Exploring Salesforce: More Than Just a CRM

If you’ve only heard of Salesforce as “that CRM thing sales teams use,” you’re missing out on the full picture. As I recently found out, Salesforce is way more than just a CRM—it’s practically an entire ecosystem for building enterprise-grade applications.

What is Salesforce?
At its core, Salesforce is a cloud-based platform for managing customer data. But beyond the CRM features, it provides a full-stack development environment through its Salesforce Platform.

Languages & Tools

Apex: Proprietary, Java-like language for server-side logic

Visualforce: Old-school templating for UI (mostly replaced now)

Lightning Web Components (LWC): Modern JavaScript framework—actually pretty slick

SOQL: Salesforce’s own query language for working with data

Customization
Salesforce lets you build custom apps, workflows, and automations without spinning up your own backend. Think of it like low-code meets full-code, with tight integration to built-in security, databases, and APIs.

Limits to Watch Out For

Governor limits: To protect shared resources, Salesforce enforces strict limits on how much CPU, DB queries, etc., you can use per transaction.

Deployment can be weird: Changes are deployed using metadata, and you’ll probably need a tool like SFDX or a CI/CD pipeline to stay sane.

Happy to chat with anyone else diving into the ecosystem—bonus points if you’ve got tips for dealing with sandbox madness or deployment XML nightmares.

#Salesforce #Apex #LWC #EnterpriseDev #DevRant #DeveloperLife