Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've been saying it to anyone who cares to listen: Salesforce is basically the biggest "Smalltalk" deployment out there. Super malleable, has a lot of ... decent rules for how to get software out into the world, every environment is basically its own universe at one point.

Someone should really attack SFDC from the "malleable Business OS" side of things. Unfrotunately everyone seems to attack it from the CRM side of things and lose the plot a bit.

Def agree that "have the thing I just came up with running in some environment that is sharable" is still a pretty gnarly problem, and LLM stuff doesn't... I don't think they've really made much progress on it.

At one point someone really needs to make an easy to manage box metaphor for all the stuff. It's not Docker. Google scripts is almost there but you really want to have the database be a thing you can drag and drop as well (SQLite people: get excited!)

Dropbox for business apps. If anyone runs with this at least send me an email thanking you for the metaphor.

Having worked with Salesforce deployments over the last two years. I'd only call it malleable as long as you fit in its definition of what's malleable. I'm half-expecting it to have its own definition of a wheel at this point.

Don't you feel like it's still fairly far ahead of other systems, if you buy into the model?

I think there are other systems that kinda get there but SFDC is the only one of these kinds of systems that give you a lot of options on the backend and frontend side of things to just ship your own things and have them be integrated.

Maybe. Honestly, it's just been the number one source of deployment issues in our stack, by a large margin, so that may be the frustration talking. It basically requires us to treat our Salesforce environments very differently from the rest of our technological stack in ways that can be pretty alien to what's pretty standard development best practices in the rest of the industry. To give one specific example, the way some things cannot be expressed through metadata or updated through API makes it very hard to have any kind of repeatability between environments, making things like e2e testing and CD a lot trickier to deal with.

As for your specific question, I'll be honest, I'm not familiar enough with what the competition has to offer, because I tend to avoid these behemoth monolithic locked-in platforms like the plague if I can help it, and my experience with Salesforce so far isn't really making it easy for me to change my mind on the subject.

That's fair, at a previous place I worked at we had SFDC integration and there was definitely a lot of restrictions and pain points there. Especially if you're integrating, it's an uphill battle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com