Lightning Now Tour for Developers with Greg Rewis

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Salesforce Developer Evangelist, Greg Rewis. Greg has been a developer for a long time, spending fifteen years with Adobe before joining the Salesforce developer team a year and a half ago.

Greg has been a great asset to the Lightning Now Tour by teaching developers how to make cool ideas come to life on top of the Salesforce platform. Join us as we discuss how Admins can work together with developers to build new and interesting Lightning components.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Greg Rewis.

Learn by doing.

Greg believes that if you’re not being challenged, you’re not really trying. As he explains, “I always go back to learning by doing,” He says that when you fall, you learn, and that developers should just take that leap.

“Next time you’ve got a task, you have to think about it as ‘there is no time like the present. Let’s just dive in and let’s try to do this.” He advises developers to turn on Lightning in a sandbox and to try and develop it that way. “Even if you’re not over on Lightning yet, maybe you’re able to struggle your way through and get something going. Don’t be scared. You’re in a sandbox so you can’t blow anything up.”

Take advantage of the Lightning Experience through the Lightning Now Tour.

As Greg explains, the Lightning Now Tour allows developers the opportunity to be exposed to the Admin experience of Lightning in order to make them more aware of what Admins actually do and vice versa. The tour teaches developers what it takes to build a Lightning component. The tour also encourages the transition from Classic to Lightning by teaching developers how to put Lightning components into Visual Force to display on Classic.

“You don’t have to dive into the deep end of Lightning component development,” says Greg. “You can keep using Visual Force to develop on Lightning. When you come to the workshop, you’ll learn how to make it look like Lightning so that it won’t look like the old Classic pages,” he says. Greg explains that the tour will show you how to take advantage of the whole Lightning experience.

Step out of your comfort zone.

When asked why developers need to attend the tour, Greg replies, “there are a lot of advantages to stepping out of your comfort zone, to walking away from the Visual Force playing field for a little while, and playing over in the Lightning component arena.”

“All new features are being done on Lightning, so you’re going to be able to leverage new features more easily when you’re doing ‘native Lightning component development,’” he says.

You, too, can be a developer.

Greg believes that there are a lot of Salesforce developers out there, but that there aren’t enough who are qualified to do Lightning development. “Everywhere we go people are showing up in every city that we go to, to learn how we’re doing this. This tells us that there is a demand.” Greg says that there are lots of opportunities if you are a really skilled developer. “You can be one of the few who is pushing the envelope and moving this forward in your own organization.”

Many Admins and business owners think that they don’t have any developers who are skilled in Lightning development. Greg says, “First of all, your developers can get up to speed, it’s not rocket science. Second of all, if you need it fast, you have a wide-open playing field of available talent, and they are called web developers. They already own the skills of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and all they need to learn is the server-side Apex aspect so they can pull the data out of Salesforce and put it back in.” Greg believes that the framework is there. If you have a web background and an affinity for learning, you can teach yourself how to be a Salesforce developer.

For more insights, make sure to follow Greg on Twitter (@garazi).

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