Salesforce.com’s 11th annual Dreamforce user conference is in full swing this week. It’s just one way the company supports developers throughout the year. Here, Reid Carlberg, Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com, shares more about what attendees can expect at Dreamforce, as well as the other ways the company reaches out to their developer community. Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management platform and cloud computing provider, knows that developers have a lot of options when it comes to CRM tools and platforms. So, throughout the year, the company supports their developer community by offering user conferences, hackathons, educational workshops, an SDK, a developer blog and workbooks—all designed to help developers learn about and leverage their CRM platform.

One of the ways in which Salesforce.com reaches out to developers is through Dreamforce, their annual user conference. This week the company is putting on Dreamforce 2013 from November 18-21 in San Francisco. Now in its 11^th year, the company says it will be their biggest user conference to date. “We’re expecting 120,000 people to register for it,” said Ashish Patel, senior PR manager at Salesforce.com, in an interview with siliconANGLE.com.

The Dreamforce DevZone

Dreamforce 2013 is going to be something “truly unique”, according to Reid Carlberg, Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com. Carlberg said that the conference will showcase a couple of different sessions which are designed to target particular audiences. The portion of the show that Carlberg will work in will be the Developer Zone—or the DevZone as he calls it. Carlberg describes the DevZone as a “one-stop shop for developers” interested in learning about the technical aspects of what the Salesforce.com platform can do. 

In the DevZone, they will talk to developers of all stripes about technology in general and the Salesforce.com platform in particular, including how to build mobile and cloud enterprise apps using the Salesforce.com platform. Carlberg said the platform consists, in part, of the Force.com, Heroku, and ExactTarget products. “Those aren’t the only three,” he explained, “but those are the three big ones. ExactTarget, the marketing company that we acquired earlier this year, has a fantastic [cross-channel marketing automation] platform called Fuel; they’re going to be a big part of the DevZone this year.”

New to Dreamforce: The Connected Device Lab

Brand new in this year’s DevZone is what Carlberg describes simply as “the Lab”, a connected device lab where attendees can meet the companies and experience the technologies which are driving the Internet of Things. Some companies that are participating in the Lab include ARM, Etherios and Xively. “We actually have 15 partners who are running hands-on workshops with great technology which is enabling you to connect devices with the Salesforce platform,” Carlberg said. “It’s all part of our vision of understanding what customers are doing with our product.”

In an October 21, 2013 blog entitled, Every Internet of Things Thing at Dreamforce 2013, Carlberg details what the companies will be doing in the Lab. A couple of examples he cites are how ARM will be showing off some creative uses of their mbed development platform and how Etherios will showcase their Social Machine and discuss how they will be doing real-time shuttle tracking during the conference.

The $1 Million Hackathon

Another exciting thing Salesforce.com is offering developers at Dreamforce is the ability to participate in a hackathon whose prize is set at a million dollars—the largest single hackathon prize ever, according to the company. “People from around the world are doing some really interesting things,” Carlberg said, “and they are sometimes doing it as individual coders and sometimes they’re forming teams with coders and designers. I’m really looking forward to seeing the apps that people build; it’s going to be a pretty exciting event.”

Developers interested in participating in the hackathon did not have to wait until they were at the Dreamforce conference to begin coding their app. “We allowed people to start as soon as we made the announcement a few weeks ago,” Carlberg said. “But at Dreamforce, your whole team does have to check in and you do have to be present in order to claim your prize.” Carlberg said that developers who are participating in the hackathon are actually going to be allowed in the DevZone 24/7 on Monday and Tuesday of the conference. More information on the hackathon’s rules can be found here.

ELEVATE Developer Workshops

According to Carlberg, Dreamforce is really the culmination of a lot of effort that Salesforce.com does all year to reach developers, to engage with them, and to get them up and running on the Salesforce.com platform. He said one of the key components of that year-long effort is education. “As a technology and platform company, we work with developers by educating them,” Carlberg said. “We believe that education is the best way to help people understand the value of our platform. If we can help them be better developers, they’re pretty much naturally going to come over to our system.”

One of the ways in which they educate developers is through their ELEVATE Program, their year-round educational series of developer workshops held around the world. These workshops are publically available and they are announced on the company’s Developerforce website, according to Carlberg. “People can sign up [for these workshops] and we actually train them on things around the Salesforce platform, getting up and running in code, and creating mobile apps,” he explained.

For example, on November 6, 2013 the company held one of their ELEVATE workshops in the United Kingdom for the first time. According to the company’s developer blog, this particular workshop’s Beginner track had developers not yet familiar with the Salesforce platform building cloud apps quickly by teaching them the basics of the Salesforce platform with step-by-step, hands-on tutorials. Developers already experienced in the Salesforce platform joined the Mobile track where they learned how to use the Salesforce Mobile SDK to develop and test a hybrid mobile app. The entire series of ELEVATE workshops have “turned out to be a great series of events,” Carlberg said, “and our developers just love it.”

Developerforce

Another way in which Salesforce.com educates developers is through all of the learning materials they provide on their Developerforce website. Developers can check out articles, cheat sheets, cookbooks, documentation, newsletters, technical libraries, Webinars and workbook tutorials, as well as browse message boards on various topics. “Everything we do in there is useful depending on where the developer is in their learning curve,” Carlberg explained. “Developers always have to learn new technology, they have to learn new things, that’s just the way it goes. Some pieces of information are really well-suited to people who are advanced users, intermediate users or beginner users.”

Force.com Workbooks

For beginner users, Carlberg said they have put something on the Developerforce website called The Force.com Workbook. He said developers who are brand new to Salesforce can go through it to learn how to use the platform. “We want people to be able to sit down and, in a series of short lessons, get to a level of comfort with what the platform does and how they can be productive on it,” he explained. Salesforce.com also provide workbooks that focus on very particular aspects of their technology. For example, they have a security-focused workbook as well as a design and user interface-focused workbook. “And if you’re somebody who wants to publish apps on [our] AppExchange,” Carlberg said, “we actually have a whole workbook that talks about how to do that, too.”