Posted by I can’t believe it has been 3 years since the start of this blog. Back in 2019, my passion for technology, learning and teaching was starting to take a significant shape in my career and life. I wanted a way to hold myself accountable to learn new technologies and push the limits of my technical skillset, continuously share what I was learning and hopefully be able to help others along the way. I have had the privilege of working with technologists from all over the world and discuss algorithmic or architectural approaches to problems and explore better ways of working. In March of this year, I received a message on LinkedIn that reaffirmed all of this:
“Hi Taylor! I do a codewars challenge every day before work, sometimes it takes a couple days. I got a consecutive num in array one most of the way there, couldn’t figure out the non-num part. Read lots of code, found your blog, yours worked, your comments are excellent for learning. Thank you!”
I was ecstatic that my content could be a small nugget in someone’s journey to become better and grow as an engineer/technologist.
Typically, it all starts with a random idea. The greatest part about what I choose to build is that it doesn’t actually have to serve something/someone greater, be life changing or adhere to an annoying deadline. Heck, it doesn’t even have to work! It is normally me, a very hazy idea of a data model and architectural design in my head, a coffee shop at 6am and a computer. I just want to explore and capture what I am exploring so that others can learn from it or offer feedback for me to be better in my own journey.
With that said, here are some of the greatest hits the last few years.
The Difference between Lightning Web Components and Lightning Components Blog Series
A series of blogs that explores the difference between Lightning Web Components and Lightning Components in Salesforce that digs into Markup and CSS, JavaScript and Modules and the @wire decorator
Black Lab Roastery
A woman who just purchased Salesforce and needs help setting up her instance to support her growing business at Black Lab Roastery. In this post, we explored unlocked packaging, the app builder and custom components to support search and maps for her various locations around Denver.
Fully immersive JavaScript and Python course
When I started getting heavy into Lightning Web Components years ago, I started getting really into JavaScript. I took a 28 hour course that enabled me to learn the core fundamentals of the language and increase my effectiveness at client sites when designing applications. Because of this course, I was able to build out the Quote Calculator JS Plugin with Steelbrick CPQ at a cyber security client in Denver and even present on it at the Salesforce Denver Developers group.
When COVID came, everything was unknown and I experienced some bench time in consulting while I was waiting on another project to start. During that time, I was just wrapping up a Computer Engineering course with MIT that used Python as its core language. Once I completed that course, I was able to use Python + SFDX to create scalable CI/CD pipelines in Bitbucket and Gitlab for various clients around Denver to improve their go to market lead times for deploying software.
Salesforce Platform Developer 2 Exam
I passed the Salesforce Platform Developer 2 Exam and had a ton of fun studying and creating flashcards for it.
Salesforce Projects
- Building a weather app in Salesforce using Lightning Web Components and integrating out to a public weather API
- Building an app that allows Sales reps to track their goals with only 10 lines of Apex
- Give Nonprofits the ability to dynamically search for/create donors and manage the amount that is being dedicated to the organization from each donor
- Clone full campaign records and hierarchies using recursion
Weekly Coding Challenge Series
I wanted to make sure that I was keeping my algorithmic problem solving super sharp so I started a weekly coding challenge series that focused on problem sets from codewars or leetcode
SMS Service with Twilio and Salesforce for my wedding
My wife and I got married in the middle of COVID and we wanted to avoid people congregating as much as possible so I loaded our entire guest list in Salesforce and sent out texts to them with an Apex integration into Twilio that sent various messages to them throughout the weekend including table assignments.
Budgie IOS
My wife and I are expecting our first baby in August and I really wanted to get a good insight into our budget, our spending and make sure that we are ready to take on this little bundle of joy financially. I built a native IOS app that integrates into Salesforce and allows us to regularly submit and track expenses so that we can have greater visibility into how each month is going and how we are trending.
What is coming in 2022?
- Budgie IOS is not going away and in fact I now have an entire JIRA board dedicated to the project where I am constantly adding stories to the backlog for me to eventually get to.
- Salesforce Functions – I have been wanting to get into this for a while
- AWS – Study for my AWS Architecture certification and start building a few services on AWS
Stay tuned and happy coding! Thanks so much for all of your support over the last few years and I am looking forward to continuing to learn with you.
Another Coding Blog 