#SalesforcePrincess

Dreamforce is over…

The Dreamforce Hangover is the real deal. I’m slowly getting back to life and work a week after Dreamforce. It was so surreal to attend as an employee this year.

This was my 14th Dreamforce and 2nd time speaking. I presented my session Misty Jones and Jet Kasinger 4 times in the Trailhead theaters and a 1 time extended version on the Admin breakout track.

There were so many great stories of Trailblazers. I enjoyed sticker trading Trailmojis with my Ohana.

The best part of Dreamforce is that I get to spend time with my teammates. We all pretty much work remote across the county. Nothing is better than a hug from your teammate right before you go on stage to speak.

If you didn’t catch Certification Preparation: Where To Begin at Dreamforce, you can watch it here:

Certification Preparation: Where To Begin

Whether you’ve already begun your journey to become Salesforce certified or are unsure of where to even start your certification preparation, join us for a look at the tools and resources available to you and learn why certifications and hands-on skills are essential to your career path. This session has everything you need to take your certification preparation to the next level.

Sharing my story of certification

I shared something personal this year in my journey to becoming certified. I’m dyslexic. It doesn’t define me but it is a part of me. As a kid, I had no idea that I actually had a learning disability. I knew I wasn’t the fastest reader and work seemed to take me longer than others.  Mostly I found myself daydreaming instead of doing the work in front of me. I loved reading which is always interesting to me that I figure out coping mechanisms to keep doing what I loved. I would get in trouble at school all the time for “talking out loud”; which was my way of reading so I comprehended what was on the page. I also would stop when I found a word that didn’t make sense and look it up. Now I can just Google.

This learning disability also made it difficult to spell. I still have a great deal of shame admitting that I do not spell well and have a very hard time pronouncing words. I had a teacher tell me to sound it out over and over… I just looked at her and said my brain doesn’t work that way. I’m so grateful for technology in today’s world. I have so many accommodations and coping skills now that I use daily.

To this day it is very hard for me when someone points out my disability. I have to remember to take a breath. This person doesn’t always know that I have a learning disability. This causes me great stress to type in a live setting with others watching. For this reason, I have Chrome extensions for spelling and grammar.

I urge anyone that has a disability to swallow your pride and ask for help. There are many accommodations that can be provided. As I tell my son, asking for help is smart; not asking is suffering. To those of you who don’t have a disability; please take a min with those of us who do. Joking or teasing us about it makes it difficult to trust that you are a safe person to have in our circle. Everyone is different and we need to choose kindness.

If you have a disability and need help taking an exam please reach out to the team via the Special Accommodations for Certification Exams.

Tips that help me

• Schedule your exam at the very end of the day.
  • This gives me time to prepare myself to take the exam.
  • I zen the whole day before an exam.
  • Eat a good breakfast.
  • Workout
  • Do a short review of topics I have a hard time with.
• Go to a testing location near you.
  • Scout out your location.
  • Do they have a private room?
  • Earplugs are a must
• Asking for accommodations – Do a case with the Trailhead team
  • Do they have a private room to test?
  • Can I adjust the screen prior to starting?
  • Can I have more time?
  • Is there a person that can read the questions to me?
  • Can I use a screen reader to read the questions?
• Tips for testing
  • Use your paper to brain dump prior to clicking the start button
  • Number a paper from 1 – 60 to track your progress.
  • Take a min to breathe before you start.
  • Read out loud the questions and answers (Private room or whisper to yourself.)
  • Read the question, all the answers and read the question again.
  • If you don’t know within 30 secs, guess, mark for review and move on.
  • Celebrate! Pass or fail; celebrate that you did it. You tried and that is what counts.

May the Force be with you!

I feel like I’m a little Jean in a sticker store. There’s a new way to personalize your persona: Trailmoji!

Trailblazers all over the world started making their own Trailmojis.

Domenique Sillett (Mother of Astro) and Amanda Cheung (Creator of Mascots) turned it up at #DF18. They had stickers made of their Trailmoji personas. The masses when crazy for this one of a kind sticker!

Fast forward to TrailheaDX, there was a booth where Trailblazers could print out their very own beautiful creation.

Now get ready for the sticker swap at Dreamforce 2019! Trailmojis are popping up all over with Trailblazers personas in sticker form.

As always I’m IN! I’ve made myself a Trailmoji. If you would like one please come find me every afternoon in Moscone West at the Admin Certification booth. I’ll be there with my sparkle on.

Agenda Builder is LIVE for Dreamforce 2019!

Join these #BossLadies for a look at the tools and resources available to you. Learn why certifications and hands-on skills are essential to your career path. This session has everything you need to take your certification preparation to the next level.

Tues 8:50 AM – https://lnkd.in/gxRQfAy

Wed 9:30 AM – https://lnkd.in/gJ65R4w

Wed 12:30 PM – https://lnkd.in/gvvKTeR

Thurs 9:30 AM – https://lnkd.in/gpvb-ev

Thurs 12:10 PM – https://lnkd.in/gCneAgc

I finally completed all the requirements for graduation of my code bootcamp!

This bootcamp about broke my brain. It was a ginormous leap into the realm of coding. It was not for the faint of heart for sure. This course was to take a non-coder to a full-stack coder in 24 weeks. I laughed at myself for even thinking that would be my end result, but if you know me, I wasn’t going to let that scare me off.

The skills that I learned from this course were Rudy, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML, and CSS. I also got super comfortable with GIT, Visual Code Studio and Heroku.  Soft skills that I furthered where time management, life juggling, stress management, and geek speak.

The hardest part was the unknown and not knowing where to find help. In tech I realize that googling is part of the gig. I already had a great appreciation for Salesforce and how available information is. Even back in the old days before Trailhead (BT) there was Help & Training.  Coding is really about trial and error, which can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming.

I knew that I was an expert at “trying and failing” being a long-time Salesforce Admin. I don’t think that I really ever found a good place for code help. Most of the resources that I found didn’t make sense to me. I ended up using Slack and collaborating with others taking the course.

What I didn’t know is how much my dyslexia was going to derail me. I had to find creative ways to figure out what the issue was. I had to read code backward to find spelling errors and missing characters. VS Code really helped me once I took the time to get myself set up in the application. Another thing that helped me was drawing out what it was that I wanted to build and pseudocoding the heck out of a project.

I’m happy that I did the bootcamp but happier that I’m finished. Now to get back to Trailhead, studying for certifications and building epic content for Trailblazers to further their career journey.

I’ve completed 15 weeks of my Coding Bootcamp!

The course came out with this nifty graduation dashboard this week.

I super stoked to see how far I’ve come!

Now to bring all my skills together for my final project:

• Functional Ruby on Rails application
• Incorporates at least one external API
• Deployed to Heroku
• Is tested with RSpec

I’ve selected to use an Open Weather Map  API just to keep it simple. Wish me luck as I climb the mountain to slay this code.

Holy moly…. I have been away for year! I got myself so busy that I just didn’t make time for blogging. Like many things in the realm that get started and not finished, I seem to come back to them eventually.

What brought me back to my blog? Well I started a code bootcamp at University of Arizona. One of our assignments is to blog about our experience learning to code. So I’m back at it.

Starting out in the bootcamp so freaking scary….

I know I have a good support group and knowledge of the platform, plus passing the Salesforce Developer certification. That still doesn’t mean that this princess doesn’t doubt herself on a regular.

The first week was chaos. I was an emotional mess of doubt, fear and frustration. It started out ok with learning HTML. I built a page to house all my assignments. I was giddy to share it with my mentors. I moved on to learning some Ruby basics.

Then shit got real… I had my first road block on an assignment…. I started to freakout and almost called it quits. I googled my little baby developer heart out only to find examples of code that I couldn’t figure out how to use. I finally turned in the assignment and moved on to something else.

Trying to keep myself motivated to learn this code stuff at night and on the weekends while keeping up with all my parental duties, work, health/fitness and not go crazy. By the second week I was frazzled. I was feeling a fraud. I felt like I wasn’t keeping up with the lessons that I needed to get done each week.

I knew I needed to meet with my mentor. He asked me how I was doing. “Not good dude.” was all I could get out. In that hour he turned everything around for me. He gently reminded me of how far I’ve come in a week and a half. From never working with HTML or Ruby I’ve created a site from scratch.

We looked at the assignment that had me all in a twist. I just said “I have no idea what I’m doing here.” We went line by line troubleshooting and testing each line to have it put an output. My brain was burning. All the lightbulbs were flipping on room by room.

I just finished week two of my code bootcamp. You can follow along with me here as I fill in the assignments each week.

Salesforce Princess – Admineloper

Today has been filled with congratulations from all my fellow Salesforce #Ohana. I’m humbled and overwhelmed with the amount of support. I have mad respect for the Salesforce MVP program and have looked up to so many of them over the years. I thank all of them that have taken the time to mentor, teach and share their knowledge over the years.

Cheers and thank you for welcoming me into the fold!