DreamOlé this year was my first international Salesforce Community Conference in Zaragoza, Spain. The event bills itself as a transformative experience, where you can delve into the heart of Salesforce and gather with experts, industry leaders, and fellow technology enthusiasts.
I attended as part of a small delegation with my Desynit colleagues, making a 1,000-mile journey from Bristol to northeastern Spain.
The weather was pleasantly mild for my very British tastes. The conference also offered a great selection of nibbles served for lunch and the after-party, and who doesn’t love nibbles?
But let’s get to the important bit – the industry talks and Salesforce insights. Here are my handpicked highlights of dreamOlé 2025.
AI is definitely the hot topic in tech, and, well, everywhere else – so it was no surprise that AI was the subject of the dreamOlé keynote session.
This 40-minute session covered AI in processes and practices, as well as Salesforce tools that are utilising and integrating AI in their products – it’s not limited to their hero AI product, Agentforce.
I think it will be interesting to see how well different AI tools, such as Code Analyzer and Scale Center, will run in an independent Salesforce consultancy like Desynit (depending on how available to us it will be).
What I will be looking for in these tools is how much of a reduction in development time they will save us, by using Agentforce to provide analysis (or at least assist in providing it) sufficiently for building solutions, using in-line and autofill to take up the repetitive tasks to free us up for more involved problem-solving, and how much Code Analyzer will take over peer-reviewing code. With the talk being lighter on the details side, we’ll have to wait and see if this will bring on a new age of Salesforce Development with AI.
The first of the day’s talks was given by Desynit’s very own Angus Brown. The name of the talk was certainly a head-turner, not many are titled something bad about Salesforce. That said, this talk was probably the fullest room of the day that I saw.
What I took away from this is that bad experiences come in multiple grades of bad, from slow and inconvenient to plain terrible. Equally, solutions range from easy fixes to impossible. We can help speed up filling out a new record form by way of moving required fields near the top or using Dynamic Forms, but there’s not much to be done about slow browser speeds.
I figured this would be a helpful talk to attend, as even subject matter experts need to remind themselves of the fundamentals from time to time.
The talk was quite accessible for all skill levels. It started with the more common mistakes, such as queries or DML inside logic loops, not making a handler class for triggers, etc. It even covered a few things that I tend to overlook, such as the importance of using variables over hard-coded values for the sake of maintainability (in tests, especially).
This one piqued my interest in being able to apply filters and relationships without the use of any Apex (and, as a result, no test coverage needed). From what Fabian talked about, along with what little research I’ve done on GraphQL, I would say it is a flexible alternative to Apex for dealing with related data from, say, multiple sources/objects, all in a single request. Though more complex, bulky requests might need Apex to handle more gracefully.
Plus, as with any new(ish) tool, a bit of time needs to be dedicated to onboarding oneself, much like what we Devs have been doing with Agentforce for the last few quarters. Whether that’s time that I have to spare to learn to use GraphQL is…debatable.
All in all, it was a tremendous experience for my first international event. Between the spacious venue, communal spaces for catching up with old faces, and meeting new ones, all surrounded by a wide variety of delicious food and drink. A very Spanish experience indeed. It had good vibes all round, an event I’d encourage anyone to visit next year. Who knows, maybe you’ll spot me there.
Our independent tech team has been servicing enterprise clients for over 15 years from our HQ in Bristol, UK. Let’s see how we can work together and get the most out of your Salesforce implementation.
