Transcript
I think we're ready to get started. Oh, hi. And, welcome to DevOps Dreamin'.
Before I begin, I'd like to give a huge thank you to Giaset for sponsoring this and to Rob Crowell and Claire James for inviting me to speak here at the opening keynote.
Tell you a little bit about me.
I'm a Salesforce Hall of Fame member and MVP.
I'm also a community college dropout or otherwise known as daycare for eighteen to twenty four year olds. I flunked out of Bunker Hill Community College after two semesters.
And I'm also a self taught Salesforce admin since two thousand and three and a world record holder.
I hold the world's record for the most times a speaker at Dreamforce has said the word fuck during their presentation.
The previous record was zero held by every other speaker at Dreamforce before or since. So Salesforce has told me I need to have my own safe harbor slide.
So, you know, Rob reached out to me about a month ago while I was at Irish Dream and asked me if I would deliver the keynote. And I, you know, my thought is I believe that I don't get asked to deliver too many keynote addresses probably for good reason.
But you know, I I am, you know, kind of like a Salesforce celebrity, I guess, which in itself is kind of weird. Like, in what other world are there celebrity admins and developers? Like, are there celebrity accounts?
Are there celebrity checkout clerks at the supermarket?
I know that there are celebrity dog walkers, but they're famous for they walk the dogs that belong to celebrities. They're not celebrities for walking people's dogs. Or maybe they are. Maybe they get followed around by paparazzis all day long looking for a poop shot or something like that.
But, true story.
Years ago, I got this package in the mail and it was a t shirt, a Sharpie and a return mailer.
Somebody wanted me to autograph the t shirt and mail it back to them so that they could give it to their Salesforce admin who was a huge fan of mine.
And then if that wasn't weird enough, this company called Conga produced a set of baseball cards of all like well known people in the Salesforce community and I was on one of them.
And if that wasn't weird enough, somebody asked me if I would autograph my baseball card so that they could auction it off for charity. And if that's not weird enough, somebody actually paid two hundred and twenty five dollars for my autograph baseball card.
Why anyone would want a Steve Moe baseball cap is beyond me. I mean, I guess if you get a wobbly table you get like three or four of them and shim the leg up and even it off.
But it hasn't always been like that.
So, you know, like I said, I've been a Salesforce admin since two thousand and three. I was working at the same company I am now as a Lotus Domino developer and then one day in a meeting my boss I mentioned to my boss that I had finished up a project and he pointed at me and said, great. Sales is getting this thing called Salesforce and you can take it. And so, for years Salesforce was just like my little side gig. I had like twenty five users. All I was doing was setting up new users, importing their data, resetting their password, reminding them about the forgot password link on the login page.
And that was it for like six months. But then it was like we need you to create a custom field. We need you to change the page layout. And along came validation rules and formulas and workflow rules.
And I started to max out on like what I knew about Salesforce or could do on my own. But luckily that was around the time that Salesforce created the developer force forum. And there were all these discussion boards on everything and anything you ever wanted to know about Salesforce. And people would just like post questions and answer them.
And at first, I was too nervous to actually ask a question. I would just scroll through the questions and find one similar to what I was trying to do and use whatever answer was provided.
But then over time, I would notice like unanswered questions. I think to myself well I've done that in my work so I would post an answer and sometimes it would get accepted and used.
And then it you know this is again like two thousand and four two thousand and five. There was no trailhead back then so it became like my own personal trailhead. Like I would seek out unanswered questions because I was like I don't have to do that right now. But someday I might have to and wouldn't it be better if I knew how to do it than have to figure it out on the fly.
So, everything was great. I was going into the the developer forums answering questions, stuff like that. But then one day I logged in and I got stuck. Like literally like stuck on the page. Tried all the usual suspects, cleared my cache, cleared my browser cookies, tried different browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer. Nothing worked. So, I logged a ticket with Salesforce support and then a couple of days later I get a call back from this guy from Salesforce saying, I'm working on your case and I think I found the problem.
And I was like, great. So, what's the problem? And he said, it's your name. I was like, your name? So, like back then you didn't have like a trailblazer profile with all your badges that you earned, all your certifications and all this and all that. It was really just like a page with your name on it and maybe a couple little things.
And at the time there were already a couple of Steve's in the Salesforce, Developerforce community. And I didn't want to be Steve123 Steve whatever. And at the time, I was signing my emails at work with Steve colon hyphen forward slash because I kind of thought it looked like me going, I don't know.
And that was my community nickname Steve with a colon hyphen a forward slash. And the guy from Salesforce said, Yeah, the colon hyphen forward slash at the end of your community name is redirecting you into the server and I can't get you out.
So, I changed your name to Steve Moe. Is that okay?
So that's how I so Salesforce actually named me Steve Moe. It wasn't a nickname I had growing up or anything like that.
So, you know, I talked about being Salesforce famous. So, you know, in addition to getting asked my autograph, you know, like one time I was at Dreamforce. I was in the admin meadow helping staff these question and answer booths.
And we had a wing man from Salesforce to answer like questions that we couldn't or like you know if somebody asked about something on the product roadmap that we don't know about they could answer it. So, I'm staffing this booth with this dude from Salesforce and people were asking me questions about reports and dashboards and formulas and stuff like that. And somebody asked me if they could just have a selfie. So, I took the selfie with them and ten minutes later another person asked if they could have a selfie.
Then the third time it happened the dude from Salesforce was just looking at me like, So, what's the deal? And I told him about like the developer force form and stuff like that. And he goes, Oh, so you're like Salesforce famous? And I thought about it and I was like, Yeah, I guess I'm like Salesforce famous.
Which is like the opposite of being celebrity famous.
Like when Ryan Gosling goes to the supermarket and gets a gallon of milk, people ask him for autographs and selfies and all that stuff. But when he's making a movie, he's just another actor making a movie in Hollywood. It's no big deal. So people leave him alone.
When I go to dream force or dreaming events, people ask me for autographs or ask me if they can have a selfie. But then when I get home and I'm in the line at the supermarket, people ignore me because I'm just another schmuck with a gallon of milk at the checkout counter.
I got home from Dreamforce and I told my wife about what happened and she just looked at me. She said, You're exactly right.
You are the exact opposite of Ryan Gosling.
So, you know, I so I was active in the developer force forum and then in two thousand and nine, Salesforce launched the answers community which is really the foundation of the trailblazer community we have and none of that would have been possible without a person named Erica Cool.
The trailblazer community, like the trailblazer community, the MVP program that's all Erica. I mean, she's a friend, she's a mentor, she's a champion. Even though she's left Salesforce the MVPs and the community members still refer to her as Denmom.
And it wasn't always we didn't get off to the best start, Eric or me because when they transferred from Developer Force to the community, I like the Developer Force forums and so like I would point out every flaw with the Trailblazer community every flaw with the It's Us community and but Erica, God bless her, she she's got you know the patience of a saint and a thick skin. She put up with my tantrums, put up with my bullshit and we've become great friends and she would even you know send me updates. She's like, you know you're at ten thousand answers? Do you know they're at twenty thousand answers? You know you're at thirty thousand answers?
And then one day at Dreamforce, twenty fourteen I hit thirty thousand answers and Paka Harris gave me his lightning bolt, which I could not get through TSA. You might find out how to believe. But, none of that would have ever happened with our Erica. I she's just she's the best.
And so, you know I've answered a lot of questions and people often ask me like why do I do it? And there's a million reasons why. I learn, I grow, it's a chance to help other people. But one day in the Trailblazer community, this guy named Sethi Wong posted this question.
Why are there so many nice people here? Tell me why all my questions are solved by you guys.
And it was like a blizzard of responses. It got over one thousand follow-up questions. And I had actually answered a couple of questions for and so I posted my reason why.
Because it's the right thing to do and the right reason to treat someone. People come to this community with their Salesforce questions and some of us have some Salesforce knowledge and can help them out or at least get them pointed in the right direction. It's no different than if I had a wristwatch and somebody asked me what time it is. I mean how can I not help that person? It takes a moment of my time to look at my wrist and give them the time of day. I just couldn't walk away from someone like that. That's my why.
And you know, I mean like and that's you know that's a great question. People will also ask me sometimes if I've got like an all time favorite answer And I do. But it's not one of my answers actually.
You know, like every once in a while somebody will post a question in the community and it's like they're a new admin or a new developer. And they're just finding their way through their Salesforce journey.
And so, somebody posted this question. It was one of those basic like admin one hundred and one questions. The kind of thing you know if you've been an admin for a year or so, you know how to do it. But they were new.
And so, they posted this question. And It was also the type of question that there was more than one right answer to it. There were different approaches you could try. So, it led to a whole bunch of replies from a whole bunch of people.
All of which were valid. But the thing that struck me was that the person after seeing all of these answers kind of like realized that their question was really simple. And they they actually posted an apology for asking a question like that.
And this woman named Ruth Margolis whose community name is Screamapilla.
She posted what I think was the best answer I've ever seen. She said, there's no need to apologize.
Everybody here has worn Velcro sneakers at one point in their life.
And that I think sums up the community in a nutshell.
People are on different stages and steps in their sales force journey. Some of them are just getting started. Some of them don't know where it's gonna lead them and some of us have been there before.
And we don't mind stopping to teach someone how to tie their Salesforce shoelaces.
I thought it was just like the the best answer I've ever seen.
So, you know, along the way in my own Salesforce journey, back in twenty twenty one, the first in person Dreamforce after COVID, somebody from Salesforce reached out to me.
They were going to be doing a video montage for the Dreamforce keynote and they wanted to do some interviews with a whole bunch of community members find out like what COVID was like for them. You know how the Salesforce community played into that. And so, it was all done over like Zoom calls and stuff like that. So, they reached, you know, they reached out to me and doing this Zoom call.
They're reading from the script like, you know, what was COVID like? What was this like? That was all stuff. And they're just looking for like thirty seconds, forty seconds that they can stitch together for this montage.
And in the middle of the interview and some downtime, I was actually wearing this T shirt and I just pointed to it and I said, this isn't bullshit.
It's a community. And I meant it. And oddly enough, that was the only clip of me that made it into the Dreamforce twenty one keynote. So, I have most f bombs by a Dreamforce speaker and the only person to ever say bullshit during the Dreamforce keynote, on my resume.
So I mean, but it's true. Like like it reminds me of the actual community that I live in back home in Massachusetts. I my wife and I, we live on this tiny little dead end street in a town called Wakefield. There's not even twenty houses on this street.
But on that one little street, we've got a doctor, two nurses, a retired auto mechanic, two electricians, a woman who raises chickens and a guy who has a smoker. I joked that if a meteor hit earth, we would be the second or third biggest economy in the post apocalyptic world. People would be coming to our neighborhood. Our car broke down, our child has a cough, and we're all out of eggs.
Okay. That'll be five hundred double a batteries and a hundred gallons of gasoline. Come on over.
Over. And you know, I remember when we first moved in.
I was doing a brake job because I don't have fifteen hundred dollars to spend on a brake job. I've got three hundred dollars to spend on the parts and do it myself. So I'm out in the driveway. I got the car up on the jack and our neighbor Bob the retired auto mechanic comes over and he asked me what I'm doing. He goes do you have a brake kit? I was like no I've got a wrench a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.
It's like, wait right here. He comes out with this wooden box opens it up all the tools that a professional mechanic uses to do a brake job. He turned a four hour job into a one hour job coached me every step of the way. Make sure I did it right before I hopped in that car and drove off with my wife and child.
That's what the trailblazer community is like.
True story. So, we moved to Wakefield in twenty ten.
After that, my wife went on her first vacation after the birth of our daughter.
First time that she really had to relax. She went over to England to be with her best friend who lives over there. So, I was home with our daughter Millie. And everything was going great.
Now, one day Millie got diaper rash like really bad. Like if there's such a thing as third degree diaper rash she had it. My wife is over in England five hours ahead and it's like she's on vacation. It's the first break she's had since the birth of Millie moving into a new house.
I can't wake her up at three o'clock in the morning. So, I reached out to people I knew in the trailblazer community who I knew were parents and they told me what I needed to do. Go to your medicine cabinet. What do you got?
Okay. Yeah. You want the ones that got the most zinc oxide. Now, this is how you wanna do it.
Make sure you don't get any on the inside because you want me to be able to have babies at some point maybe, You know, to coach me through the whole thing.
And I literally put my daughter's well-being in the hands of the trailblazer community. People I knew.
Then in twenty twenty, a storm blew through our neighborhood and a massive oak tree landed on our house.
And we were fine. We were fine. We were all huddled into the basement. As soon as the storm cleared our neighbors came down to check on us. They yell in through the basement window, Is everybody okay in there? We yelled back, Everybody's okay, but we ran out of red wine.
And we come out of the house and there's our neighbors standing there with two margaritas waiting for us. And the next day one of the first people I reached out to is Nana Greg. Nana's a Salesforce MVP. She lives in Texas and I've known Nana almost as long as I've been in this trailblazer community. In twenty fifteen, a tornado flattened Nana's house.
I reached out to Nana. What do I need to be doing right now? What you know and she was like rattling him off. Okay. You need to do this. You need to do that and you need to breathe.
That's what the trailblazer community is about.
Back in twenty thirteen, I had a project at work that I needed to get done and it was beyond anything I'd ever done. Couldn't do with a formula. Couldn't do with a workflow rule. I needed to use flow. Now, we're talking twenty thirteen flow people.
Not the flow builder we got now with pick list fields and lookup fields and menus and all kinds of nice shiny things and this entity relationship diagram built into it. I mean, you would write and declare everything.
So, a guy named Mark Ross who was one of the earliest adopters of Flow in the entire Salesforce ecosystem is so good at Flow he writes the Trailhead flow modules.
He reached out to me and asked me what I needed to do and he said, let's set up some time on your lunch break. I'll walk you through it. He had me build it, but he coached me each and every step of the way like Bob with that brake job.
He told me why I was doing something, what I was doing, how it was all going to work. And here's the thing.
I've never written a formula for Mark Ross. I've never answered the question for Mark Ross.
But Mark Ross doesn't give a shit about that. Mark Ross saw someone who needed help with a flow and he helped them. And the community is just filled with people like Mark or Jennifer Lee who knows so much about process automation that Salesforce hired her to teach process automation.
People like Judy Sohn who knows more about the nonprofit success pack than anyone else in the world. People like Evan Ponta who is the master at Salesforce report and dashboard tips and tricks.
People like Deepak Anand who in my opinion is the greatest single contributor in the history of the Salesforce trailblazer community. And it's people like you and me.
Not bots.
Human beings, real people answering questions for other real people. That's the trailblazer community. That's what makes it so incredibly awesome and powerful.
So, I just want to close with a quick little story. You know, I talk about the Salesforce community, the trailblazer community, that neighborhood that my wife and I live in.
I grew up in a little city north of Boston called Malden. Little tiny five square mile sardine can with sixty five thousand people shoved into it. And the neighborhood that I grew up in was half Irish and half Italian and ninety nine percent Roman Catholic.
So, growing up, Easter Sunday was a big deal. As a kid, the highlight of Easter Sunday is waking up and seeing what's in your Easter basket. And the centerpiece of the Easter basket is the chocolate bunny. We forget about the marshmallow peeps, forget about the Easter eggs. It's all about that bunny.
But it was a working class neighborhood and some years were better than others. Like, if they were putting on extra shifts at the factory that your mom and your dad worked at, they'd be a solid chocolate bunny and you reached the basket. But if times were tough, you might get a hollow chocolate Easter bunny. But you couldn't tell until you reached in on the basket, bit the head off, and then you'd like look inside and get the bad news. Like, does this mean I'm not gonna be able to go to hockey camp this year?
And then over the years with me and my buddies from that neighborhood, it became like an analogy for people and their character.
Can you count on them? Can you trust them? Are they true to their word?
Do they support you and nurture you? And the saying goes, people are like chocolate Easter bunnies. Some of them are solid and some of them are hollow.
Be solid.
So, that's all I have. Thank you. With five minutes to spare.
Anybody else? Like, do we have a Q and A or do we get out of dodge?
Oh, okay. So, yeah. Actually, I had a slide for it. So this is actually, the second jacket. So, Chris Duarte back in twenty fourteen when they were launching Trailhead at Dreamforce, Chris Duarte got this idea to have a game show during Dreamforce the whole week of people doing Trailhead modules live on stage called Trailhead Gladiators.
And so, I volunteered to co host with her. Unbeknownst to me, Chris made matching green sequin jackets for us to wear as co host of Trailhead Gladiators. So, after Dreamforce wraps up, she's like you can keep the jacket. It's got your name on the back.
I made it for you. So, I would bring it wear it to Dreamforce and wear it to Dream in events and stuff like that. And then I wore it at a very ill advised attempt at being the backup dancer at a Macklemore concert during Dreamforce where there was an unannounced hip hop dance off. And, let me tell you a word of advice.
If you find yourself in a hip hop dance off and you walk across the stage and your opponent is wearing a gold lame Wu Tang Clan t shirt, expect the most epic ass kicking in the history.
It was the most most epic beat down of a dumpy white dude by a person of color since Custer at Little Big Horn.
So the next day, I run into Chris and I'm like, you know, did you hear what happened last night? She's like, oh yeah, I heard it. It's all over social media. And, I was like, I've had this thing for like five years.
Can I wash it? I mean, it's got my sweat. It's got McElmore sweat. Who knows what else?
And Chris was like that thing was only supposed to last a week. Like if you wash that, that thing will be destroyed. It will just fall apart. Like, no.
But Chris is being Chris. She says, all right. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go in the idea exchange, post an idea for a new jacket, outlining all the shortcomings of the current jacket.
It can't be washed. It's heavy. The pockets are sewn over. And I as the dream coat product manager will respond and make you a new jacket.
So, this is jacket two point zero and Chris being Chris, she doesn't leave anything, you know, any detail undone. The day before she was supposed to give me the jacket at the true to the core, she calls me and she's like, I need to do a final fitting. You've never actually worn it. So I need you to do it.
Can you swing by the Salesforce tower and do a final fitting? So, I'm in the trailhead department standing on a chair. Chris has got her chalk and her tape measure and she's doing all stuff. And her team kind of assembles around me watching what's going on.
And I was just like, can I ask you guys a question?
Yeah. There's a rumor going through the trailblazer community that somewhere in the Salesforce tower there's a room where you keep all the trailhead mascot prototypes that didn't make the cut. Like the I am on the Misfit toys. Like there's an Astro that frightens small children locked away somewhere.
And they looked at me and they're like, You people really believe that? It's like, Yeah, yeah. It's like a legit rumor going through the trail. You people believe some fucked up shit.
But follow me.
So they led me to the trailhead mascot r and d department and like they actually had. So the the Singapore world tour was coming up and in Singapore, there's this iconic statue of a half mermaid half lion. And for the Singapore world tour, they were actually working on a white half mermaid half lion half Astro for that. But so I can report that there is no island of mis cyclops Astro walked away like the hunchback of Notre Dame. But, yeah. So, it's been a ride and I owe it all to Erica and to the community. I mean like none of this would have happened without you guys, without the there'd be no community without us.
So thank you.
