TrailblazerDX 2K24

Team Tython @TrailblazerDX 2024

Hot on the heels of January’s Cactusforce conference, early March saw the return of Salesforce’s annual TrailblazerDX to downtown San Francisco. (If you have not been to TrailblazerDX before, think of it as the event specifically for folks who build on the Salesforce platform.) Once again, the team at Tython answered the call to assemble. Following the two day event, here are our combined experiences and key takeaways.

Conference Recap

The general flow of TrailblazerDX follows the pattern:

• Day One kickoff activities
• Morning Keynote event establishing Salesforce’s main thrust for the year
• A cacophony of sessions, talks, activities, discussions on the floor and in the dozens of conference rooms
• Evening “Trailblazer Celebration”, a Salesforce-sponsored open-bar social and concert event
• Day Two further cacophony, but with a noticeable afternoon taper
• Wrap up session

The first day in particular can feel like a blur with the sheer number of attendees and the number of concurrent sessions, activities and discussion going on at any given moment. While not quite at the scale of the gargantuan Dreamforce held later in the year, TrailblazerDX is comfortably an order of magnitude larger than cozier conferences like Cactusforce. The size of the event also means it’s both a good opportunity to catch up with acquaintances from previous dealings as well as establish new contacts.

The overriding theme of the event was unmistakably “Artificial Intelligence”. Whether it was splashed across signage or inserted liberally into session titles, “AI” loomed large over the conference proceedings. Often alongside it was “Einstein”, Salesforce’s catch-all name/label/mascot for all products machine-learning driven. Booths, demonstrations and hands-on workshops were numerous. It underlined how big of a push throughout the Salesforce ecosystem these products will receive in the coming years.

Among the more amusing applications of this technology came in the form of AI-assisted photo editing. Never shy of a good digital makeover, the team took this picture together. Judging by the results, indeed the “handsome filter” was generously applied!

As with each year, there were an array of other session topics to fully occupy any attendee, be they admin, architect, or developer. Developers at heart, Tython members gravitated in particular towards all topics Apex, LWC and dev-ops. One of the advantages of being a Salesforce-organized event is that various internal teams show up to unveil the latest and greatest in features.

That said, we have been prepping our first AppExchange listing, Permissions Assistant. You might have heard of it! As such, we also paid close attention to sessions centered around partner strategies and security review. Scott, our esteemed squad leader, was even invited to co-present a talk on best practices for acing the security review process!

One fun twist on this year’s event “gamified” the conference experience. Show-goers were encouraged to get eyes-on or hands-on with target technologies, engage with vendors, and capture specific event photos in pursuit of hitting outlined goals. Completion was rewarded with fun swag as well as entry for some bigger prizes. All Tython members at various points during the conference enjoyed tackling the coding challenges. Challenges were broken down into code and no-code categories, and served as a good opportunity to break the ice with Einstein GPT, Mulesoft, Slack and Heroku among other services and integrations.

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As a busy day one wound down, folks migrated over to The Masonic for food, drinks and wholesome party time. For 2024, Trailblazer Celebration was headlined by musical guests Third Eye Blind. Members of team Tython were luckily old enough to heartily sing along with some of our T.E.B. favorites from the 90s!

Day two felt more clinical, as we were now settled into the buzz of the event and focused on cramming as much into our remaining itinerary as possible. The second day hosted fewer sessions and served as a good chance to catch up on any missed the previous day. Overall, it was a more leisurely cadence. This year, the capstone event was meant to be a feedback session attended by both show organizers and (some) Salesforce department leads.

Amusingly, that session was unceremoniously cancelled. Attendees instead were politely encouraged to vacate the Moscone Center. Since it was past 5PM, perhaps time ran out? In a sweet gesture, the crew of hard-working convention center employees, who had toiled to keep the event running smoothly, lined up alongside the path to the exit doors applauding us show-goers. My colleagues and I appreciated the rock star send-off!

Tython Team Member Highlights

Each Tython team member shares their personal key moments and sessions from their conference experience.

Andrew

Having attended TrailblazerDX once before, I appreciated my second time a lot more! I lined up talks revolving around LWC techniques and feature updates, but also had an excited eye to learn more on applications of AI. Having dabbled with the GPTs and already enjoying development assistance in my IDE, I loved getting to learn more about prompt engineering. The system of input, and the flexibility of output demonstrated at an Anthropic session was eye-opening. As was a hands-on demonstration of Einstein on-platform generative capabilities where I followed a walkthrough for email template generation.

Conference activities aside, hanging out with the team was a major highlight. From our Day-Zero seafood platter demolition, to a post-conference stroll around the Salesforce headquarter-adjacent Elevated Park, to our last evening Tiki bar crawl, we had some amazing times!

Chuck

It’s been many years since I’ve been to Moscone Center, and it was great to visit it and the larger San Francisco area again. The highlight for me for every conference is connecting in person with the team and reconnecting with faces from previous gatherings. I’d be hard pressed to choose a favorite moment, because it’s between visiting the Elevated Park with the team or when we stopped by The Pagan Idol for a drink.

While most of the artificial intelligence push was geared toward building AI tools for end users, I found the sessions dedicated to Einstein for Developers to be the most interesting. I attended two sessions on the topic, one given by Branden Bellanca and Sebastian Wittenstein from CGI, the other by Ananya Jha and Sridhar Raghavan from Salesforce.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Einstein for Developers is Salesforce’s VS Code extension, providing access to developer tools powered by AI. It supports Apex code generation from natural language prompts, autocomplete of Apex and Lightning Web Components, and test generation from Apex code. I’m a little dubious about that last one, given that the generated tests would just confirm what the Apex code is doing, not what it should be doing. Still, I’m looking forward to taking the information provided by all the presenters and experimenting with Einstein for Developers while comparing it to GitHub Copilot.

Martin

It had only been about two months since the team met up at Cactusforce, but that time really seemed to fly by. It’s always great to have the team together and we had a lot of fun.

This was my first time to Trailblazer DX and I was impressed by the size of it. There was so much going on, it was impossible to do it all. I made it a priority to go to as many of the “What’s New and What’s Coming” sessions as possible. It’s great to get that cutting-edge information directly from Salesforce devs and PM’s. There was a lot of talk about AI at TDX this year, but there’s cool stuff happening with the core platform as well.

Scott

This was my second time attending TDX and I felt it was a great conference all around. I was thankful to have the opportunity to deliver another talk at the conference, and even more thankful I was able to do so with Bharath Balasubramanian, a senior product manager from the Salesforce AppExchange team.

When I was new to the platform, I spent the majority of my time at Salesforce conferences absorbing as much as I could from the content being delivered at all the different sessions–discounting the importance of networking with other attendees. Over time, I’ve found there is also so much to learn from the serendipitous, one-on-one hallway conversations that are possible when so many Salesforce folks are under the same roof. I thought this year’s TDX delivered on both fronts by offering high quality content in sessions and keynotes as well as high quality water-cooler conversations!

Whats Next?

With another awesome conference in the books, Tython turns its eyes towards our upcoming milestone release of Permissions Assistant on the AppExchange. But the year is still young! Hopefully we will have the opportunity to attend more Salesforce events together later this year.

Got your own TrailblazerDX questions or musings you’d like to share? No need to wait for the next conference, go ahead and give us a shout!