Nobody plans to become a Salesforce developer.

1. 2016 The person nearest the org

   Halden Retail had bought Salesforce eight months before I joined, and the consultant who set it up was long gone. I was hired to do operations reports; the org and I were assigned to each other the way people get assigned to the office plant — I sat closest to it. The first thing I ever changed was a picklist value. I checked it eleven times and changed it on a Friday evening when nobody was in. The value was Won - Closed and needed to be Closed - Won. Eleven times.

2. 2017 Flow, and the first wall

   By the second year I could make the platform dance — validation rules, Process Builder (a moment of silence), then Flow, which felt like being handed real power. I automated the quote-approval chain, saved sales thirty hours a month, and for six months believed clicks would be enough forever. Then I built the forty-element Flow, and met the exact moment every clicker meets: panning around your own logic like a tourist with a bad map. I did not know the word for what I needed. The word was Apex.

3. 2018 The trigger, and the exam

   My first trigger took three weekends and one very patient forum developer who kept replying "bulkify it" until I asked what that meant. Platform Developer I took two attempts, and the failure was more useful than the pass: it drew a precise map of what I had been faking. Collections, mostly. I spent two months on Map<Id, SObject> alone and have charged money for that knowledge ever since.

4. 2019–2021 Consulting: nine orgs in three years

   An education no course sells — nine client orgs, nine different ways an org can go wrong, and nine chances to watch my own past mistakes arrive in other people's systems. The data-migration framework I built there is still in use four years after I left, which remains the compliment I am proudest of. The certifications stacked up in these years — each project found the edge of what I knew, and each exam was the cheapest way to push the edge out.

5. 2021 — now The org I stopped leaving

   Northwind Digital was meant to be another engagement, but there is a difference between visiting orgs and living in one: a resident owns the consequences of last year's decisions, and that is where the real learning was hiding. The console rebuild, the billing integration, the pipeline — all of it is the work of someone who has to be there when it breaks.

What I would tell 2016 me

• The org is the teacher. Every weird field has a reasonable Tuesday behind it. Read the org like an archaeology site, not a crime scene.
• Bulkify your habits, not just your loops. The 200-record rule is a way of thinking; the trigger is just where it shows first.
• Write things down in public. Half this site is the post I needed and could not find. The other half is thank-you notes to people who wrote theirs.

If your journey looks like the top of this page — nearest the org, checking a picklist eleven times — the courses here were built for exactly you.