With a 19.8% CRM market share and 150,000+ active enterprise-grade users, the prominence of Salesforce’s solutions is irrefutable. 

In October 2021, International Data Corporation (IDC) named Salesforce the best CRM for the eighth year running. The CRM giant has truthfully catapulted into a league of its own, with the likes of Oracle, Microsoft, and Adobe consistently striving hard to catch up with its pace.

As a matter of course, Salesforce’s offerings are truly remarkable and serve a host of enterprise-grade use cases, meaning that Salesforce developers are obligated to make efficient and flawless use of it. 

And this is where the real challenge begins. 

The Salesforce ecosystem, unlike any other CRM in the world, is loaded with a vast pool of developers capable of delivering cutting-edge solutions that seamlessly integrate on top of Salesforce platforms. This means that the competition is fierce and getting more intense by the day. 

Artisan Hub, a progress tracking service, records (as of 2020) the growth of 76,800+ Salesforce Certified Developers residing in 112 countries. 

Certainly, as the Salesforce ecosystem becomes increasingly competitive, having the skills and knowledge to master its intricacies is even more crucial. This is where the road to becoming the best Salesforce developer in 2022 begins.

Do This to Be the Best Salesforce Developer in 2022

Be Knowledgeable About Salesforce Fundamentals

As clichéd as it might sound, mastering the basics is essential for anyone ambitious enough to be at the forefront of Salesforce development. Training oneself on the theoretical concepts of governor limits, sandbox org, data types, bucket fields, amongst others, is imperative alongside defining, using, implementing, testing, and auditing the use of standard and custom object fields, Apex triggers, workflow rules, formula fields, validation rules, and Visualforce pages.

The idea is to be excellent, if not expert, at leveraging all the features Salesforce has to offer — be it technologies that are brand new or ones in vogue or be it developing a fully-integrated and custom solution out of data modeling, management, reporting, and analytics features facilitated. That said, everything begins from:

• Acquiring a thorough understanding of the Salesforce environment’s various components, from Apex and Visualforce to triggers, channels, and flows. 
• Understanding how Salesforce apps are developed and deployed. 
• Learning about the various development tools that can be integrated into Salesforce in order to enhance its functionality and customize the experience for the users.

The key to all of this is knowledge and practice. 

Be Adept at Salesforce Apex

An OOP language that features “flow and [transactional] control” is the foremost go-to for developers. Apex is Salesforce’s proprietary OOP language that is best suited for technical finesse and user experience. The good thing is that the language is relatively user-friendly and can act as a basis for integrating version control, test automation, and other related tools to complement CRM’s capabilities while inclining towards a DevOps methodology. 

But the benefits don’t end here. Salesforce Apex:

• Follows Java-style formatting with loops, conditionals, and methods. This makes it easier to code, test, and debug Apex code, not forgetting the accompanying ease of learning.
• Runs in a Salesforce-managed environment, meaning there’s no additional setup for hosting or security issues. In fact, Salesforce ensures that the metadata for Apex code is protected to prevent any unauthorized access.
• Supports database interaction, allowing Apex code to access and modify multiple records. This is especially helpful for reporting and data analytics.
• Supports multitenancy, giving developers the freedom to work on a single code base and automatically deploy their changes to multiple tenants.
• All these benefits complement the modern-day scalability, integration, speed of response, time to market, and security facets that organizations need to succeed in 2022 and beyond. 

Be Acquainted with Frameworks

Salesforce’s idiosyncratic application architecture is unlike any other in the world. Business logic, user interface controls, and intelligent apps are all coalesced into a single platform. Although several components contribute to its layered architecture, the heart and soul of it all are frameworks like the Visualforce and Lightning.

As a developer, being familiar with these frameworks will require the best of your abilities, which includes:

• Learning the intricacies of Visualforce and how it is compiled. 
• Understanding how Lightning stacks up and how it facilitates dynamic web/mobile app development
• Understanding the benefits of using Salesforce frameworks for data management, data modeling, and custom application development.

Be in the Know About All Things Cloud-Related

Salesforce’s cloud model is the most widely adopted in the industry, and an investment in the cloud is an investment in the future. With the proliferation of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, given the cloud’s growing popularity, the number of developers adapting to heterogeneous environments will be on the rise.

Consequently, it is paramount to be well-versed in using and integrating Salesforce features with third-party applications, data sources, and technologies like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and others. 

At the same time, it’s noteworthy that knowing how to integrate Salesforce with clouds and databases wouldn’t solely suffice since plans of managing deployments in multi-cloud environments, ensuring the consistency of data, and securing each tenant’s data will entail having an in-depth knowledge of the how and why of Salesforce’s cloud, customizations, and deployment features. 

In a Nutshell

The good news is that apathy in all this is not an option. Salesforce has always been at the forefront of innovation, and even higher are its levels of credibility for its solutions and transparency for their usage. With Salesforce’s definite adoption and relatively superior functionality, the only way to accomplish heights is to dive in and stay there — making your knowledge superior, skills flawless, and impact immense.

The best news is that it’s never too late to start.