Salesforce Obscura: Stop! Put That Process Builder Down!
You may be a pro at Flows and Process Builders. You may just have discovered the amazing power that comes with Salesforce’s declarative (fancy way to say “no code”) tools. Either way, maybe you are feeling like you can SOLVE. ALL. THE. THINGS!!! for your users!
Yeah, me too. And many other tools before my journey with Salesforce. In the last 25ish years of building automated computery things for fed-up end users, I’ve learned a lot about jumping exuberantly into making my life a whole lot worse with all of my automation powers.
When asked for automations now, I find myself saying “not yet” a lot more. I have a checklist I use now for anything that might incur technical debt or risk, and it’s loosely based off of Bill Gates’ quote about automation and inefficiency.
It’s never just a field
Every 23 seconds someone, somewhere, asks for “a new field” to be “added to the database.” Several times per month I am the lucky recipient of such a request. I often wonder about my role in hoarding so much data that if every human who will ever live works frantically until the heat death of the universe we won’t be able to make meaningful use of it all. I also sometimes wonder if we are tearing small holes in the space/time continuum in our race to coerce ever-tinier bits of matter into storing All! The! Photos! of adorable wombats.
But I digress. I want to talk about fields in databases.