My way towards Salesforce

First of all, I would like to introduce myself. I am a Chinese,36 years old, and have lived in Japan for about 7+ years now. I am a salesforce enthusiast and when I cleared the right side of this pyramid(you can click it to see a clear image), I want to share some useful information(from my point of view) to help more trailblazers who are new to this ecosystem(or those on the #JourneytoCTA). This is my motivation for writing this blog.

Since salesforce is a highly evolving and fast-paced environment, we can learn the newest technology and techniques, this is the first and foremost reason why I keen for it. Besides,there are many more attractiveness why people love it, such as the company itself was noted for culture, social responsibility, market leadership, unique community, and emphasis on client success.(see the link below:)
dreamforce-top-10-reasons-why-people-love-salesforce-com-and-marc-benioff

I have been not so long in this area, nealy about 3 years salesforce experience. In these years, I experienced 2 sales cloud projects, one service cloud project, 2 financial projects based on the force.com platform, and one insurance project on the lighting environment. But sometime I would like to learn various aspects of its technique in order to get a closer look into the methodologies and ideas of salesforce. Below is the doc I wrote in the past(which is only a small investigation): 👉https://www.slideshare.net/Shenyifeng1/salesforce-and-ai-bigdata

My ex-experience has had helped me when learning this new platform. My first job was doing the signaling analysis based upon the gsm/gprs raw data, and also did the wcdma/umts protocol development using VC++(when the day was back to 2007). So learning apex for me is without much difficulty. (BTW, C is still my most familiar language, decoding the protocol looks like wireshark-packet-ipsec-tcp.c or wireshark-packet-ipsec.c, this open source tool evolved over the years......)
Compared to sfdc, I also find the strategies behind the scene are alike, take an example, the bukify concept. I remember that processing/decoding 2G signal raw data in short time was a very challenging task at that time, the solution was somehow similar as the BULK API. (Here is a detailed article about this API: salesforce-bulk-api-step-by-step)

Following are the contents of my general thoughts focused on three topics: apex, integration and identity. Most of them are tips and takeaways:

(1)Apex:

When I first touch this language, I mainly walked through Chris Barry's Dev 501 lessons which are all available on the youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx31uJy7fbw&list=PLRjvzNnyl4-JfOQCSj70honzSAcfWerQm
In addition. I bought this book: http://advancedapex.com/ , the 4th edition.
'Advanced Apex Programming is required reading for any self-respecting Salesforce developer!'-said by David Liu.(http://www.sfdc99.com/additional-resources/)

(2)Integration:

I also think the integration is the most interesting part in salesforce.
There are plenty of blogs written for this study guide:
https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2015/06/integrating-force-com.html
https://metillium.com/2018/05/integration-designer-study-guide/ 
https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2009/02/integrating-with-the-forcecom-platform.html
        BTW, in the 3rd link-'integrating-with-the-forcecom-platform', there was a link which says:'Okay, I’m excited to announce the Integrating with the Force.com Platform article', but the redirection is changed since 2019 Jan, last year this article would redirected to a page which gave a thorough introduction on the api and integration. it is deprecated and I couldn't find it again. I think the old article also contains some valuable knowledge, and recently is replaced by this:  
https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.integration_patterns_and_practices.meta/integration_patterns_and_practices/integ_pat_intro_overview.htm

Although I had experienced using web service, rest api, continuation class etc in real projects, I still prepared for this integration designer exam for about 160 hours mostly 2 months time frame.

The last but not the least, I want to share my on-hands experience evidence to everyone(Covered in the HandsOnActivities-IntegrationArchitecture on the trailhead):
👉 👉 https://www.slideshare.net/Shenyifeng1/integration-playground-20190211/

(3)Identity and assessment:

This is tough for me, because this one had least number of topics which I had real-time experience. Here are some helpful sites to share:

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=identity_provider_about.htm&type=0
https://www.oauth.com/oauth2-servers/access-tokens/
https://github.com/salesforceidentity (<- this is a great repository)
https://archladies.com/category/system-architect/identity-access-management
(the website archladies.com is an excellent place if you are on the way climbing the pyramid, big big thanks to Natalya Murphy and many others, for your materials about IAM which gave a great explanation of the basic and fundamental knowledge.)

I also recommend to practice this little program (using php to retrieve sfdc data, the picture is from my local run result)

As for the certification:
Some people think the more, the better('as certified as possible') eg,
'This however is one of the reasons I love certifications as it forces you to explore all areas of Salesforce. '- Ben McCarthy
I am the one who is alike, but someone don't, it depends on his/her time and thought.
One guy who is sitting behind me at my present project does have no certification of salesforce but is doing very well and has a decent understanding about the force.com platform and sales cloud, plus he is very good at communicating in Japanese(He is a Chinese).I think that's enough.


Heroes in my heart:
There are too many in salesforce community that I want to mention, but in short I want to mention these two who are I am very respected and admired:
1. Mohith Shrivastava (https://twitter.com/msrivastav13)
I also bought his books.(How much effort he has had put! I can not imagine....)
2. David K. Liu (https://twitter.com/dvdkliu)
Really really a inspiration man. I gained much energy and know-how from his site sfdc99.com.

Other's heroes:
http://melissavandyke.com/my-sfdc-heroes/

You can DM me if you have any question.(shen_alan@yahoo.com)