Why You Need Your Own Org
Welcome back to the Apex Master Class! In the last episode we talked about what you can actually expect to do day to day as a Salesforce developer. Today we’re doing something way more practical: getting you your own Salesforce org, for free, so you have somewhere to actually write code.
This matters more than it sounds like it does. You cannot learn this platform by reading about it. You need somewhere you can break things, write bad Apex, delete it, and try again without anybody yelling at you. A free Developer Edition org is exactly that. It’s yours, it doesn’t expire, and it doesn’t cost a thing.
You’ll also want it for the rest of this series, because every single episode from here on out assumes you’ve got an org open in another tab.
How To Sign Up
Head over to developer.salesforce.com/signup and fill out the form. That’s genuinely the whole thing. Name, email, role, country, and a username.
Then hit Sign me up and wait. Salesforce has to actually go partition out space and stand up an entire environment for you in the background, so it isn’t instant. Mine took about four minutes for the verification email to land. If it hasn’t shown up after five, go check your spam folder before you panic.
When the “Welcome to Salesforce, verify your account” email arrives, click Verify Account, set a password and a security question, and that’s it. You now own a Salesforce org.
The One Thing That Trips Everybody Up: Your Username
Your username has to look like an email address, but it does not have to be a real one. And here’s the part that catches people out: Salesforce usernames must be unique across every single Salesforce org that has ever existed. Not unique in your org. Unique everywhere.
So if you’ve ever had a Salesforce login anywhere before, at a job, in a Trailhead playground, anywhere, and you used your email address as the username, you can’t reuse it here. You’ll get an error.
The fix is easy, just tack something on the end. I used codingwiththeforce@gmail.com.apexmasterclass. It doesn’t need to receive mail, it just needs to be unique. Pick something you’ll remember.
A Heads Up About Limits
Here’s something that’s going to come up constantly for the rest of your Salesforce career, so let’s introduce it now while it’s cheap.
Salesforce is a multi-tenant platform. That means you aren’t running on your own private server, you’re sharing infrastructure with a whole lot of other customers. To stop any one tenant from hogging everything and ruining the day for everybody else, Salesforce imposes governor limits on basically everything: how much data you can store, how many records you can query in a single transaction, how many API calls you can make in a day.
In a Developer Edition org, those numbers are much lower than in a real production org. You get about 5MB of data storage, 20MB of file storage, and a pretty modest daily API allowance. So don’t go trying to load a million records into it.
If you’re curious about the exact numbers, Salesforce publishes the full allocation list by edition. It’s worth a skim, because honestly the Developer Edition gives you a lot considering it’s completely free.
And to be clear, hitting a governor limit is not a bug. It’s the platform working exactly as designed. Learning to write code that respects those limits is a huge part of what separates a decent Salesforce developer from a frustrated one, and we’re going to spend a lot of time on it later in this series.
What’s Next
That’s it, you’ve got an org. Go poke around in it. Click Setup in the top right, wander through the menus, don’t worry about breaking anything, because you can’t break anything that matters.
In the next episode we’re going to dig into what Apex actually is, what all those scary words in Salesforce’s official definition mean, and when you should reach for code instead of clicks.
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
