The Trail Maker

The Trail Maker Salesforce Evangelist and Trainer

09/08/2026

Stop polling Salesforce. This is what real-time actually looks like.
One publish, instant subscribe — no cron job, no lag, no “check every 5 minutes” hack. 10 seconds, no fluff.

06/06/2026

The 30s identity shift nobody prepares you for.

You did everything right. Built the career, the life, the identity. Then somewhere in your early 30s it starts to feel like a costume — functional, but slightly wrong.

That's not a malfunction. That's the gap between the self you constructed for other people's expectations and the self you actually are.

The worst response: chase more achievement to outrun the feeling. It doesn't work. The gap isn't caused by insufficient output.

The useful response: slow down long enough to hear what's actually true for you — separate from what's supposed to be true.

Full breakdown at Real Syllabus. Link in bio.

06/06/2026

Custom Settings in Salesforce — the zero-SOQL config layer most developers underuse.

Reading config data inside a trigger without burning SOQL queries is possible because Custom Settings are cached at the application level. Hierarchy type gives you per-user and per-profile overrides. List type gives you a named lookup table. Both have zero query cost on read.

The most important rule: always null-check the return value. And if your config needs to survive sandbox refreshes or travel with deployments — that's Custom Metadata's job, not Custom Settings.

Save this if you're building config-driven Apex. Link in bio for the full code walkthrough.

05/06/2026

Custom Labels are the boundary between code and configuration. One of the most underused tools in Salesforce — admins can update text instantly without touching a deployment. This covers the full pattern: Apex syntax, LWC static imports, Flow merge fields, translation setup, and a naming convention that holds up at scale. Save this if you're building anything with user-facing strings.

05/06/2026

Motivation isn't a character trait — it's a starting mechanism. The people who make lasting progress aren't more motivated. They built systems that don't require them to be. This reel breaks down the exact mechanics: habit anchoring, friction elimination, the two-day rule, and why identity-based habits outlast goal-based ones every time. Save this for the next time you feel like you're "just not motivated enough."

04/06/2026

Your salary tells you what arrived. Your net worth tells you what stayed.

Most professionals in their 30s are optimising for income — promotions, raises, the number on the offer letter. But income and wealth are not the same thing, and the gap between them widens every time lifestyle inflates to match a new salary level.

The one number that actually tells you whether you're building wealth is your net worth, and more specifically, its growth rate. A £60k net worth growing at 18% annually is a stronger financial position than £150k growing at 3%.

Calculate yours today. Assets minus liabilities. Write it down. Track it quarterly. That's the whole system.

Save this and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Full breakdown at link in bio.

04/06/2026

Salesforce order of ex*****on — why your trigger logic breaks even when the code is correct.

Most developers know *what* their trigger does. Fewer know *when* it runs — and that gap causes every mysterious double-ex*****on bug, every stale rollup read, every recursive loop that hits governor limits at 3am.

The 19-step sequence isn't trivia. It's the foundation of reliable Apex. Know where rollups recalculate. Know when triggers re-fire. Know why static variables are transaction-scoped.

Full breakdown with code patterns and a one-page reference table at Real Syllabus. Save this for the next time a trigger behaves in a way you didn't expect.

*****on

03/06/2026

Apex security isn't one switch — it's three layers. Most Salesforce devs enforce one and miss the other two, leaving real data exposure gaps in production code. This reel breaks down `with sharing`, `WITH USER_MODE`, and `Security.stripInaccessible()` — what each one actually does, what it doesn't cover, and how to combine them in every user-facing class. Save this before your next Apex review.

03/06/2026

SOPs are dead for a growing class of business tasks — here's what replaces them.

AI agents don't follow checklists. They're handed a goal and reason their way through it. The lead your team spends 20 minutes qualifying manually? An agent does it while you're still in your first meeting.

The structural shift is bigger than speed. The unit of automation moved from steps to outcomes. And if you're designing these processes, your job is now writing agent briefs — not SOPs. What's the goal? What tools does the agent have? Where should it stop and ask a human?

That clarity is the actual skill gap right now. Save this if you're thinking about where agents fit in your workflow. Full article: link in bio.

02/06/2026

Dynamic SOQL injection is a real attack vector — here's the safe pattern every Apex dev needs. Most tutorials show you how to build the query. This one shows you where it breaks and why Database.queryWithBinds() with bind maps is the only pattern that's structurally safe. Covers the vulnerable pattern, the escape approach (and its limits), bind variables, dynamic field lists via describe, and allowlist-guarded sorting. Save this before you ship your next dynamic query.

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