Wednesday 30 December 2015

New Year, New Trailhead Badges

Badges

Overview

The Trailhead juggernaut keeps rolling, with a new trail and 6 (count ‘em) new badges, taking the totals up to 13 trails and 70 badges (not counting the community badges which you get for earning a new badge on a particular date, such as halloween, which is always tricky for those of us who already have all the badges, but these are the first world problems I am cursed with).

So What’s New?

  • Advanced Formulas
    This strikes me as an excellent fit for Trailhead, as the challenges will be tightly focused on a single formula field which satisfies a well-defined set of requirements. I’d imagine there was some competition in the team that writes the code that checks the challenges for this one.
     
  • Apex Integration Services
    If you haven’t done much of this before, get cracking. Its a good grounding in the topic and gets you writing code that carries out real integrations, but in a much safer environment than a customer org! 
     
  • Lighting Experience Chatter Basics
    One aimed more at the newbies than the experienced administrator or developer, which is a good thing as we want new people using the platform.

  • Lightning Data Management
    Getting data in and out. Useful information if you are considering a career with a Salesforce partner, as I guarantee that any project you work on will have some form of data migration, and it always takes longer than you expect!

  • Application Lifecycle Management
    Okay, so this is a rewrite rather than a new module. If you’ve taken this in the past you won’t be able to retake it, but if you held off waiting for some different words your masterful inactivity has paid dividends.

    and saving the best until last
     
  •  Build a Battle Station App
    A themed project to coincide with a film that you might have heard about. This kind of thing is what makes Trailhead fun and keeps it interesting. This is one of the few badges that I have remembered to add to my LinkedIn profile, which shows how valuable it is

So What’s Next?

I wish I knew. Or maybe I do and those pesky NDAs stop me from telling you. Unfortunately I don’t. But is that what the NDA forces me to say. Its all so uncertain.

One prediction I will make is that the number of badges will break 100 in 2016, and I’d expect this to happen around July/August time.

New Year, New You

As I mentioned above, there are now 70 badges available, so if you haven’t made a dent in them by the start of 2016 you’ll struggle to catch up and be forever chasing those last x badges.

Make a New Year’s resolution that will have real impact (on your career, your reputation, your battle station building capabilities) and resolve to earn more badges!

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3 comments:

  1. Hey Bob - i really loved the battle station app - excellently written. Yet it was so frustrating that my namespaced dev-org couldn't finish the challenge due to validation errors. :( I just dont fancy the idea to create a new dev org for each trailhead.

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