Tools, tools, tools, and a big Salesforce background update

Happy Friday, and welcome to this week's edition of CloudBites Weekly. This week, we have a few exciting new tools to share and some interesting behind-the-curtain updates from the Salesforce engineering team. Let's have a look!

Apex Scheduling Tool

Scheduling an Apex class to run is always slightly painful, and, completely honestly, it is one of those jobs that always has me looking up the correct CRON string. Justin Wills has come to the rescue for developers, admins, and consultants everywhere by building a small tool to help generate the CRON string and the scheduling command.

Thank you, Justin, for the great little tool that I know will save many people a bunch of time. You can see Justin's announcement post, along with links to the tool, here.

Quick Links for Salesforce

Strangely, a week or so ago I was on the phone with a friend who said she would love to be able to bookmark specific setup pages in certain orgs that she frequently visits. For example, in one org most of the logic and automation is around the Opportunity so she finds herself on the Opportunity page in Object Manager a lot, but it can be a pain to navigate to sometimes if she is in another part of the system.

Nikhil Karkra may have solved all my friend's woes with his new tool SF Quick Links, a Chrome extension that allows you to have quick links from the right-click menu to navigate around quickly.

There is also a helpful "Empty Cache and Hard Reload" feature that does exactly what it says, making testing of UI changes much smoother. You can read Nikhil's announcement post and download the tool here.

ForceQL - Salesforce GraphQL Tool

GraphQL allows developers to get data from multiple resources in a query for use in your app in a well-structured graph format. When starting with GraphQL, it can be a bit of a leap in going from traditional REST requests and SOQL to the GraphQL setup. Dheeraj Varyani has released ForceQL as a nice Chrome plugin to help you build GraphQL queries and see the outputs.

This is another handy little tool for Salesforce developers who are looking to investigate using GraphQL and want to build and test their queries. You can read Dheeraj's post with some details and a link to the utility here.

Behind the Scenes of Salesforce's JDK Migration

I recently spoke to Henry Martin from Salesforce Ben about why Salesforce's Hyperforce migration was such a big deal and what exciting changes it could lead to in 2025. One thing I think that Salesforce has been doing particularly well for the past few years, and truthfully doesn't get enough credit for, is large-scale infrastructure and underlying systems updates that occur without most customers experiencing a single issue. Many of us will have undertaken large migration projects and seen the impact and challenges that are faced. Salesforce is working with a codebase that was originally developed over 25 years ago, so doing these updates is no small job.

Salesforce's Engineering team recently released a blog post, which you can read here, on the migration from JDK 11 to JDK 17. It's a great read about managing such complex projects and the steps the team took, which I would recommend reading. And a huge congratulations to sankara rao Bhogi and the Salesforce engineering team on this amazing piece of work. I'm excited to see what the Salesforce development team can add in to the product with the extra features and scale from this upgrade.

Happy Friday!

Thank you for reading this week's edition, and I hope you have a great weekend. My tip for this week is to go and ask your users what information they would like to see more clearly on their screens. Do they need a count of open cases on the account? The number of days since the last email was sent? Or a report of their outstanding opportunities? I've often found asking this question every few months can unlock some great quick wins that make navigation much easier and help improve user adoption and satisfaction.

Thank you again for reading, please remember to subscribe and share with a friend. If you have tried any of the tools in this edition I would love to hear in the comments what you thought of them!