Description
Check out this talk from Jonny Harris (Salesforce DevOps Engineer at Zurich Insurance LTD)as he walks through his first 5 years in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Jonny talks about:
- The learnings from his career so far
- How DevOps can be used for your own learning and development through continuous learning
- The challenges he’s experienced in his career
Learn more:
Transcript
this won't be a technical presentation this late in the day. It would just be a walk through my first five years within the Salesforce system.
I'm hoping to kind of bring to life what I've achieved, some are learning, some of the challenges, that I've experienced doesn't have come through.
What you should be able to see come through it is some of the stuff that you've seen today around dev ops is actually how that can used for your own learning and development rather than just always talking about technology.
I think working within the dev ops team for the last five years, it's really pretty my career forward at quite a rate.
It's allowed me to kind of experience a lot of different things.
So you should see some key takeaways up there.
As I mentioned, so one of the key takeaways I hope you'll get from today is actually the continuous learning that I've gone through.
I'm sure you'll see and you'll know how important it is in our industry to continuously learn.
As we've again heard today and you'll see over the last year, how quick something like AI has come upon us.
And if you're not continuously learning and developing your own skills, you can very quickly get behind our industry. So it's important to spend time and focus on yourself, not always just doing the work.
You'll see development up there.
That one's more around being kind of like that cliche CEO of your own career.
No one's gonna sit and force you to do a trial no one's gonna sit and force you to the next certification you want to get done, but actually you need to make sure you do that yourself so you can push yourself forward Hopefully, you'll be a little bit empowered. Again, a bit cliche and actually a bit ins inspired from this chat of seeing what I can do and what I've done in the last five years. Hopefully, you will take that away and go try and push on yourself as well.
And also life isn't a highlight reel.
We all get challenges as we go. So it's it's good to understand that that can happen. You know, there are ups and downs, and you'll see that throughout this presentation.
These takeaways are kind of what I found myself referencing back to.
As I was trying to bring together some sort of presentation for today when Gearsitt asked me to present, and it it kind of helped me look back and reflect and actually see where I've come from and actually what is possible.
So I'm gonna roll back the gears a bit and sorry to roll it back the other side of COVID. It's a tough one. So gonna roll back to January twenty nineteen.
This is my first year at Zurich.
I came in with limited knowledge around Salesforce.
My previous company, I was a marketing executive, and I was using Salesforce end user, but I was building the reports dashboards really not using any of the kind of back end doing the admin work. However, when I was building the report for dashboard, it kind of drew me into it bit more and wanted to get to know a little bit more about how it was working.
So when I joined Zurich, twenty nineteen, I suddenly realized how quick I'd actually have to learn and step in the deep end from the off.
So some of the things that were brand new to me, when I joined Zurich.
I was now working with key stakeholders, product owners, trying to understand the relationship that was required between myself, working in an operations side of their thoughts and actually the wider business. So understanding what they expect from me, what I would need from them, how we have conversations around change and what kind of rate, you know, incidents and fixes and bug fixes should be going in at.
Trying to learn as much as I could around Zurich, you know, an insurance company. It's there's a lot of new terms to take on trying to understand new acronyms. It seems to be riddled with them.
And then also now working in DevOps.
Never heard of it before. I joined Zurich, and now I was expected to try and work out how this how we were meant to work in this dev ops methodology. One meant what both sides of, you know, DevOps actually does.
I'd also now expected to trying to learn about agile, working in an agile way, and also trying to get to the basics of, you know, what a sprint is how does that work and using tools like Jira. So suddenly looking at a user story, understanding what a user story should how it has built what kind of information we need from the business on it.
I was also starting to learn how to use train sets. I know we gone there as Salesforce professionals using chain sets can be painful and being brand new to it, trying to move my changes through the different environments.
Really brought to light, you know, what you need to understand to get stuff through and actually how you make the changes.
And I was also stuck to a ten a change of forty boards as we've had today, you know, the the big meetings you rock up and some are suddenly looking at all your bit of work. Make sure if you're going there, waiting just to get it accepted to move into the production environment.
So some of the other key tasks that I was looking that during the first year. I was trying to build on my experience before building the reports and dashboards.
I was actually trying to achieve my ADM to one, it took me three attempts. So if you're ever doing it and it takes you more than once, don't worry about it because, you know, you'll get there in the end.
I was working in the operations team trying to streamline some processes and also using trailheads as much as I could to get as much learning from So you can start to see how I've already start to implement my learning into my day to day and actually try to iterate as I go through to improve myself.
So my second year of Zurich. It kind of gave me a chance to in bed my new skills.
Am I learning from from twenty nineteen it starts to bring through some new challenges.
So in twenty twenty, it was a year where I'd been introduced into welder release management.
And I was now trusted and empowered to start to use some new deployment tools like Ant, Bitbucket, Band new and the velocity build tool.
So during this year, I got a chance to be more involved with one of the major that the Salesforce team at Zurich was working on at the time, and it kind of gave me then that working knowledge of working that agile way that I'd learned before in the previous year, but I was now working in that methodology.
I was going out and making the change of Christmas myself and following the full journey through, not just turning up to the cab board to get the approval while actually starting the change, moving it all through.
I've also now started to run the stakeholder calls with the business. So I've sat in them, learned what we've got. I've now start to actually run the calls myself.
And I was actually then also like I mentioned, started as a complete deployment using these new tools.
The deployment, however, did bring to life some of the challenges as you can read in the case study that Zurich has done with gear it, and to quote the case study, some of the deployments were starting to now take three to four hours on a Friday night, and I have one colleague took eight hours deploying profiles over a course of a Saturday.
And the a three to four hours deployment is actually me. So I was spending a lot of my Friday nights, you know, kicking off the deployment at six o'clock using Boo and sat there watching Salesforce spin round for the full four hours till it got deployed.
And with that, we're also starting to face full source code deployments.
It's because we didn't have a deployment way of we didn't have a regular cadence.
So it actually start to introduce more risk so it's adding a loss of into our pre and post deployment steps.
So not only was I sat doing deployments, I was doing all the pre, all the posts, all testing sign off. So it's just the packages got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And also the challenge with the some of the tools I mentioned earlier, where they weren't easily accessible for admins and developers who are used to using change bits.
We actually had no consistent use of source control. We had no replica builds. So it meant it was really difficult to actually start to roll back any changes that did go wrong.
And actually some of those challenges is where we started the conversation with gear set and you'll see in the coming slides. It's actually developed, I think, and I'm sure the guys are back with agreeing to a a really good partnership between myself and the gift at team.
So twenty twenty one, the year is dread for everyone, I think.
This the year with a lot of work, like, pressure for myself, but it really developed my understanding of for DevOps.
My greatest achievement this year is actually I moved into a Salesforce developer role just two years after starting the eco system.
And I need to give credit here to the training development. I've received that Zurich because without it, I wouldn't have got to where I got to.
Actually all their support during the lockdown. So I know, we all kind of suffered in different ways, but I took quite a on my mental well-being during that time.
They really sported me well.
So this is here at Zurich where we've got gear up and running, and it meant the major task for the year with understanding all of the gear set functionalities, and then to be able to train then back out into the wider team.
This was a new tool, required to get everyone on board with, and especially with the new ways of doing deployment using the comparing deploy functionality.
Which allowed us to compare the different orgs, move metadata through lock and easier than we did using chain sets.
And that actually, once we got it in place, made a massive it's to my own deployments because I went from doing a deployment on a Friday night. It took me four to five hours. It now just took me twenty minutes. So there's a massive time saved straight away.
And actually once we got it rolled out, not only developers picked up the compare and deploy tool, but all the admin jumped on it straight away because it's easy to understand. It's a nice clean UI.
And then midway through the year, gears that actually introduced the pipelines, and this is where my course kind of diverged, and my passion for the for DevOps actually really grew.
Starting to use this tool it really made me start to understand how CICD works with Salesforce, what the best practices should be, and allow me to that a way of working with the new functionality.
And actually so much so I've got two and I think many more suggestions in the actual product now that you see that when you are is offered by gear set, and you can see that where that partnership starts to come actually using their tool, see in places where I feel there's a gap or something that we could be slightly better passing that back and then seeing it come background, you know, within quite a quick turnaround into the product is really great to see.
So actually one of them up there. You can see on the screen is to to be able to turn back that back propagation.
When pipelines first went live, I think back propagating to your developer Sandboxes, and actually suggesting to have a switch to turn it off and then seeing it, which a really good way to be working.
And yeah, as I said, it starts to show how that collaboration, how the partnership started to develop.
And just to quote again, gearset provided support to work out the right solution for and set up for Zurich, which allow myself in partnership with gear gear set to refine the pipeline's process on the project which kind of formed the whole model to be rolled out across all of the zip southwest, Zurich south or talks.
And just to add to this, I also challenged my south this year to go on to a DevOps engineering diploma, which I'll jump on to now.
Let's check time.
So this move the DevOps diploma I started on.
This course was funded by Zurich and supplied by Cornell to give a structured training and mentoring pathway to success.
This course ran over the next twenty four months, and it ended in a three month.
Presentation back and it is in two different endpoint assessments and there were two practical interviews.
One was discussing devox best practices, and the other one was discussing my work that I'd done on the pipelines tool.
So the apprenticeship ran in four weekly cycles.
The first week would be a reading week, the second of workshop, the third week was a kind of project work. In the fourth with additional reading.
So that was all on top on my normal day today.
And some of the units we covered over the course which really stretched my knowledge of DevOps so far and started to bring together the why we do DevOps. I knew how we do it, you know, in Zurich, but actually helped me understand why some of the history around it, because, obviously, again, joining the company is brand to me.
So some of the units that really helped me was the general purpose at coding, actually to be able to I owe myself to other coding standards where I'd come from being a marketing executive. I've gone into Salesforce only ever seen Apex. It actually gave me a chance to go and use Python and understand that different coding language.
We've start we also look to automated testing, using new tools and system like Jenkins to run test scripts and start to get a bit more exposure to the other tools that are out there in the ecosystem.
One of the main ones for me is the actual DevOps culture, and how DevOps as teams should move forward and try and develop, in different ways days, different toolings, and then actually the continuous deployment and continuous integrations, again, be able to see different tools working in different ways, but all achieving the same outcome.
And in the EPA, the endpoint assessment, actually fully assessed by the chartered Institute of IT and accredited by the British computer society.
So moving into twenty twenty two. This is kind of where my real passion and for dev ops came to life.
I have started to intertwine my apprenticeship with how what I was doing in my day to day job.
And actually start to like mention, bring the life to why we work in certain ways, and and to really show the benefits of why, and it helped me kind of have more in-depth conversations with the wider DevOps team as well, and actually try and influence it in certain ways that I've learned what actually are the best practices.
So in twenty twenty two, I actually managed to complete twenty four month, DevOps apprenticeship.
And actually, I choose the distinction, and I was also nominated for the twenty twenty three DevOps apprentice of here, made it through the finalist, didn't win it. Not faulty.
And then actually I got that far and got nominated as a final because I'll focus I focus my endpoint assessment on the gear set pipelines at all.
It allowed me to show what kind of automated CI upside setup, what monitoring jobs I've set up.
Be able to track our code quality, work it in sprints and actually work on Jira and following use the story all the way through end to end.
And actually, I spent a lot of time in gear set launch pads.
I it's a really good, I know. We've talked about today, a good learning platform, and I've actually tried to achieve as many sets as I can on it. It could give you a really good foundation.
I really recommend during the salesforce Devil Fundamentals cert, and also salesforce DevilF Leadership certification.
They both were really fundamental in my kind of overall apprenticeship and be able to overdose and talk through and have those face to face conversations.
During twenty twenty two, I was also running a transformation project, and it ran for twelve months as a lead developer within that project.
And we Zurich, for us, it was a common one of the kind that we managed it all in house. And actually, we really drove forward the agile methodology with the wider business team, so all of our learnings in DevOps, how we should work. We then brought the the business team on the journey with us.
It's came with its own challenges, especially getting the wider business on board with agile and training them up. For them, they're always used to using work in a waterfall manner, suddenly now we're taking on a different journey and actually by the end of it, it took some time, but got there in the end and actually they they really saw the benefits of working an agile working in sprints.
So much so that a couple of the team are now implementing agile in their own day to day work. They're not in a technology way, but actually managing their day to day work.
Cool. So now I've come to this year.
As I mentioned, if you have just come off the end of a transformational project, which ran for twelve months and it actually ended.
There's an extra sprint that came up after Piper care, and we managed to run it in a truly agile way.
So it's three weeks, and we actually managed should do a week of development deploy, week of development deploy rather than the kind of waiting to a big package you'd do up in pushed it in.
And it really came to show them what can be done with when you've got automated testing, we've got quick turnaround testing, and all the other benefits that we showed during the project to the business, they gave us that trust to actually right let's go for it for weeks. Let's try it. It worked really well.
And as I mentioned right at the start, so you might have noticed I've now moved into a Salesforce Devil engineer role. This is a quite a brand new role, new role for me and within Zurich, and it's giving me the chance to try and show what we can do over the next six months. So some of my focus gonna be on our dev ops processes, processes within the Salesforce team. I'm gonna be taking a holistic view and bringing together all of our best practices. Across what we do in projects and what we do in ops and try and bring that all together into one good point.
I'll be working a lot on our on the gear set pipelines and trying to streamline the process we have at the moment in Zurich around our deployments and getting to continue view across the board.
I'll be focused on the gear set status code analysis and implemented process around trying to optimize code, and it'll also be building out a lot of documentation, around the processes as they change and actually recently, I read the, Door twenty twenty three report, and it it mentioned in there that quality documentation is found It drives its successful implementation of technical capabilities and amplifies the impact of those capabilities have on an organizational months.
Documentation also had a positive impact on outcomes such as team performance, product and job satisfaction.
And actually, once I saw that, I've started to have a shift of mindset of documentation before. I very much of, you know, we'll do that later. But I've now started to switch and think actually, how do we help the wider team get to the where I've got to, you need documentation we need training. So I'm trying to now build out a bit of a backlog and portfolio to help the team come forward on the journey.
And with all this, I'm hoping that I can actually alleviate some of the challenges and blockers the team will currently facing.
And I think a lot of that is kind of due to that lack of training, lack of documentation mission and a requirement to all be aligned on one north star. I think, you know, they've kind of come round from over the last five years, the Salesforce DevOps team has grown from just five people to twenty six.
And I think as we've grown, we've kept moving at a speed, but now we've recognized the team. Actually, we need to look back and cement that training in place. So everyone who joins a team or anyone who's been here for a while, are all at the same place, not trying to all look at different ways and think are that might be rival. It might not be in trying to get that aligned process.
And just to the final quote for myself and from the case study of where we're trying to get to as a team now.
In partnership with Gearit, the team at Zurich have ambitious goals for the future and we're working to establish a true CIC pipeline with automated testing across all of our orgs.
So our vision we want to be able to push something into a feature branch, push it into the first environment. Coming the next day, it's in prod. Whether we ever get there or it's a different matter, but that is our goal.
There's just some useful links, that I've kinda looked recently and talked about today. You're regularly now a lot of them. I think we've seen them in other slides today as well.
And thanks, there's my LinkedIn issue. Anyone ever wants to ping me.
Johnny, thank you so much for sharing your story story with us.
I think Johnny's story is fantastic representation of everything that we have discussed here today. So it's to the leadership at Zurich for giving Johnny the opportunities to develop in the way that Johnny has been able to. It's a testament to Johnny for taking that learning that drive to develop himself.
And he's also embodied all of those quality practice that we've been talking about today as well. So thank you Johnny again for your time. Thank you.
