben (22:43.358)
Yeah, nice. Yeah, that’s awesome. And on your LinkedIn, you mentioned that Salesforce development is five years behind. And what do you mean by that?
Igor (22:55.518)
If you look at the kind of life of a career of a Developer, we go through certain stages, right? We start with not knowing how to code to being kind of coder, then being a junior Developer, then being a middle Developer, and then a senior Developer, and then we can branch out into different roles, into more management role, into architecture role, into senior, Senior Developer, if you like how to code, right? So you have all this different path. If you take the steps that each Developer goes through and look at what services or what possibilities for education do we have as Salesforce professionals in the ecosystem, it’s really, really hard to find something really sophisticated for each of the steps. There are some steps who are covering starting as a Developer, some steps that are covering, for example, how to become a CTA or how to become an Admin. But if you look in general, there’s nothing that covers either all of the steps or in general, if you want to progress as a Developer, you can get help on a lot of the stages. So for example, solving a thousand tasks, that was my biggest way to learn coding. And we don’t have it in Salesforce ecosystem for Developers. On the Trailhead, you have maybe like 20 tasks in general for coding, maybe 100 tasks, but that’s not nearly enough. We need 10 times or 100 times more tasks than that. And then if you look how to progress from being a junior Developer to being a middle Developer, yes, you can do it on the job and you have to do it on the job, but you also need some help. You also need to have some way to get help externally, not only on the job. And if you look at all the other ecosystems, Java development, front-end development, they all have the services, they all have the possibilities that you can study through all the stages of your developer career. But in Salesforce, basically have Trailhead and a few other programs, and that’s it. So I think that we are still quite not developed in this regard.
Ben (25:18.538)
It’s interesting you say it because a lot of people in the ecosystem would think Trailhead is enough, but for you having done all those thousand challenges, you know, you’ve seen, and so many different things and so many different variations of challenges and stuff, I guess you’ve seen a different side to what, what is potential out there. I was expecting what you meant by the five year thing to be more around like deployment and DevOps tools and things like tooling, which I guess has, has become like has, has caught up with the external development world, but when you first came in, were you doing like change sets and things like that back then, or were you straight into like DevOps tools in Salesforce?
Igor (25:59.662)
We had a DevOps pipeline even back then, but I think it depends a little bit on the team. I think it definitely gets better now with the time, but I see those things as much, we can influence much less in those things. Like DevOps, a lot depends on what Salesforce allows you to do. If Salesforce would work with all this metadata and it’s obviously quite hard to manage. So yeah, but I see what you mean. Yes, we didn’t really have the sophisticated tools as we have now with the gears and all of that back then.
Ben (26:35.426)
So obviously you coming from a Java and a JavaScript background, your skillset, like you said, was perfect for Salesforce in terms of learning that LWC with JavaScript and so on, do you feel that a Developer should be full stack or do you think in the best, I guess it depends on the size of projects and teams and stuff, but in an ideal world, would you like to see Developers go down one path or the other, like front or backend?
Igor (27:05.058)
This is interesting. So my experience is that Salesforce Developer should be kind of full stack Developer. And the reason for that is because what we do as a Salesforce Developers, we usually work with the business processes. We usually digitalise or some kind of automate the business process. And business process, it usually starts in the front end and ends in the backend to some degree in a lot of cases. So if you really want to be efficient with what you do if you really want to have the whole, the full overview of what you’re doing as a Salesforce Developer, you will most likely start with some kind of frontend, be it a flow or be it just an action or maybe LWC or maybe another component. But most likely you will have the entry point there. And then the business process goes into the backend, into the logic where you actually work the logic of your business process, automate something. So I feel like Salesforce Developers in a lot of cases, you need to be a full stack Developer versus just frontend or backend. But on the other hand, there is definitely this separation between backend and frontend Salesforce Developers. I see myself as a backend Salesforce Developer and I don’t like working on the frontend. I can work on the frontend, but I’m not nearly as good with LWC as other people who coming from, from this front end background. Because I am from more from a Java background than JavaScript background. So I can do both, but there are definitely people who specialise in the front end. And especially where I see that is if people specialise in something like B2B commerce, or B2C commerce, that’s where you can be pure front end Developer. And I work with those Developers who are just pure front-end Developers and don’t really write that much of Apex, but you still need to have some quite sophisticated knowledge of Apex, but it’s not the main thing why you’re hired. And those people who specialise actually in front-end, they’re quite rare and they’re really needed, at least what I saw in my last years working as a Developer. I really wish we had more people who are really, really good in front-end because then we can be the person can do it, the front end part, I can do the back end part, and we are both happy doing what we love.
Ben (29:39.779)
Nice. So you are obviously now training Admins to code. So are you typically training them more backend? Are you typically training them how to do that kind of heavy lifting automation stuff or does it just depend on the person?
Igor (29:55.934)
I train both, but I do put a little bit more emphasis on the backend part. But I train more and I focus a lot on people who don’t know how to code and who want to just learn how to code. And for that, it doesn’t really matter what exactly you learn. It doesn’t really matter what language do you learn. And I am an example that I learned totally different language in the beginning, and then I switched into Salesforce because the fundamental understanding of programming or algorithmic thinking, it’s the same for everything. So the programming principles that you have for front and the back end, they’re quite the same on the beginner level. But if you want to move more and be proficient with all of that things, that’s where you need to specialise. But I definitely teach a little bit more of a back end because I like the back end myself much more and I don’t enjoy the LWC part that much myself.
Ben (30:54.862)
So where did the idea come from to start training Admins?
Igor (31:01.634)
That’s a good question. When the war in Ukraine started, I had this push to do something for, because I’m originally from Ukraine and I was in Germany, so I wanted to do something. The only skill that I was good at back then was Salesforce. So I decided instead of going and helping refugees somewhere, sorting out things or providing food, I would rather go and take a group of refugees and teach to them how to do Salesforce. And I took, I think, two or three groups in total. And this is how I started with teaching. But that was just people who wanted to learn Salesforce. And some of them actually got a job at some companies. So some of them are working now in Salesforce ecosystem, which I’m quite proud of.
Ben (31:57.474)
That’s amazing.
Igor (31:59.134)
Yes, thank you. But when I was doing it for free, so I saw a lot of problems with doing something for free because some people don’t really value that much when you do it for free. So there’s a huge, you need to be a certain mindset. You need to be a certain volunteer mindset to do it long-term because it’s quite a difficult field actually. It sounds like easy, you take a group, you do it for free and that’s it. But it’s psychology, I don’t know, for me it was kind of difficult because I saw a huge drop in students sometimes and a lot of students they start, but they don’t really want, they just wanted to take something for free. And I don’t know, that was quite frustrating. So I kind of look at who can I teach and like who are the people who can benefit the most from learning how to code? And I think Admins or Business Analysts or consultants, that’s my, that’s my three main focus groups, can benefit the most from learning how to code, not necessarily become the Developers. You don’t need to be a super Developer, but if you’re an Admin who can also code, it’s much better than if you’re just an Admin who has no idea about coding.
Ben (33:27.734)
So is that what you find? They’re typically, they’re not looking to necessarily become Developers. They’re just looking to round out their skill set and know more about what’s possible with development?
Igor (33:38.762)
I’m looking at both. I think it’s very hard to see if you want to become a Developer before you actually start the journey. And I think that first you should rather start doing the first steps and see, “okay, do I enjoy doing it for three months, let’s say”. If you can keep up with the three months, then “okay, do I really want invest my time into becoming a Developer?” Because it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of energy. All the people will work full time. So after you’ve worked the eight hours on the job, you have to go home and study for an additional hour or maybe two the programming. You need to have some kind of really internal motivation to become as an Admin, to become a Developer. And are you willing to invest over a long period of time your energy into this thing versus, for example, going to the gym or doing something else, or maybe getting another certification, maybe going more the architect path? And this is something that people, that’s very hard to tell until you actually try. And I think programming has this very, very appealing image on the internet, right? Because Developers, they have this certain image, they earn six figures and blah, blah, but this is a huge time investment and you need to have some kind of motivation that’s going to drive you over a long period of time to get there.
Ben (35:09.698)
That’s such good advice. And I get that a lot, especially when the market was so crazy over the last few years, I’d have people reaching out to me and saying, like, “oh, I see what Developers are being paid. Like, should I become a Developer?” And what you said is so true, like test it, like dip your toe, do the commit for a period of time and see how you feel after that and see if you complete that. Because it’s not for everyone, right? You have to enjoy it. To be a good Developer, especially you have to enjoy what you’re doing. Because if you don’t, you’re never going to put in the hours and the effort that you need to get to that level.
Igor (35:42.338)
This is an interesting question that I actually think about a lot, because I think most people don’t really enjoy that much the coding part itself. At least if you, “okay”, so if you go and take a hundred Developers and you ask them, “If I give you a billion dollars and will you still be coding if I give you that much money?”
Ben (36:08.931)
Haha.
Igor (36:10.794)
95% of Developers will say no. So, yes, you do need to have some kind of enjoyment on the development part, but it’s a very interesting question and I don’t have the super good answer for that because if someone would give me a lot of money, I wouldn’t be coding as well, but I do enjoy Salesforce development. And I think that the part that people enjoy a lot is actually not the coding itself, but building something, creating something, building from the scratch, or being able to actually understand the whole system and build whatever you want. And I think this is the part that people actually enjoy the most in most cases. But if you enjoy the coding itself, this is a whole different level, because those people, you will be extremely successful. If between watching Netflix and coding, you would get more enjoyment from coding, this is so rare that you should definitely do that. But if you’re like me, if you would rather watch Netflix than coding, then I think that people enjoy actually building this stuff and being able to produce something and create something.
Ben (37:27.566)
I love your honesty.
Igor (37:30.39)
This is an interesting question because I was thinking a lot about what motivates me to be a Developer. Because you definitely, I also agree with you, you need to enjoy your job to stick around. You need to like it to stick around. You need to like it to go deeper into the development, to read additional book or to learn more patterns, to learn more coding. But this is a really, really interesting question. And in my free time, I don’t code just for fun.
Ben (38:10.03)
But you did at the beginning, right?
Igor (38:15.19)
Kind of yes and no. So it was, I don’t think it was for fun. It was a challenge. I did like it. But here’s the question, what do you like more? Do you like the process or do you like the challenge? I definitely like the challenge a lot. And when you have this kind of gamification, when you say, okay, I solved 50 tasks, now I wanna solve 100 tasks. Now I want to solve a thousand tasks and now I want to get to the university. So these types of goals, I think they’re more motivational than enjoying the code. And the code is actually the tool. So the code is not what is the purpose of a Salesforce Developer. So the purpose of Salesforce Developers to solve business problems, to make money for the consultancy where you work and to it’s kind of the purpose of a Salesforce Developer. And the code is just a tool to achieve this goal. If we had another tool, which would be more efficient, better, we would be probably using this another tool.
Ben (39:28.814)
Yeah, that’s so true. So, in terms of training Admins, I guess everyone’s different, right? Some people will have some knowledge. Some people have no knowledge when they start your course. Some people might be the same as you doing all of these different challenges online before attempting a course like this, but what, what do you feel like if, if you look at like patterns, what people typically struggle with, what are the kind of the fundamentals that people need to know and what are the areas that people struggle with?
Igor (40:00.494)
I have a lot to say for this one. So I think there are typical mistakes that people do before they start, and there are typical mistakes that people do when they decide to start. The typical mistake before they start is that they heavily, heavily underestimate the amount of effort and time it’s going to take. And that was my problem as well. If you think about, okay, so I can become a Developer, let’s take four months and then I’m going to try to become a Developer. You probably need to multiply this number by three or five, depending on what knowledge you already have. So people in so many cases really, really underestimate how much it takes. So this is before people start. When you already decided, okay, no matter how long it takes, I do wanna try myself in becoming Salesforce Developer. Salesforce is really, really amazing at marketing and marketing their own products. And one of the products is Trailhead. So there’s this common knowledge or common advice that if you’re an Admin and you want to start with the coding, where do you go? Of course, Trailhead. Of course, this is the first place where people go. Now the problem with that is that Trailhead is basically a documentation with quizzes or interactive challenges. It is not for people who don’t know how to code, because it doesn’t explain in depth all the fundamental concepts. There are in total maybe like 20 tasks on Trailhead, and this is not nearly enough to become a Developer or to learn fundamentals. Something that people skip a lot are this very, very basic concepts like what is a variable, what is a class, what is a method. Those things, they’re not described on the Trailhead. Trailhead is made for people who already know how to code and who want to switch into Salesforce. So people like me, when I was learning Salesforce, Trailhead was awesome because I didn’t know how to do the loop in Apex. I go to Trailhead and they explain for me in a couple of trails how to do the loop, how to do the circle queries, list and blah, blah. And I’m “okay, I know all of this stuff from other programming languages. Now I know how to do it in Apex”. Now for people who don’t know how to do it in other programming languages, they have to learn first what is the loop, not how to use it in Salesforce. So one of the biggest mistakes that people do is they jump way too quick into Trailhead or they try to do the Trailhead and then when they solve the Trailhead, they’re “I’m still not a developer.” And this is totally normal. This is totally normal if you solved all the Developer trail mixes on Trailhead and you still don’t feel like a Developer. That’s normal because no one can become a Developer just by doing Trailheads. That would be kind of very, very quick and way too easy. So, yeah.
Ben (43:22.062)
So what about when do you think someone can call themselves a Developer then like what, what does someone need to be comfortable doing to actually start writing code that’s going to be deployed into a production environment? Like, you know, what would you say make someone ready?
Igor (43:50.958)
I think the best about Salesforce that you can actually be quite quick in going from zero to be able to do something. I think that the purpose of us, professional Salesforce Admins, Developers working is that we should serve the business. We should solve the business problems. And if you can code with chat GPT, for example, without having a lot of coding knowledge, and you can deploy it to production and it solves it, helps the business, it’s okay. As soon as you accept that there might be some inefficiencies in the future, there might be the code that you write might be not really that good or it might break in the future. If that’s fine, and this is fine for quite a lot of businesses, because for quite a lot of businesses, it’s burning, you have to, you want to have the feature already for yesterday. And then if you can do that, it’s awesome. So I think that definitely you can go quite quick from zero to be able to write some code in Salesforce. Because especially if you have some flows knowledge, for example, you already know a lot of stuff how to do it. You just need to translate it to Apex, basically.
Ben (45:14.634)
And you mentioned ChatGPT as well. Do you see ChatGPT changing the role of a Developer?
Igor (45:24.61)
I definitely see AI changing the role of Developer. I’m using GitHub Copilot quite a lot, and that’s super helpful. I can’t imagine now anymore my life without GitHub Copilot. It saves me so much typing. And the same for ChatGPT. I think it’s also a really great tool, and it’s really, really nice to use all of that stuff. Still not on the very sophisticated level, though. You can use it for simpler things, you can’t use it for more complex things, but I hope that it gets there in a couple of years.
Ben (46:03.298)
And what about flow? Because you mentioned like you didn’t have experience with the more visual kind of flow tools, I guess, internal and external to Salesforce. But you learned flow. You mentioned it is a, it’s basically programming, but more visual. Do you see that reducing the need for Developers or do you think Developers should be the ones that are building flows?
Igor (46:31.63)
This is a really good question. If Developers should build the flows. I think that flows and code, they serve different purpose. And flows as any visual programming language, the flow flows, no matter how sophisticated they get, they still suffer from this problem of being just visual. We still don’t have a single visual programming language that is easy to maintain. And using this whole this big discussion right on the internet between flows versus Apex. This really nice article from VAL architected by Salesforce when to use what flows they still have a lot of problems with how can you maintain them because as soon as your project gets really big like let’s say you need to flow with 500 elements. It’s going to be very difficult to write. It’s going to be very difficult to do. You would rather go for code rather than flow. But I think the best about flow is that for simple projects, for smaller organizations, for smaller projects, you can build something very quick and you don’t need the coding knowledge for that. And this is a huge, huge benefit. And I think that Developers should rather focus more on the code side rather than flow, even though Developers definitely should be able to do the flow if needed. But also in my experience, there’s always enough coding tasks that you can just go and code all the time instead of focusing on the flow. And flow is more of a general knowledge, so more people can flow than can Apex or LWC. So I think if you have this more of a narrow knowledge of Apex, you should rather focus on programming than on the flows. But definitely knowing flows is definitely a must for every Developer. So I think this definitely changes a lot for ecosystem, the flows. When I started, we had pretty much a lot of APEX, and now you have all the time collaboration between people writing flows and people writing Apex and we could we can really reduce the time that we need for development when we collaborate together when we have some part done in flow some part done in LWC that’s much quicker than just writing everything you like your coding will not to the bottleneck of the project
Ben (49:27.214)
So tell me about the vision for your business, because I believe the plan is to be full-time now, step out of consulting and run your business full-time?
Igor (49:36.562)
Yes, now is the end of November when we’re recording this, and I started the full-time journey in September. So it’s like three months maybe into being full-time self-employed. My idea is to develop the best online school for learning how to code, to learn these steps, to give people the possibility to go from zero coding to have some coding understanding. And then if you still kind of feel that the coding is actually in Salesforce development for you, then you should be able also to go from this to being a junior, to being a middle Developer. That’s my focus from zero to basically middle Developer. That’s where I’m going to focus in the next couple of years.
Ben (50:30.006)
Yeah, I think that’s awesome. I think once you get to mid-level and so on, there’s, you know, seniors around the team to learn from and develop with, but it’s so hard to get started, like it’s so difficult to get your first step into the ecosystem and your first job. And I see people struggling with that so much. So yeah, helping people through that journey up to that mid-level, I think is, is amazing. If anyone wants to reach out and pick your brains, find out more about your courses, find out more about you, where’s the best place to find you.
Igor (51:00.734)
It’s on LinkedIn. I post a lot on LinkedIn. It’s Igor Kudryk on LinkedIn. Yeah, reach out to me there. I am very, very active there. I’m always there on LinkedIn.
Ben (51:13.794)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I’ve loved hearing more about you, your journey and the world of coding. So yeah, thank you.
Igor (51:20.182)
Thank you, thank you for having me.
You can visit our Salesforce jobs page for up to date opportunities. If you’d like to become involved in the Talent Hub Talk podcast as a guest, we’d love to hear from you.