The event platform: Whova

Whova is a feature-rich and stable event app which comes in desktop and mobile versions. Through it, the Cactusforce crew achieved a profound and intense community enablement even prior to the actual conference.

Through clever gamification within Whova, a lot of content, creativity and cordiality was unleashed in the pre-event phase and, of course, during the event. A miniature Trailblazer Community actually emerged within the event platform, along with its hopes, worries, and boundless enthusiasm.

Participants started engaging with each other on a huge variety of topics, including practical ones like accomodation, eating, running long before the actual hybrid conference. Overall, 165 topics have been created, also driven by the desire to gain points, but mainly serving the larger goal of facilitating exchange among event attendees. And it worked!

Apart from the conference itself, Cactusforce was a brilliant example of community building. The “social game” proved to be very attractive to trailblazers. It was a great pleasure to observe the traits of kindness and empathy that reliably emerge in the Salesforce Ohana. Whova should be credited for their “nudge” design model of human interaction.

The conference: Two days of content(ment)

Cactusforce fully lived up to its ambition of being a rich and exciting event full of great content for architects and devs, and hopefully also for admins given the number of Flow sessions and more functional topics.

Speakers were clearly enthusiastic about their topics and expert in them. There was often an entrepreneurial spirit in the room. We got to hear about some exciting new ecosystem products e.g. in the security domain.

Owing to the target audience (two thirds technical), many topics were fairly technical but explained in an accessible way. There was a good amount of functional topics and project management aspects added to the mix.

The technical sessions covered a broad spectrum of Salesforce application and system architecture. A few of them are highlighted below.

🌵 The vulnerability theme

The intersection of security and integration architecture was especially in the limelight. Did you know that Salesforce doesn’t do any virus scanning for uploaded files? Did you know that Lightning APIs can be accessed even without a user interface and provide access to an org’s metadata and data in unforeseen ways?

• Matt Meyers, Ethically Hacking a Salesforce Digital Experience
• Ray Dehler/ Michelle Liang: Sneaky Salesforce Screen Scraping

🌵 The quality theme

Another focus was on delivering changes quickly and reliably. For this to happen, you need a good DevOps process and a well-working defect management. The ideal being to do frequent, smaller releases while avoiding that any defects make it into production.

• Rob Cowell, Effective branching strategies for Salesforce Developers
• Nikita Prokopev et al., Observability for Salesforce

🌵 The integration theme

Last not least, in todays API-driven economy, you need to be creative when it comes to integrating Salesforce with other systems in order to unlock additional value drivers across the digital landscape.

• Alan Petersen, Integrating Salesforce with AWS Lambda Functions
• Daniel Peter, Making your Salesforce + Slack Apps even cooler with Salesforce Functions

🌵 The road to #CTA

I particularly enjoyed Steve Simpson’s great kick-off session on “Scaling the Architect Pyramid, DEV to CTA, from a Certified Architect Instructor” and will be following his precious advice.

Summary

I found 🌵 Cactusforce 2023 to be an excellent community-led conference with great content for multiple audiences. Many thanks to the organisers, sponsors, speakers & attendees! 🙌🏽

🌵☀️🌵 Some Cactusforce posts

Steve Simpson, Numaan Mohammad, Cactusforce 1, Cactusforce 2, Luis Escalante, Carlos Siqueira 1, Carlos Siqueira 2, Deb Derringer, Jana Walker, Kate Lessard, Inga Ragozina, Sundhar Kasinathan

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