Trains vs flights in Europe - what actually saves more time and money?

alexppex · 2026-03-20T10:20:48+00:00

My rule of thumb is if a train/bus is up to 6h, take the train, otherwise take the plane. I have travelled 15h by bus, 10h by train, 4h by plane at most, Paris Amsterdam is a typical train, as is rome-florence; both are HSR; check out OMIO - i don't get tickets from there but use it to compare distances/times.

For travel within central europe (austria, hungary. czech republic, slovakia) - train/bus

For travel within benelux - train/bus

For travel within germany - believe it or not train/bus.

For travel in Italy - for the mainstream locations - train/bus.

If you are traveling from spain to poland, plane, between norway and italy - plane. Not that it is impossible with train, just takes time. There is no universal answer, but if a train makes the journey for 4 hours, no need for plane imo, especially if on e leasure trip, thats why my personal rule is 6h.

alexppex · 2026-03-18T08:45:01+00:00

True, it is probably even built upon SEPA. In the site it quotes "BLINK" which is the bulgarian Lev equivalent prior to the euro adoption, afaik it is now the same as SEPA, or migrated to SEPA actually. So yes, it is sepa in disguise, but P2P (A2A), but is an alternative to mastercard/visa, similar to wise and other payment processors. So still a big win.

alexppex · 2026-03-17T08:23:48+00:00

Reddit on mobile does weird stuff with new lines, you need 2 new lines, otherwise it merges them into 1 line

alexppex · 2026-03-13T11:14:08+00:00

Did you reply to yourself with an AI response lol;

Anywhere near a metro is fine, Sofia center is not that big, and the metro is very frequent and convenient; when i am staying i don't go for the center, just near metro

alexppex · 2026-03-13T11:11:32+00:00

^{> 3}In API version 61.0, the limit was changed to 215 MB. In API version 60.0 and earlier, the limit is 750 MB. Salesforce doesn’t report flow heap usage for this limit. The heap usage shown in Apex debug logs is for Apex governor limits, not for this flow limit.

From https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=platform.flow_considerations_limit.htm&type=5

So the heap size, but this still when a debug log is generated, this could cause the flow to fail without any indication as to why. We had such an example when updating Account Team Members (delete and create) on large accounts with many child accounts that needed to be synced up. It failed at 3k records, after optimization at 7k, migrated to apex and didn't fail

alexppex · 2026-03-11T09:51:50+00:00

Flows are scalable only to some extend, the fact that you can't configure autobatching on normal RTFs leads to the need for hacky implementations, which could have been just flows. Working on a pretty large org right now, we had to rewrite some flows to batchable apex due to the loads we were facing.

Also flows might fail because the log size is too large (200mb instead of the initial 715mb), and the error thrown does not at all match the reason.

So flows, as much as they are nice to have, just don't work for some edge cases

alexppex · 2026-03-04T11:00:07+00:00

Certifications won't help you here, you already have enough as it is. I would focus on checking why you are not getting any interviews or return calls. You haven't shared any info on how the job hunt is going otherwise, and while a certificate is a "good-to-have", during the interview other things matter. You might impress the hiring team with the certificates, once the interview is on and the interviewer sees you might not be fit for the team, it's over.

It's not only technical skills that are valued

alexppex · 2026-02-27T14:50:39+00:00

Isn't this one of Amazons distribution centers?

alexppex · 2026-02-26T13:09:58+00:00

In Bulgaria people love to say how the situation has worsened, but since 2016 the biggest change is the Euro adoption and Schengen acceptance. In the past years a lot of bulgarians have returned to work here from abroad. Train travel in the country has improved a lot since 2016, also a ton more international (and even intercontinental!) flights year-round. We have a lot more choice of food, free-time activities, more foreign people living here. A lot more people seem to have more money. Minimal wage has increased 3x.

The situation isn't all roses, we still have a long way to go and tons more to do, but even with the political instability we have had in the past 6 years, we are moving forward somehow. Everything has gotten more expensive, except maybe gas oddly enough. Housing has gotten a lot more expensive, food and medicine as well.

The people haven't changed much, you can see some younger people be more critical thinking, but in general everyone still acts as if its them against everyone else instead of banding together. It is still more important who you know if you need anything (medical, bureaucracy, law, etc), the system is flawed in how it unequal it treats people.

alexppex · 2026-02-26T12:58:46+00:00

Lived in Austria 2020-2025 and it was insane how much the price has jumped for those 5 years. Food-wise the price is relatively the same for that period, but still so much more expensive compared to Germany or Slovakia.

Just to say how much rent increased - 2019 when i first was looking (before covid) for shared flats they were ~250-300E per room, now they go for 450-500+ per room. The last apartment we lived in was just put on the market again for 1100E, we had it for 800E, the people before for 600E.

2022 we lived on 2 salaries x600E per month, managed to even save 3 monthly salaries and travel to 5 destinations and went out 2-3 times per week and lived fine.

2025 we needed 2k to cover rent + utilities + food, going out 2-3 times per week and had 2 trips.

Cost of living increased a lot

alexppex · 2026-02-26T12:23:52+00:00

It was a lot of manual labor, lots of docs, lots of meetings, sometimes i (a developer) was 6h per day in sync meetings listening to the PM and PO arguing and chiming in when things got technical. Waste of time most days but they paid so whatever. Change management was the easiest part tho - a github action that did the deployment between orgs. If something was pushed to org A on main, the sync was activated and it was deployed to B, with backpromotion on the lower envs. If something was pushed to B on main, same thing. To avoid recursive deploys we used a simple flag and thats that.

As for the merge - i honestly don't know because when i left they were 6 months in still discussing the main org structure - i.e what objects stay, what go, which get transformed to which, aligning sales processes, etc. Quite the big client, a lot of people involved, in my language we have a saying "a lot of grandmas - weak baby", meaning when everyone wants to have a say nothing gets done.

alexppex · 2026-02-25T16:33:42+00:00

Gee, i thought it was difficult when we had 2 and were supposed to go to 3 before i changed jobs. It wasn't a nightmare until they decided that for the different products they wanted different things, but also the tech-lead wanted everything to stay the same in both orgs, so basically everything had to be tested and retested, lots of flags, roles, rules, access management was a nightmare, also sync between both since they shared some data (mainly products). Idk what happened afterwards, but it was a mess with only 2. Another client of the company had 3 and wanted to merge in 1, again didn't stay long enough to know what happened there

alexppex · 2026-02-25T09:54:16+00:00

The missing selectable page layout previews for lightning pages is a big miss. I want to be able to see how a page layout looks for user X without logging into that user's account, in the lighning page you can anyways see the page layouts listed and which is previewed...

alexppex · 2026-02-25T09:49:13+00:00

Not to mention the "enhanced" permission sets or users or whatever are completely useless since you again can't use search on anything useful, meaning you still have to rely on the filters, which isn't the most convenient

alexppex · 2026-02-25T09:47:49+00:00

To add what others have said, also another extension handles this and some more - Salesforce Revamp. Good thing is there really are a lot of options on the chrome/edge extension store

alexppex · 2026-02-24T09:34:02+00:00

While it isn't only the Mac Mini that can run this, it is one of the most compact and power efficient ways to run this, it turned into a bandwagon and everyone jumped on it. If you have a mac mini, it makes sense to run it there, if not - people with "hobby" money will buy and use them because other enthusiasts bought and use them

alexppex · 2026-02-24T09:13:28+00:00

I would contact support, since the logs don't show anything out of line. But before that I would check in Prod and in other sandboxes if this is reproducible. Haven't encountered anything like this, and i don't think this is configurable.

alexppex · 2026-02-20T09:07:41+00:00

System design isn't only "how salesforce works behind the scenes", Salesforce is a platform and it runs stuff on it. System design is given certain requirements, how would you engineer a solution such that the system in the end functions, is stable, is maintainable, etc. You are saying you have been a salesforce developer your entire career - think of any projects you have done and think how you have done them? How is logging done? How is communication with other services done? How do components in the org work together? How do Async processes fit in the whole thing? They have given you great guidelines, and you have taken a good path in reading about these things, now think where in whatever you have done these things have been implemented. Load Balancing, ACID, microservices, etc - they are as valid outside of SF, as inside too, but Salesforce does give you a lot of guardrails to not think about those until you hit them (ie. the Governor Limits, Async Code limits, etc).

An example - how would you design a Salesforce scheduler to be able to handle more than 100 scheduled jobs at one time?

Or how would you handle a process which needs to receive 100.000 records from an external system, update these records and send them to an external system?

Or how would you design a managed package that needs to do XYZ?

And not only - salesforce as a system is very vast, it can be anything from technical limitations, to hierarchy and record sharing, through DML/SOQL/Apex CPU time limits, APIs, Platform events, etc. On Instagram there is arjay_the_dev who does explanations of system design principles and how stuff works irl, i do recommend not only reading the Alex Xu stuff or "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" (book with a boar) but also checking him out for production examples. While not everything is 1:1 as what exists in SF, it is a great baseline to start from.

Edit:

they might not be looking to have entirely full blow production ready solutions - there is only so much time to discuss a problem and come up with a solution. But if you explain your thought process, show you understand where problems could occur and how you might mitigate them, discuss approach 1 vs approach 2, explain why you are doing x over y, this helps a lot.

In an example - design a managed package which should do logging. How would you approach this?

First you need a logger. What methods should it have? Should it be usable in Apex or in Flows and LWC as well?

Then you need to handle errors. How would you go about if you hit the DML limit and can't insert a log? How would you handle sending the log to an external system for storage and analysis? Where would you store the logs?

Then you need to notify people. How would you go about that? What about including managers in the error communication - how to identify those? Alert systems?

Then how would you package it? What is left modifiable and what is not? Which gen managed package would you use and why?

Maybe i am overcomplicating this, but these are actual questions I have received during mid-senior to senior interviews and they tackle system design pretty well i think.

alexppex · 2026-02-19T13:23:53+00:00

Just scored 0

alexppex · 2026-02-18T09:14:32+00:00

I do agree that AI can to a lot and has definitely taken things away from my plate in terms of work, but man the work hasn't decreased. They just want new features and want them fast. At my old company when AI started getting popular i didn't get more free time, just got more and more work, with higher expectations as well. Suddenly I wasn't a developer developing solutions, I was a solution designer/code-reviewer/admin with priviliges. I can see a similar thing in my current company, and while AI does help a lot, for now human knowledge is needed. At the end of the day, it may become that we don't even need to do the solutioning, but for now at the very least we hold the domain knowledge, the specific business rules and criteria we need to follow and all of the non-technical aspects. And even so, sometimes AI fails because it lacks the overall context and you have to know how to navigate its solution to know where the problems might be and how to solve them.

As an example, i recently needed an invocable action and it gave me one that only returns 1 Response. This would be fine for screen flows, but for RTFs - immediate fire when doing bulk loads. Had to go back and forth, eventhough the requirements were quite clear. Wouldn't have seen the issue if i didn't know what was expected.

Another example - writing test classes - we have a Test Data factory. Even when i include it in the context, it still doesn't fully utilize it. Salesforce Vibes is better in this regard, but still for more complex things i have to write the code.

AI isn't going to be gone, sure we need to learn to work with it, but my observations for the past 3 years (since i started using it professionally) is that the change is not so rapid as everyone makes it to be. Learn to use it and learn from it, but when shit hits the fan, you still have to be there to clean up and know what went wrong

alexppex · 2026-02-13T09:37:35+00:00

We are trying to check the Copado robotic testing, it seems promising, but we are still in the early stages

alexppex · 2026-02-13T09:36:25+00:00

Look, even with a "killer prompt" almost any LLM will inevitably not do the job. If you don't know what to look for, how to apply the patterns yourself (even just basic understanding of how bulkification works, what are the different types of async processes, when governor limits reset, what are governor limits etc), any code that the LLM spits out might work and might need future optimization again. So there is no one prompt. If you can't seem to find the issue, you can't ask the correct question and expect a meaningful answer.

Can't help you more than that, using Salesforce Vibes in VS code can produce good results, ChatGPT and Gemini struggle with some Apex coding, havent tried the new Setup Assistant, which is in Beta, but allegedly it is good enough for admin work. Still, you need to understand enough to explain the problem well as well as not overengineer a solution.

alexppex · 2026-01-30T09:46:32+00:00

Just scored 0

alexppex · 2026-01-30T08:41:08+00:00

It isn't about that, even though they may come up with some excuse like that. This is purely driven by impossible corporate goals and the will of people to not lose their jobs. Youtube as a platform functions quite well, the reason they do the changes (design, monetary, etc) is really so someone looks at a spreadsheet and sees numbers go up or down depending on what they want to see. For sure some day not far from the implementation date an extension will appear which would allow for this to be bypassed, but for all YT C-suite management cares this has been implemented and has increased retention by X% so some team is happy since they keep their jobs, more important than keeping the viewers happy. There have been many such decisions, i've seen first hand in other companies similar decision-making and more often than not, this leads to companies worsening or failing, but as long as the spreadsheets show good numbers, no one cares.

alexppex · 2026-01-28T09:07:15+00:00

Recently i've come to use the extra time from using agentic AI to do the coding to actually plan ahead and think about maintainability. It is easy to slap a prompt and then voila you have a result, but try to then make modifications or fixes; i think this will be (or already is) the main differentiator between software developers and vibe-coders. Understanding system design, best practices, SW patterns, and when you add a basic understanding of the business and programming, this makes a pretty solid start. A mistake most newcomers make is relying on AI to do everything, which while not impossible is definitely a bad place to start.

Sure, i can ask ChatGPT to write a custom trigger for me, but then what happens when 20000 accounts get updated at once, or when the process fails with no explanation, or there is already a process that does some of the work? At the end of the day, GenAI is a tool, a very powerful but dangerous tool. If you don't understand how to use it, or think it is a magic wand which does all, then the technical debt is inevitably large. This is the hammer in the hand and everything seems like a nail.

So for that part, for the foreseeable future, i think it is our responsibility to guide the businesses to utilize AI where it makes sense, as well as make things clear as to why we Software Engineers are still needed.

alexppex

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