Salesforce’s TrailblazerDX conference was a blast of energy! I enjoyed the much-needed social break after spending an unusually long time in disconnection due to the pandemic. This was my first in-person conference since the pandemic began. In this blog, I’ll recap some of my favorite community moments from TDX22 and share a few of the memories I made.
Kickoff
The event kicked off with a “Welcome Back, Devs!” party in Salesforce Tower on the 61st floor (the ‘Ohana Floor) in the evening. Unfortunately, I arrived much too late and missed the party. Some of my community friends were able to make it. I heard from them that the event was awesome.
Day 1
The first day was when the actual fun began for me! I had many reasons to attend TDX in person and hope to recap some of those below.
Being a MuleSoft Community Ambassador, I participate in many Mule Community events. I had some of the community activities planned for me. If you are following MuleSoft’s Instagram, there is a high chance that you saw me taking over that channel on Day 1. Thanks to Courtney Chia, AKA Coco, MuleSoft’s Social Media Operations Analyst, for this opportunity! Throughout the day, I broadcasted mini-videos to give a glimpse of what was happening at TDX22. It was a very fun activity and I enjoyed interacting with several of you over Instagram.
(Me exploring MuleSoft Mountain for the Instagram channel at TDX22)
The event officially started with a Salesforce keynote! One of the fun parts was the reserved, front row VIP seating for Mule Community leaders. My colleague Kevin King (MuleSoft Mentor) and I (MuleSoft Ambassador) got to sit extremely close to the stage. We sat right behind Bret Taylor (Co-CEO) and Sarah Franklin (President and CMO).
(Bret Taylor and Parker Harris during the main keynote)
The main keynote covered some amazing new features from Salesforce, MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack. Some of those features are that Composer now supports calling REST APIs which opens the door for more integrations with your MuleSoft APIs, updates to Trailhead for adding your MuleSoft certificates, a Double Ranger badge, and much more. One exciting thing that happened was that my friend and former colleague, Miguel Martinez, became the first Muley to receive a Salesforce golden hoodie! Congrats, my friend!
The main Salesforce keynote was then followed by a MuleSoft super session where some more exciting new features like Anypoint Code Builder, Anypoint Flex Gateway, Anypoint API Governance, Composer, and RPA were announced. For more details, feel free to read what my colleagues have blogged about those announcements at TrailblazerDX 2022: How it Went, Highlights, and More by Kevin and Announcement Highlights by Chakri.
(Shaun Clowes, CPO, MuleSoft @ Salesforce summarizing the new features timeline)
Later that day, I had the opportunity to talk to Shaun Clowes and David Wang, VP of Product Marketing and Developer Relations. I got to hear about some exciting changes coming to Cloudhub (please see MuleSoft’s safe harbor statement) for Cloudhub 2.0 experience. I am so looking forward to the upcoming Cloudhub 2.0.
(Me, Shaun Clowes, and David Wang)
The first day ended with an awesome VIP happy hour with the MuleSoft Community. It was such a great opportunity to meet many old friends and make some new ones. A lot of MuleSoft community leaders, MuleSoft Ambassadors, and MuleSoft Mentors were there.
(MuleSoft Community happy hour with Mariana Lemus, Jimil Patel, and me)
Day 2
The second day began with a visit to Salesforce tower and the Ohana floor. Listening to the history of Salesforce tower, touring the tower (thank you, Gordon, Abby, Steve, and Jeremy for helping to make it happen), and enjoying the views from the Ohana floor really kickstarted our day.
(Me, Chakri, and Kevin at Salesforce Tower)
Once we were back at the event venue, we quickly became occupied with a sequence of great events. Some of those sessions were by the MuleSoft community leaders. I was one of the fortunate ones to get an opportunity to present. In my presentation “Distributed Tracing with MuleSoft APIs,” I talked about how OpenTelemetry can be used to capture trace data from MuleSoft APIs. If you have missed the talk or are interested to learn more about it, you may visit the Mule OpenTelemetry Module to learn how to get started.
Tracing is an important part of Observability which is one of the crucial properties of any distributed system. The MuleSoft APIs are no exception to this. If you are looking for a complete Observability solution for your MuleSoft APIs, feel free to reach out to us.
(Me presenting at TDX22)
Throughout the day, the Mule community team ran LinkedIn discussions with some of the community leaders. I had an opportunity to talk with Patryk Bandursky, a MuleSoft Ambassador from Poland. We talked about our journeys to become MuleSoft Ambassadors and other community involvements. If you missed it, you can still catch up on the discussion at this LinkedIn post. Also, be sure to check out other leader discussions on the LinkedIn community page.
As I walk through the community memories of TDX22, I believe it won’t feel complete without mentioning the power that keeps the community running: Sabrina Hockett, Isabella Navarro, Sabrina Marechal, and Mariana Lemus.
(L to R: Sabrina Hockett, Isabella Navarro, Sabrina Marechal, and Mariana Lemus
Photo Courtesy – The community photos by Sabrina Hockett)
As always, the MuleSoft community is so vibrant and large that I always enjoy the in-person events. If you’d like to get more involved, feel free to tweet me at @ManikMagar or find me on LinkedIn. For more updates on the MuleSoft Community, be sure to follow MuleSoft Community on LinkedIn.
The TDX22 was definitely a blast! I am sure the TDX23 will be much bigger than this and I look forward to being there next year!