There's a reason why being a Salesforce Developer is one of the most lucrative jobs on the market. One of those reasons are Lightning Components. Salesforce Lightning Components using Aura are great for the following reasons:

1. You can write it right inside of developer console
2. You are able to make use of HTML markup and CSS stylesheets for complete control over how your code looks
3. You get to make use of the very powerful javascript language for client-side processing of your code.
4. You can connect your front end Aura / HTML / Javascript to the backend Apex and SOQL for very powerful interactions with the Salesforce database.

To write an Aura Lightning Component you will be utilizing the MVC (Model / View / Controller) architecture.

• Model: This would be your Salesforce database. Your lightning component can connect to your salesforce database seamlessly and allows you to access your data through your Apex controller class.
• View: This would be your HTML markup. In your aura...

The state of job search today is very different than it was even 10 years ago. It used to be that an employee would work for 1 company their entire life. However, in today’s work culture more than 40% will be freelancers and independent contractors.

More than 40% of today's technology workforce
will be freelancers and independent contractors

So instead of working FOR your employer you will really work WITH your employer. You will be offering the services you are skilled at to a company for a period of time. So as a job seeker you really have to know how to market yourself in today’s job market.

You will want to make sure you get noticed by recruiters and are even sought out by recruiters. However, it’s helpful to know how recruiters work and what their typical day looks like.

1. A recruiter will on average get about 200 job applications for 1 job position. So they will usually need to skim over resumes (that’s really important to know). They usually only spend...

With the holiday season coming up I’d like to give some helpful buying information to the Apex Coding Academy community which laptops (and other gear) are most popular with developers. Today we’re going to take a look at the highest selling laptops among programmers over the the past several months (as ranked by Amazon).

As you’ll see the top spots are dominated by Apple and Razer (both are powerhouse work horses who dominate this class of laptops).

At the top of this list we see a few contenders from various brands. I’ll also share another list later this week of the top inexpensive starter laptops for programming.

Note: Amazon currently has some great specials at the moment on laptops and gear as part of the holiday promotions.

10. LG Gram 17" IPS WQXGA (2560 x 1600) Intel 10th Gen Core i7 1065G7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD (512GB x2), 17 Hour Battery, Thunderbolt 3 - 17Z90N (2020)

9. HP Elite Dragonfly Notebook PCHP

8. Huawei...

There are few things that motivate and inspire me to create more than the insight and empowerment I get from a great book. I’ve ready many books over the years, but I wanted to share with you a few of the books I’ve read recently that have had a tremendous impact on my life and my business.

The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea
By John David Mann & Bob Burg

This book was an incredible read. I could not put it down. It’s a fictional story, but really it’s a business parable about a new innovative way to think about business, people and life. I really did love the approach the authors took.

The Go-Giver gave me timeless principles that I could apply to not only my business but to life in general. Business is really about relationships with people (i.e. your customers). Making sure to treat those customers like people by providing value and free content is a take away that I’ll continue to pursue in my business for years to come.

When you start working with coding languages you start to realize that you need to store collections of information in variables instead of just one value at a time. In Salesforce you do this through Collections. If you’ve never used collections in Salesforce, I’d like to break down for you how I understand these and help you to get an idea of how collections are used and when you might use them.

Collections (Lists, Sets, Maps)

Apex uses collections to store multiple records. It’s basically just a way to collect records for use later on in your code. You will want to use those records in various ways and you have three different types of collections you can store the records in. Each method has it’s own benefits and drawbacks, but you will probably use them all, so it’s good to become familiar with them.

Working with Lists

A list is an ordered collection that can store records of primitive types (integer, string, etc), collection types (lists, sets,...

I’ve found there is a big difference from what colleges say you need from what you actually need in order to make money in the business world as a programmer. College tends to try to over prepare you and many times ends up teaching you things that are either out-dated or of little to no business value in the real world.

They do get a some things right, don’t get me wrong. You can learn a lot in college (usually more than you wanted to learn) and it’s a very structured environment that helps you to systematically learn in a classroom setting whereas you may not have dedication and commitment to learn on your own.

But there is a real gap between what you learn in college and what the business world is looking for. I’d like to offer my perspective here and break this down for you.

You do NOT need to be a math genius or even take advanced college math in order to be a programmer.

What Colleges Say You Need:

Lots of Math Courses:

The computer science BA and BS...

One of the great things I love about Salesforce is it’s ability to make things easy for the user and powerful for the developer and Lightning Components are no different. The Lightning Component framework is a UI framework for developing single page applications for mobile and desktop devices.

You can build Lightning components using two different programming models: the Lightning Web Components model and the original Aura Components model. Basically, Lightning Web Components are just custom HTML elements that are built using HTML, JavaScript and CSS on the front end with the ability to connect to Apex on the backend as a controller. The great thing is that both Lightning Web Components and Aura Components can coexist on the same page.

The below code shows a simple hello world output using HTML, Javascript and CSS.

HTML

 <template> {TestOutput} </template> 

Javascript

 import { LightningElement } from 'lwc'; export default class App extends LightningElement {...

Being a morning person has been a fight. It doesn’t come easy for me. However, I love waking up in the morning in the quiet of the day, reading my Bible and spending time in prayer and having the time to get a jump on the day before anyone is awake.

I have struggled with being a morning person for a long time. Ever since I was 20 years old I would love being the night owl, pulling all-nighters and going on 3-4 hours of sleep. However, that can only go on for so long before you have to crash and catch up on sleep. It would affect my moods, it would affect my productivity at work and I’d get headaches and crash during the middle of the day.

I had to make a change. It first started with getting rid of my addiction to soda. I would drink 3-4 sodas a day. I’m not a coffee drinker, so I rationalized it as my daily intake of caffeine. However, when I got rid of soda and switched to carrying around water bottles all day, that really helped me not to stay up so late. I then...

Sometimes we get started with our coding day, we are fired up and on a roll aaaaand…  can’t remember a password or can’t remember the name of a field and it bogs us down and we lose momentum. Ever felt that way? I have.

I forget my own passwords all the time, much less customer logins or all the names of fields that I’ll need to be working with and so much more. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some tools that could help us with this!

Well I’m glad you asked, because there are! Google Chrome has several extensions that will help you in your Salesforce Developer journey and I’d love to share with you some of the top tools I use:

Google Chrome Exensions

Force.com Logins: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forcecom-logins/ldjbglicecgnpkpdhpbogkednmmbebec

This is a tool that helps you to manage Salesforce login credentials and lets you login with 1 click. Whether you are an admin or developer who needs to manage multiple orgs and...

When you start to write code many programmers just start writing to get the project done. Honestly, I’ve done it. My code still works even if it doesn’t look good and so does yours. The compiler doesn’t need it to look nice and structured or organized in order to compile it, and the web browser doesn’t need it to look a certain way either.

So why organize your code?

I’ve started many projects where previous code had been written and I’m adding new functionality or fixing old broken code. You may have experienced this too as a developer. You start getting into the code and it’s a nightmare! Before you can even start your project you have to parse through the old code, and even start formatting it and organizing it so that it’s readable and understandable for yourself so that you can then start looking at the changes that need to be made to it.

We organize our code to reduce the effort needed to read and understand source code, to enable...