Join us for an exciting discussion with Stephan Chandler-Garcia, Director of Strategic Content at Salesforce, as he takes us through his journey from composing music on a computer in his early school years to becoming a self-taught Salesforce Developer. Listen in as Stephan recounts his experiences of exploring computers, creating custom scenery for a computer game, and ultimately moving to the UK to start his career in the Salesforce economy, all without a college degree. 

Stephan gives an intriguing insight into his project HowToDev_ a series aimed at helping people transition into Salesforce development. He also sheds light on the future of development, focusing on the role of AI, Data Cloud, and Hyperforce in the current Salesforce landscape. 

Tune in to hear about Stephan’s exciting journey, his contributions to Salesforce, and his vision for the future of AI in development.

Show Highlights:

  • Insights into the core object model, security, order of operations, and the impact of low code and no code tools in Salesforce.
  • The future of development and the role of AI, Data Cloud, and Hyperforce in the Salesforce landscape.
  • The importance of learning how to prompt AI tools, equating it to understanding how to use a search engine like Google. 
  • Using pre-built and pre-configured AI applications. 

Links:

Episode Transcript

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
And I remember just being able to log in and play games whenever our teacher wasn’t paying attention or looking and slowly and slowly, obviously they kept getting better, the technology kept getting better, and we were able to start writing music and composing music on the computer.

Julián Duque:
And that’s Stephan Chandler-Garcia, Director of Strategic Content at Salesforce. I’m Julián Duque, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast, and here on the podcast, we share stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we’re going to talk with Stephan about the future of development at Salesforce, and of course, AI.
But before, we will start as we left off and we often do, with his early years.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
One of the very first experiences with a computer was in my third or fourth-grade classroom. And I remember just being able to log in and play games whenever our teacher wasn’t paying attention or looking and slowly and slowly, obviously they kept getting better, the technology kept getting better, and we were able to start writing music and composing music on the computer and-

Julián Duque:
Writing music? That’s new for me.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yes. Yeah, very much so. And so I just remember through the years of school, this is still where I was really young, just being able to create, and that was what we used the computer for was to create. This was before we were going on and searching for anything.

Julián Duque:
This was pre-internet or internet was around?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
The internet probably was around, but I don’t really couldn’t tell you. I don’t remember.

Julián Duque:
Okay. This is interesting. I have talked to many people that had exposure to a computer for the first time, and all of them has been either through games or early programming, but this is the first time I hear about that first experience creating music. How was that?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah. Well, if we really want to get into it, so I had a very inspirational teacher in music who just gave us the opportunities to tinker around and sort of find what we were interested in. And part of that was they built this first little computer lab for writing music, composing, and we didn’t have a computer at home, so this was the place where we were able to go in and sort of get to play with this for the first time. I came from a family, we didn’t have our first computer until I was about 12 or 13 years old, so all of that happened at school in these places where they would start to introduce technology.

Julián Duque:
And from all these creative process when programming came in, how you started creating or building software?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
So I think I’ve told a story a couple of times. There was a computer game called Rollercoaster Tycoon, if you’re familiar with it.

Julián Duque:
Oh, yes. Yes, yes, of course.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Okay. And in the second edition of Rollercoaster Tycoon, you could create custom scenery and I wanted to be able to write and create custom scenery in Rollercoaster Tycoon because maybe, I don’t know, the brick wall wasn’t the right color that I wanted it to be or the rollercoaster wasn’t the exact type or I wanted to create a moat. And so I learned how to tinker around and create custom scenery for this game so that I could create custom worlds. I was also obsessed with rollercoasters, so that kind of plays into it too, but it was the weirdest thing, just being able to go in and once again sort of create this sort of artistic thing. I even won a few contests as well.

Julián Duque:
Contests?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah.

Julián Duque:
Nice. It’s like Minecraft today.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
It is.

Julián Duque:
I’ve seen a lot of kids getting introduced to programming through Minecraft. It’s incredible.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah, very much so.

Julián Duque:
And what made you say, “Okay, I’m going to start working with computers or working building software”?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Well, as I started getting into the job market, once again, I come from a place where I started working when I was like 14 and my mother always used to work in gyms as an aerobic instructor after her day job. And so my first jobs were working at the front desk at a gym for many, many years. And I was always, even at the age of 15, 16, the one who would always go in and try and fix the computer. And so it just sort of came about that I was the one that ended up turning that into my career, just being there to support, being able to solve problems. Most of us, I’m sure you were as well, was the kid who always took their toys apart and put them back together.

Julián Duque:
Oh, yeah. Of course. Of course.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
The second you can find a screwdriver, everything was coming apart.

Julián Duque:
Pulling them back together is an overstatement. Sometimes I wasn’t able to do it. But yes, definitely disassembling the toys was, I think.
Nice. And from that exposure and working, fixing computers and deciding that that’s what’s going to be a part of your job, how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
So that’s a slightly different story. So when I moved from the US to the UK, which is something I did, my work experience and my skills didn’t necessarily transfer over very well, and I also am someone who didn’t get a college education. That just wasn’t in our cards. It wasn’t in our family’s cards, we weren’t taking out loans, we couldn’t afford school. So I was right into the workforce, moved to the UK, and thankfully, there they give you a chance whether or not you have a degree unlike some places in the world.
And I got a job sort of doing some admin work for a company that was just getting started out. I was there doing data entry and someone spoke to me, who actually works for Salesforce now today too, and asked if I’d ever heard of Salesforce, the technology. And the answer was obviously no, but I pretended I did and I’d heard of it before. And I was very familiar to member management, CRM-type systems. And so I was able to just get hands-on with this company who needed someone to help get started with Salesforce. So we were all kind of learning at the same time.

Julián Duque:
That’s beautiful. I love that, especially in this profession and with the so-called Salesforce economy, you don’t need a degree to start adding value or working; you just need to know and be able to study by yourself or be self-taught. I started in something different than computer science or programming and I ended working specifically doing this, so that’s one thing that I love about this profession.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah, very much so. I mean, a lot of it comes from experience of working with businesses, understanding how businesses function and companies function because obviously in most instances, people who are implementing Salesforce are implementing it for a company to work on processes that impact customers. And so if you’ve worked on the front lines, if you’ve worked in customer service, then your mind is already trained to how things and businesses operate when you’re dealing with customers and with people. And so you can easily translate that experience into technical abilities if you go in and put in the work to do that learning there.
I think that’s a really, really important part of it. And on top of it, the soft skills are just as important as the technical skills. If you have good communication skills, if you have good writing skills, if you have good people-reading skills, you can also excel without actually going in and doing four years where you’re learning about many different topics that are not going to impact the rest of your career.

Julián Duque:
So true. That’s so true. So how many years did you work as a consultant or a Salesforce developer before joining the company?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
You’re going to make me do the math on the spot?

Julián Duque:
Yeah, it could be just an estimate.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah. So before I started working for Salesforce, about six or seven years.

Julián Duque:
Okay. That’s quite-

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
And not just necessarily as a developer. I started out, I would pretty much call myself an admin. I wasn’t writing code for Salesforce, I was helping set up a Salesforce org from scratch. I was setting up users, I was creating custom objects, I was writing validation rules, I was creating flows back then.
One of the very first programming-type activities I did on Salesforce was create a flow back in the old flash interface so I could expose some public forms through Visualforce, I will add. But from there, I just sort of latched onto the technology, saw how useful it was compared to other technologies that I’d worked with in the past that we won’t mention on this podcast.

Julián Duque:
Of course.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
But just the ease of configurability was unbelievable compared to other technology platforms at that time and still is today, but it felt like a really good place for my career to go in. And I found my local community developer group. I joined the developer group in London back in 2013 and never looked back.
I was at that company for a year. I ended up moving on, stepping up my role a little bit to another company, and found and worked for a partner, found an ISV, and then found myself at Salesforce, all in a very short span of time, but was able to really grasp and embrace the technology thanks to the ease of use, the community, and a lot of people investing in me at the same time.

Julián Duque:
And it’s beautiful that you had the opportunity of give back. I guess you learned a lot from both the content that the company creates and the content that the community also shares, and then you had the opportunity to do the same, but from the inside.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah, very much so. Yeah, it was one of my priorities. A lot of the people that I work with today I’ve known for many years before actually working with them formally from being part of sort of that little Salesforce tour of going around to all the events and conferences and supporting each other, learning, speaking. And yeah, you are correct. It’s nice to be on the other side and just fully support those communities.

Julián Duque:
Nice, beautiful. Now if I go to the Salesforce+ website, I am going to see your face in there and our beautiful art promoting a show called How to Dev. So tell me a little bit more about that show.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah, of course. So I mean, speaking of sort of trying to give back to the communities, I think there were a lot of resources that didn’t exist when I got started. Everyone talks about how when they started developing on Salesforce, there was no Trailhead. When I started developing on Salesforce, there was very little content around about how to translate my existing skills into Salesforce. And nowadays, there is a lot of content, there are lots of blogs, we have lots of great community members who have YouTube series that will teach you about getting into Salesforce, but there wasn’t really anything that was straight to the point, short and easy.
And so we created How to Dev as a very highly produced, six-episode series that showed you how to get into Salesforce development from other programming languages or from other parts of technology. And so we try and relate Salesforce back to terminology that you know and really break down the jargon that you’ll read in a lot of the blogs and a lot of the content that normally doesn’t get cut through. And so for example, in Salesforce, we have objects, and in the series, we refer to them and relate them back to tables in your database and understand how those correlate to each other in the Salesforce world.
And so we’ve had a great response so far. We’ve had lots of people watch the show. We had a little challenge going on when it was launched, and it’s really nice to see the impact that that work is already having.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, it is incredible because one of the most common questions I get in conferences or online for people that’s not part of the Salesforce ecosystem or maybe they are admins and they want to make a career change, is how to start as a Salesforce developer or how to start building applications on Salesforce. And people that already have skills, they have been building web applications for a while, but that concept of a Salesforce application is still foreign for them. Having a series like this one is, “Oh, now this is how I can put all the pieces together and pretty much translate the knowledge I have into something that I can use,” so it’s great.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah, I think a lot of people forget that you’re not just opening up VS Code and starting to code. You need to go in and understand the core object model, the security, the order of operations, all of the low-code and no-code tools before you even step foot into an IDE. There’s so much background knowledge that really needs to be embedded into you before you’re starting to build apps.

Julián Duque:
Yeah. And also, you’ll need to know what are you going to build. So there is also a design process behind.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Totally. Yeah, totally.

Julián Duque:
Forward-looking statement, you are free to say no, is there going to be a second season?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
There’s not currently one in the works. We’ve got some really exciting stuff planned for the rest of the year, but if I were putting together a second series, I’d really want to deep dive into Lightning Web components.

Julián Duque:
Oh, yes, please.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
I think there’s a lot of minute detail that we miss in educating people about how to build LWCs, and I think if we were to take that same amount of time, six episodes, about three hours of content and put that out there into the world, I think we could create some really good inspiration and education for our developers.

Julián Duque:
Yeah. And the good thing is that our technologies keep evolving. We recently had Dreamforce and we saw-

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Did we?

Julián Duque:
Yeah, of course. I think we experienced a very intense Dreamforce, of course.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yes, of course.

Julián Duque:
And we saw the new features on LWC, Apex, Flow, and I always love seeing how our tools and our languages and our technology’s evolving. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the future of development, which was the main topic for developers at Dreamforce, and how you see it, not necessarily the features we release, but what can come in the future for us developers.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Of course. I want to preface this by saying the technology landscape is changing whether we like it or not, and I think it’s really, really easy to dismiss a lot of the changes that we’re seeing in the world, especially around AI, until you really get hands-on and understand how powerful it is. And I think we really need everyone to know, all developers, to understand that we are here learning with you when it comes to artificial intelligence, and we are going to be that AI engineer for you so that you as, whether you’re a front-end developer, a full-stack developer or you’re an admin, we’re going to be creating tools and utilities for you as well, and it’s not just about low-code, no-code tools and innovation on the platform.
Secondly to AI, so number one, AI, number two, you’ve been seeing a lot around Data Cloud, formerly known as Genie, formerly known as CDP, as being this new way of bringing all your data together. And I think as developers, I think you really need to take a look at some of this technology and what it’s doing because it’s pretty innovative and the fact that it’s using that same metadata framework that exists and that you know and love from platform, I think is pretty amazing. It’s really easy to connect multiple data sources, to reduce those down to single unified profiles, and it’s much easier than you would think. And it is, I think, going to be a huge game-changer for developers as companies start to adopt the technology.
But those things set aside, as Salesforce developers coming from a Salesforce developer, we need you to know that we are still continuing to build and invest into the core CRM platform that you’ve all been using for a very long time. Einstein, AI, Data Cloud are all additional huge benefits that are also benefiting from the platform. There’s no way that we would’ve been able to build and roll out all of the generative AI functionality inside of Einstein or even Data Cloud without all of the continuous work and innovation on the platform. I mean, without Hyperforce, which is really the re-platforming onto public cloud, it would be impossible for us to scale in the way that we’re scaling the technology currently.
So all of the work that we’ve been putting in over the last few years behind the scenes is now starting to surface and will soon really start to make a big difference and impact for developers themselves.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, I’m impressed by the velocity of how we were able to achieve these AI features in such a short amount of time. I saw in Dreamforce, this release of Einstein for Developers, the Prompt Studio, all of these new technologies that we are building that make our life as developers, as admins, as users, way easier. I love how that is being added into our products.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
I’m going to let you in on a little secret though.

Julián Duque:
Sure.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
I don’t think a lot of people know. Okay? So lean in for a second. Which company do you think has the most Salesforce developers in the world? Salesforce. I mean, we’re building all of these apps using our own technology. If you look at the Prompt Builder, that is all built using LWCs and APIs on the platform.
So we need the technology to be robust and flexible and expand for us because we are building just as much as all of you are. We need the technology to be cutting-edge. We need the technology to be secure. And so that core platform enables us to build and grow in the same way. I mean, look at all of the industry’s clouds. Those are all custom-built applications on top of Salesforce. If you look at a lot of the innovation around Commerce Cloud, a lot of the new innovation around Marketing Cloud, a lot of that is being built on top of the platform using that same metadata framework in ways that are extensible, just like sales and service cloud that you see today or just a core platform that you may be using to build your own internal applications.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, it is like that saying that Salesforce is built on Salesforce, which is kind of like recursion, but this is the truth.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Technically, you could build your own Salesforce on top of Salesforce in a way, and I think it’s really easy to forget about that as developers. And I think it’s just important to keep that in the back of your head that any big decision we are making for the technology also impacts us and needs to scale to the size of a company the size of us.

Julián Duque:
With this AI revolution, I have a lot of people that come to me and ask this question, I have my own answer, but I want to ask this question to you: should I be worried?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Well, I think the easy answer is no, you shouldn’t be worried as long as you adopt and embrace the technology for what it is. I think there’s a new class of engineer or developer that’s coming into existence. So obviously traditionally, we have our research teams who are, if we’re talking about AI specifically, we have research teams who are doing the research, understanding trends and datas and almost writing and creating about this new AI technology. We have data scientists who are putting it into practice and creating models that are using languages like Spark to create these machine learning algorithms. And then traditionally, someone is getting an API somewhere and bringing that data into their app, and that is traditionally a developer.
There’s almost a new role for an AI developer to now take these hundreds and thousands of APIs and these new frameworks that allow you to orchestrate them to create new types of applications and in points for your full-stack engineers to incorporate into their apps. Because at the end of the day, someone still needs to bring all this technology to light and together, and that person isn’t going to be AI. AI isn’t going to be coming up with these new ways of working and building these new applications.
Now, if your job is to put fields on a form on a page, that’s not been necessary for how long? I mean, how many form-builder packages are there? How many web frameworks are there? How many specific services are there for creating WYSIWYG websites? And web developers aren’t out of a job at this point in time. I think just the job and the work that they do has changed. The way that they do it has changed. And as developers, I think that the ways that we work are going to vastly change over the next few years.
Even if you just think about AI assistive tools, if you think about things like IntelliSense as part of IntelliJ, code completion isn’t anything new. It’s something that we’ve all been working with and has been helping us. And I think when we look at fully generative code and programming capabilities, everything still needs to be stitched together. Everything still needs to be maintained. So I think we’re not losing the need for developers, but what developers do will change and shift as it has done over just the last five years with technology.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, we have to adapt and adopt. It’s like you mentioned with intelligence. I always have this analogy with ideas. You can use an ID to build your application. You are getting a lot of productivity performance, you are making your job way easier, but you can also decide to build the application using a basic text editor. The experience is not going to be the same. You don’t know all the language’s constructions, you don’t have syntax highlighting, so you are missing a lot. By adopting and adapting yourself to use AI, you are going to pretty much gain a lot and you will be more productive and even accurate.
I have used it for my own projects and I shared recently something on X or Twitter. I don’t know anything about CSS. I’m a backend developer. I don’t have any UI skills, but I was able to build a full application with a beautiful UI thanks to a generative AI that helped me with those CSS rules.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah. Well, I’m the opposite, and if you need me to scaffold anything, I am horrible at it. But not using AI, using a framework now, I can initialize an app, I can add in a CSS library like Tailwind, I could bring in generative AI capabilities, I can scaffold an entire application and just start writing front-end code and some APIs, and I’ve got my app running. That’s the one thing I could never do. And no, that’s not thanks to AI. That’s thanks to technology advancing.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, the tooling is going to be integrated with that. As a developer or any other person in technology that hasn’t had that experience or exposure to AI, what is the most basic skill that I need to learn to start using an AI tool?

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Well, I think there are two directions to go in. And the first one, it might seem boring, and I know people hate talking about it, but learning how to prompt an AI tool is super important. I like to really relate it to searching on Google. If you are searching on Google specifically, there are specific keywords and characters that you can use to get a better search result. So for example, you’d be shocked at how many people don’t know that if you put a quote around a word or a phrase, the results must include that word or phrase, or if you type in the word site: and then provide a web address, the search will be restricted to that site.
And these are just things that we’ve learned over the years that Google is introduced. They’re not very well-documented or presented anywhere, and you kind of just know them. And it’s the same thing with communicating with an AI tool, whether you’re using ChatGPT or another provider, when you’re presented with that text box, you need to know how to type to it, how to write to it.
I recently learned how to prompt with larger blocks of text than are allowed or than it accepts. And so you learn how to say, “Okay. Chat bot, whatever you are, I’m going to provide you with two chunks of text. And at the start of this one, it’s going to say, ‘Start of block one,’ and at the end it’s going to say, ‘end of block one,’ and I want you to respond with, ‘okay, awaiting block two.'” And then the next prompt has block two, and I provide it with that and then say, “Okay, can you summarize this for me?”
And these are mechanisms that I’ve had to learn in order to get the most out of generative AI. And I think as developers, we are the ones that need to control that and understand how to do the prompting so that when we’re building applications, we can bake that into our sort of prompt templates per se, so that when users are interacting with the applications, they’re just asking it a question from a simple basis or I don’t know. We don’t really want everyone to have to learn how to prompt just the same way we don’t need everyone to know how to very precisely use a search engine.

Julián Duque:
Of course, but those are good-to-have skills.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah. The second direction is to ignore prompting 100% and just use pre-built and pre-configured AI applications that exist for you, which do… I mean, if you think about how we’ve released Einstein for developers, which is our generative AI assistive coding tool in Visual Studio Code that you can download now from the Visual Studio Code. Apologize, is it the exchange? I don’t remember all the names of these different application stores.

Julián Duque:
Let’s call it the Marketplace.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
The Marketplace, that’s the one.

Julián Duque:
To make it easier.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Which thousands and thousands of people have already installed and are trying out for us in the beta, but this tool has lots of support when it comes to prompting. There are loads of statements and phrases that exist in the prompt before you even type in your prompt around what you’d like. So you can say, “Write me a trigger that updates this on the account.” Inside of that prompt, it’s probably saying, “Okay, you are writing Apex code. The trigger needs to do this. It must not be recursive,” and then your phrase gets inserted into there. And so you’re using someone else’s prompt to generate your content, and you don’t have to worry about the fine details of that prompt.

Julián Duque:
It’s already a pretty grounded prompt.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Yeah, exactly.

Julián Duque:
By the way, all of these terms that we are mentioning here, you can go to Trailhead and I recently did this module, there is very good modules about basics of AI, generative AI, fundamentals. Go ahead and get your badges and learn all of this.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
And just to reiterate, this is not necessarily the full future of development for Salesforce. Like I said, we’ve got just as strong a commitment to all of the tools that you know and love, but this stuff is exciting. I can’t wait for all of you to be as pumped about it as I am. And once you start to really get your hands on it and explore what people are doing outside of the Salesforce ecosystem, it’s crazy. It’s amazing some of the stuff that you can build and create with AI today that you couldn’t really create a year ago.

Julián Duque:
That’s totally true. I can’t wait to see what people start publishing on the AppExchange.
Stephan, this has been an amazing conversation. While you are not building a strategic content for Salesforce, what do you like to do? Tell me about your hobbies.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
That’s a tough question.

Julián Duque:
I know.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
What do I do besides work? I like spending time with my dogs and hanging out at home. I love traveling. We were chatting earlier. I love going on cruises and vacation, and that’s pretty much all that I do besides work because when I’m not working for Salesforce, I’m writing code, I’m exploring, I’m learning and doing all kinds of creative stuff like that.

Julián Duque:
That sounds like a great life.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Because I think it’s fun.

Julián Duque:
Yeah. Thank you very much for all your insights and hope to have you on our next one.

Stephan Chandler-Garcia:
Perfect. Thank you very much.

Julián Duque:
And that’s it. If you want to learn more about this show, head on to developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear all the episodes and read the show notes. Thank you, everybody, and talk to you the next time.

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