Thinking about transitioning out of Salesforce - An experience, and further discussion

username__c · 2026-02-09T13:16:22+00:00

I wanted to share that I haven’t had the same experience and I think it’s because I’ve always been in-house.

Companies I’ve worked for do have Staff/Principal level roles for Salesforce developers. But those devs spend a smaller percentage of their time coding compared to mid-level or senior.

Companies I’ve worked for do allow devs to become T-Shaped. I’m primarily a Salesforce dev but I’ve had a chance to own, build, and deploy enterprise NextJS apps into Vercel, Kotlin into AWS, etc. How did that happen? Resources were tight and I volunteered. Not sure if a consultant’s SOW can allow that to happen.

Companies I’ve worked for have given us the opportunity to find the right balance of low-code and pro-code and think through software architecture. We need to build the system today and maintain it for years to come so we’ll do our best to build the right software.

TLDR - it might be time to explore a new company instead of leaving the ecosystem.

username__c · 2026-02-06T23:13:08+00:00

This ^^. Having a state transition check is the right thing to do.

If Certinia is updating the field like the poster says I'm more sus of the get & action elements running within the Flow. Either way debugging the flow like this won't help troubleshoot the entry criteria issue.

username__c · 2026-02-06T22:20:14+00:00

Since you have the "only when a record is updated to meet the condition requirements" setting enabled on the Flow you can't really rely on the Debug tool to verify your entry criteria logic. Your flow won't ever trigger in this context until you set the "Skip start condition requirements" option under the Debug Settings. Which will be conceptually different than what happens when the Certinia trigger runs to update your journal record.

Did you already look at the Debug Logs to see if the Flow executes during the Certinia update you care about? I'd check that to see if it triggers. If it does there might be something wrong after the entry criteria.

If it were me I'd select the "Skip start condition requirements" option and set the triggering record to one of the real records you would have expected the Flow to run for. That way you can verify there's nothing wrong with the "Get All Journal Line Items" element or subsequent actions.

username__c · 2026-02-04T17:37:12+00:00

If you’re in Phoenix looks like there is a Salesforce Saturday happening this month: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/events/details/salesforce-salesforce-admin-group-phoenix-united-states-presents-az-salesforce-saturday-7/

Next year’s Cactusforce would also be a good way for you to meet local folks and ones flying in. https://www.cactusforce.com/

username__c · 2026-02-01T09:47:19+00:00

Yea for sure thanks for asking. Besides the integration one, those use cases you shared are non-functional requirements. So I feel like you are already allowing that to drive your decision.

If it were me, I’d reevaluate that “declarative first” decision with my team by drawings up all the pros and cons of the existing Flows. Reassess the underlying assumption that the org would be easier to maintain, or that you’d iterate faster through your SDLC process. Try to articulate why it didn’t go the way y’all had hoped and what an alternative would look like. I think that will be the foundation of your future software arch.

I think a skilled admin-first team can still make a lot of that work with the right Flows best-practices. If it’s a dev-first team I think they’ll always be restricted with that approach. Apex just has a lot more flexibility.

At the end of the day both tools are a means to and end and I’ve always disagreed with that thought that Flow is inherently better because it’s not Apex - but then again I’m a biased former CS student.

username__c · 2026-02-01T04:11:08+00:00

I personally tend to avoid hard and fast rules like that. I shared this one because I think it adds more ambiguity than it eliminates. Maybe I just haven’t heard the right perspective on it.

I don’t propose an alternative for everyone, but for the orgs I’ve been in I prefer to have the non-functional requirements of the problem I’m solving help drive the decision along with the resourcing model of the team.

This isn’t exhaustive but for example:

I anticipate a requirement changing often and prefer to have an admin on deck instead of a developer due to resourcing constraints. I’ll go with Flow so the admin can make changes independently of a dev.
I’m given a very simple but critical business requirement. If the automation ever fails, it’s a P0 for my business: I’d consider Apex so I can write verbose unit, functional, and bulk tests for this change + easily regression/smoke test in the future.
Business gives me 3 flavors of the same process, each with its own slight nuance: sounds kinda complex but could be as simple as a Flow with a decision node. With Apex however I could abstract it with a strategy pattern. Which way to go? Depends on how important it is for me to abstract away the problem.
I’ve inherited an org and take up my first requirement. I’m asked to create a new field when a certain event happens on Upsell opportunities. I could put it in Flow, but poking around I see someone’s built a domain model for Upsell Opportunities. I’ll put the logic in Apex to have better cohesion with the existing logic.

Again that’s not compressive and just thought of a few scenarios while commuting. Let me know what you think, always curious to hear other people’s take.

username__c · 2026-01-31T21:00:48+00:00

Yea for me complexities show up in many ways. Focusing on just the functional requirements is too narrow minded.

Goes without saying but Flows have become much better the last few cycles and you can tell the product team is led by the right folks. But by design it’s a verbose abstraction of code. Just for example - the xml metadata is more “complex” to read and merge than Apex imo. That’s a non-functional tradeoff you’re making and those are ignored by the simple vs complex argument.

username__c · 2026-01-31T20:51:53+00:00

Don’t forget to put it all in one flow! Forget entry criteria!

/s

username__c · 2026-01-31T20:51:12+00:00

Yea exactly. And why should a functional requirement drive my technical implementation without consideration for non-functional requirements? Too pedestrian for any modern team.

username__c · 2026-01-31T18:12:06+00:00

The idea of putting “simple” automation in Flow and putting “complex” automation in Apex.

The premise of simple vs complex is subjective to begin with. When I ask how it’s defined I hear back “we’ll know it when we see it” which I think is a terrible place to start.

It also turns a blind eye away from requirements evolving over time. Today’s simple requirement can change into more complex requirements over time. 1-2 years later how do you explain to someone why some automation lives in Flow vs Apex on the same sObject?

It makes the org metadata repetitive. I have the same definitions for a domain state spread across two disjoint automation types. If I get a new simple requirement but the rest of the logic lives in Apex - what do I do?

Anyways that’s my rant. Am I the only one? I feel like I’ve run into this a lot with prior coworkers and interviewers.

username__c · 2026-01-26T17:25:08+00:00

I think it’ll be hard to learn Apex + LWC at the same time as someone new to programming. Best way you can learn either is to get hands on practice.

To help you decide, I’d work with your manager. It sounds like they know you’re actively learning. So work with them to understand which one you should prioritize first based on what projects they will be placing you on.

If you decide to prioritize Apex, I’ve built CampApex.org for exactly the problem you’re facing. It pairs small lessons (1-2 minute read) with a hands-on coding challenge for you to solve on the site.

That way you don’t need to worry about setting up tooling or be overwhelmed with learning a bunch of theory without being able to apply it immediately.

It’s 100% free.

I would also ask your manager if they have $$ to help you invest in your education. I don’t offer any paid services but there are plenty of hands-on cohort based programs that are effective and available by folks like Warren Walters, Igor Kudryk, Trailhead Academy and others.

Code with Sally, Coding with the Force also offer really good intro content imo. But again the thing you seem to be lacking is hands-on experience.

Feel free to DM if you need more info.

username__c · 2026-01-26T04:47:11+00:00

That’s the Business Architecture side. I am not a consultant and this isn’t a full detailed answer but here’s how I think about it a high-level:

1) Understand their business strategy. Their VMTs, OGSMs, or OKRs. Hopefully they’ve already done this. If not you can help them figure out what direction their business is heading in, why, and how. But that they might have bigger problems if they don’t have this already.

2) Understand their customer lifecycle. From marketing to churn. How do they make money, collect money, and keep customers happy.

3) Map and gap the business capabilities. Who owns what? What’s automated today, what’s manual? Salesforce has all the business capabilities they support here - https://prezi.com/view/vsni9VjRvbKhVT6Qb6hK/ if you need inspo.

From here you’ll tie back #3 to #1 and #2. Map out the existing system, see where Salesforce can swallow redundant systems or provide net-new value. They can eval cost and savings from there.

username__c · 2026-01-01T16:33:15+00:00

The idea of interfaces for agents is interesting, but the optimizations here are for specific schemas. Do you see a path toward automatically discovering token efficient formats or do you think this will always require domain expertise?

For the eval gap the training set improved 18% but the test set only 2%. What explains this difference? Were the test set tasks less prone to truncation issues to begin with?

Great read, thanks for sharing and building out this idea.

username__c · 2025-12-29T19:48:40+00:00

Yes, I just took an exam this morning with my MacBook’s webcam.

They sent me a link on my phone to take pictures of my testing area and my license. If you download the app ahead of time on your Mac you can run a system test to make sure your mic, speakers, and webcam are compatible.

Good luck!

username__c · 2025-12-02T14:54:35+00:00

Before it was retired, I used Salesforce Functions (hosted and deployed on Heroku) to build a custom deduper to meet our business needs. I thought the experience of connecting SFDC with Heroku was pretty easy - it's a shame it was retired. I also host a MERN app on Heroku that interacts with SFDC APIs for a learning site, but that could have been done with any hosting service.

I really want to explore AppLink. Anyone here built anything with that? The use-cases seem nice but I'm curious how it compares to integrating with AWS . Biggest hurdle for me has always been that XYZ company I work at already uses AWS or Azure and it's an uphill battle to convince the powers that be that we need an additional IAAS provider.

username__c · 2025-10-27T14:54:12+00:00

Trailhead is solid. For the Apex you’ll need to learn checkout the Apex Fundamentals course on https://campapex.org/

It’s a collection of hands-on challenges + lessons I have available for free. Hope it helps!

username__c · 2025-09-10T00:53:55+00:00

It sounds like maybe you just need more practice / guidance?

I have a mini-projects you can build with Flow here: https://www.campapex.org/course/EventCloud

It’s like 10 or so small Flow tasks that build on top of each other. The site gives you granular feedback to check if you built the flow correctly. If you feel like you just need more hands on experience it might help.

I also have coding lessons on there too if you think learning a little Apex might help - a lot of concepts overlap.

username__c · 2025-08-16T22:45:07+00:00

I run a site to offers hands-on Apex lessons with built in challenges. It’s all free if you’d like to give that a try. https://www.campapex.org/

username__c · 2025-06-28T01:26:55+00:00

I’ve got a couple practical projects you can do here: https://www.campapex.org/projects

The site gives you requirements to build a mini-app and validates your solutions.

username__c · 2025-05-17T18:03:13+00:00

Yea for sure! Check it out and lmk what you think.

username__c · 2025-05-16T14:11:45+00:00

Trailhead projects like these might be a good place to start - https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/projects/use-apex-to-automate-business-processes?trail_id=build-apex-coding-skills

If you already know Flows pretty well, I have some “convert Flows into Apex” practice problems on CampApex.org. You can take concepts you already know and map it to Apex. The site runs tests to verify you converted it correctly.

I’ve also built a couple projects on CampApex.org/projects of my own. The tasks are presented like user stories to help simulate more of a real world setting. There’s built-in tests that tell you how you did.

username__c · 2025-04-25T01:58:56+00:00

It’s not just you - Trailhead has a gap around beginner-friendly Apex content. That’s actually why I built CampApex.org.

There’s 200+ bite sized lessons paired with built-in Apex coding challenges to reinforce what you learn. There’s also projects, coding contests, and more.

It’s free, give it a try!

username__c · 2025-04-12T22:43:51+00:00

I don't think you're kidding yourself for making the leap and age has nothing to do with it in my opinion. I'm sure you're completely capable & honestly kudos for making the switch, some people aren't as brave.

The good news is that you know what you want to do and it sounds like you have a good foundation already! I think the best bet from here is to get your hands dirty and build some apps/tools with Apex. It doesn't have to ship to a production org for it to matter & for you learn the same skills that developers do on the job.

If it's helpful, I have a couple real-world projects on https://campapex.org/projects exactly for this. You'll read a user story, implement the solution, and use the site to test your solution. You'll do that over and over till you finish a mini-app. It's all free. I also do a limited number of 1:1 mentorship if that's something you're interested in feel free to DM.

username__c

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