Chris McMahon's Blog

This is the story of a really great project I did while working for Salesforce.org. I have done a significant amount of remote pair programming over the last ten years, but this project was extraordinary in a number of ways. For one thing, it was a really complicated problem that demanded a technically advanced solution. For another thing, it took almost an entire year to finish-- one hour per week. The Problem I will try to give you the background in a way such that your eyes don't glaze over: in order to work with data in a Salesforce instance via the API, you address "Objects" and "Fields".  (These are actually tables in a database that may be addressed by a poor and crippled version of SQL.) For example, here is a description of the Account object whose first field is AccountNumber.   If you are a developer on the Salesforce platform, you can add your own Field to the Account object, but you have to append ' __c' to it, like " MyField__c ...

As of January 2018 I resigned my position as "Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Quality Assurance" at Salesforce.org . I have more than twenty years experience in testing user interfaces and APIs across a wide variety of platforms. If you would like to contact me, my DMs on Twitter are open or by email at christopher dot mcmahon at gmail. I do not use Facebook, LinkedIn, or Skype. I have been working remotely for more than ten years. I enjoy telecommuting, it suits me nicely. In the past decade I have lived all over the western United States, including some time in Hawaii. Here are some points from my career that help tell the story of how I came to be here today: In 1997 I started testing 911 telecom location services, life-critical software for police/fire/ambulance dispatching for most of the USA. I tested these systems through Y2K and beyond. We saved the world. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. In 2004 I was, as far as anyone knows, the first person ...