Why Start Here?
Welcome to the very first episode of the Apex Master Class! Before we write a single line of code, I want to spend one episode on something more useful: what Salesforce actually is, and what your life would genuinely look like as a developer on this platform.
I’m doing this first on purpose. There’s no sense in you sinking months into these videos, learning a whole tech stack, and landing a job only to discover you hate the work. Money is nice. Money does not make a job you dislike bearable. So let’s figure out up front whether this is for you.
So What Is Salesforce?
Salesforce describes itself as a CRM platform, a Customer Relationship Management platform. The pitch is that it brings marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams together so they can keep customers happy from anywhere.
It is currently the number one CRM on the market. I’d offer one word of caution about that though: don’t pick a career purely because a product is currently in first place. Before Salesforce, Siebel and Oracle and SAP were the big names. Market share moves. When I started back in 2015 the CRM market share was around 19.7%, and it hasn’t moved dramatically since. Salesforce will very likely be around for a long time yet, and I certainly hope so for my own sake, but “it’s number one right now” is a thin reason to commit years of your life to something.
Pick it because you’d enjoy the work. That’s the reason that holds up.
What You’ll Actually Build
I’ve worked on around 50 projects across more than 20 clients at this point, and I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of what you build falls into one of four buckets: marketing, sales, commerce, and service (as in a service desk or help desk). There are exceptions, and if you’re unlucky you’ll end up in Health Cloud or Financial Services Cloud, but those four cover most of it.
Within those, the work is a mixture of declarative configuration and genuine custom development. I’ve built very large custom marketing applications sitting on top of Salesforce, heavily customised Sales Cloud instances, Commerce instances, Service Cloud instances.
The underlying goal is almost always the same: take a team’s old or underperforming system and make their day to day job faster and easier, while giving them better analytics on what they’re doing.
Why Everything Moves Faster Here
When a company moves to Salesforce, they expect things to ship fast. That’s partly Salesforce’s own marketing, and partly because it’s actually true.
The reason is that Salesforce hands you an enormous prebuilt shell. Log into any org and click Setup and you’ll see what I mean. You build your database tables (objects) and columns (fields) declaratively. You configure page layouts, sharing rules, permission sets, record types, all through a UI. On any other stack, every one of those is something you’d be writing and maintaining yourself.
So yes, timelines are shorter. But as long as you’ve got a decent architect estimating the work, that’s usually fine, because so much is already done for you.
This is also why you need to know the admin side. This course focuses on Apex, but you cannot be a good developer here without understanding the declarative half of the platform. You have to know what clicks can do to know when code is the right call.
Personally, coming from Java and PHP, this is the part I’ve enjoyed most. Salesforce cuts out a lot of the work I never much liked, standing up servers, wiring databases together, and lets me focus on the parts I actually enjoy: complex integrations, genuinely complicated user interfaces, and building reusable components I can drop in anywhere.
Let’s Talk About The Complaints
You’ll find plenty of opinions online about Salesforce development. Some are outdated, some are fair. Let me go through them honestly, because you deserve the real picture.
“There’s no IDE support.” This was true when I started. It is thoroughly untrue now. There’s excellent tooling for both VS Code and IntelliJ, and we set both up later in this series.
“You can’t do source driven development.” Also no longer true. Between scratch orgs and unlocked packages, source driven development works fine. You don’t even strictly need either.
“Apex is an outdated language.” This one is fair, and I’ll own it. Apex is roughly Java from six or seven years ago. It’s a good language and it has almost everything you’ll need, but it lacks some of the more advanced capabilities you’d find in modern Java or C#. There’s no real reflection, for instance. There are open source libraries that mimic some of it, but it can be genuinely frustrating. It does keep getting updates, just slowly.
“You can’t use modern front end tech.” Until Lightning Web Components arrived, largely true. Now you can do most modern front end work. There are still limits, mostly courtesy of Lightning Web Security and its predecessor Locker Service. If you were hoping to use TypeScript, you’re going to have a rough time. Importing arbitrary JavaScript libraries often takes real effort to adapt.
And when the platform genuinely can’t do something? You build it off platform, on AWS or wherever, and pipe it in. Salesforce gives you that door, so there’s realistically no hard ceiling on what you can deliver. It’s just that occasionally you have to go around.
“Aren’t Salesforce Developers Just Admins?”
This one I want to kill properly, because it’s the misconception I hear most: that as a “developer” on this platform you’ll spend your days pointing and clicking and never actually write code.
It’s not true. In seven years on the platform there have been basically zero days where I didn’t produce code. Have I done admin work? Of course. Far less of it than development, though.
If you take the development side of this career seriously, you will write code every single day. That’s the job.
What’s Next
So that’s the honest version. You’ll build marketing, sales, commerce and service applications. You’ll move faster than on most stacks because of everything Salesforce pre-builds for you. The language is a bit dated and occasionally annoying. The front end has real constraints. And you’ll write code every day.
For me, across seven years and thousands of hours, it’s been considerably better than I expected. The pay is genuinely good, better than I made as a Java or PHP developer. But pay isn’t everything, so make sure you’ll actually enjoy the work before you commit.
Still with me? Good. In the next episode we’ll get you a free Salesforce org so you’ve got somewhere to start building.
See you there!
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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend
Advanced Apex Programming
Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture
Mastering Salesforce DevOps
Good Non-SF Specific Development Books:
Clean Code
Clean Architecture
