A Platform Developer’s Retrospective of TrailblazerDX ’23
TrailblazerDX ’23 was a blast — full of innovation and content for developers. A month after the show, there’s still plenty that you can learn from this major event. In this blog post, I’ll share a Salesforce Platform developer’s hot takes and a list of resources to help you navigate the different product and feature announcements.
Main keynote announcements
As you would expect of a technology conference, the most anticipated part of the show was the main keynote. We made a number of key announcements showcasing new Salesforce innovations. I’ve selected the three most important developer topics that were covered during the main show keynote. Read on!
Announcing Einstein GPT
The highlight of TrailblazerDX ’23 was the announcement of Einstein GPT, Salesforce’s investment in generative AI across our product portfolio. We shared a number of demos of how it works with different products (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Slack, and Tableau, just to name a few), but what stands out the most for developers is the potential productivity boost brought by the ability to leverage GPT technology for code generation.
In particular, we got a glimpse of how Einstein GPT could help us generate Apex code based on a prompt in VS Code: Einstein GPT generated a method and the related test code. How cool is that?
This is just the start of a whole new developer experience, however, don’t get me wrong: AI will not replace developers. Einstein GPT helps developers be more productive by suggesting code fragments, but the responsibility of developers is to use the generated code as a starting point, then refine it and maintain it to meet business needs.
Data Cloud
The second important announcement from the keynote was a showcase of Data Cloud (formerly known as Genie). We saw how Data Cloud can ingest data from multiple sources, harmonize and transform the data, then trigger actions in near real time. This last part is the most interesting for developers: Data Cloud can generate platform events and trigger flows based on custom rules. With these capabilities, developers can easily implement custom business logic that is triggered when Customer 360 data gets updated.
Automation
Automation is a key part of our Platform strategy. We announced a number of features that will simplify and expand the way Trailblazers can automate with or without code, thanks to Flow, Flow Orchestrations, MuleSoft, and Slack. Here are my top highlights for Platform developers:
Care to go deeper into the TrailblazerDX keynote content, or product demos on things like Flow Orchestration, DevOps Center, Apex, and more? Read the full blog to check out all of the goodness from TDX, complete with links to recorded sessions from the event and Trailhead modules to learn even more. Get ready for even more developer updates as we work toward the Summer ’23 release in the next couple of months.