London’s Calling 2024 – A Vibrant and Engaging Salesforce Event

On a lovely sunny Thursday afternoon in July, myself and 10 colleagues embarked on trains heading to “Europe’s largest Community led event for Salesforce professionals” called London’s Calling (LC) for what had been dubbed the “Salesforce event to go to”; a fantastic event that combines engaging talks and a vibrant community atmosphere. As a first-timer, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and if the event truly lived up to the hype.

Angus & Claire from Desynit had been selected to give a talk on the Friday called ‘Making It Up As You Go Along in Flow’ (You will find a video of this talk added to this linked YouTube channel soon). So on the Thursday evening they went off to the Speakers dinner, re-joining the group post dinner to tell us of the wonderful food, people and experience they had – we were starting to get excited. 

At 8am sharp on Friday morning, we met at the hotel reception to take the short walk to the Brewery – what a fabulous quirky building! There, it was time to browse the great exhibits from vendors and partners and mingle with many different types of experts. This also gave us time to catch up with old colleagues and friends from the Salesforce Ohana – plus to make some new friends too! Excitement was in the air and there was a buzz around the place. After a few coffees and shots of green or orange goodness it was then time to all head up stairs; the show was about to begin. 

First up Welcome & Demo Jam. I didn’t know what to expect from a ‘Demo Jam’ . This was a highlight for me: 6 vendors had 3 minutes to demo their products in the most fun and engaging way possible. Chaotic, informative fun is the only way to describe it – a great way to start the day. 

With 11 members of the team in different positions we went to many varying talks covering all kinds of subjects from ‘We are all imposters’ with Tom Bassett through to Paul Battisson’s ‘Code Generation through AI – why it’s amazing and we need to be careful’. The range of talks on offer is what makes London’s Calling stand out from many of the other conferences. The Desynit team all agreed that the content of the talks is second to none and there are so many quality sessions to choose from. London’s Calling allows you to deep dive into areas of that you would like to learn more about and I came away buzzing. The enthusiasm of the Salesforce Community is electric and contagious. As one of the speakers I listened to said, “It’s better than Christmas” – well, maybe not quite as good, but close.

Some of the main takeaways from the talks and sessions attended is that AI is everywhere and we all need to hop on the AI train. Similarly, we need to think about what we build and how it is used. We often think as sustainability as ‘things’ but the effort, energy and electricity that goes into building object and technology should also be considered – worryingly one the stats picked up on was “50% of custom objects aren’t used and 40% of custom fields aren’t used”. If we combine this data with the question ‘But do we need to do it?’ – a great talk from Leanne Botwright, then we may well stop and think before agreeing to build these objects or fields and understand if there are alternative solutions that usually already exist.  

London’s Calling is for the people who actually use Salesforce; Users, Admins, Developers, Architects and Consultants. There are many conferences that are mostly full of people trying to sell you their products, but the majority of talks, conversations and interactions at LC are about real people discussing their stories using Salesforce – this makes a difference. Real people talking about real life problems that we all face everyday and how they overcame them. 

Across the team we went to over 30 different talks and have already started to share the knowledge that we have learnt, or exploring the little nuggets of information that are sending us down rabbit holes to uncover more information. As mentioned above, we had 2 members of the team doing a talk on the day – ‘Making it up as you go along in Flow’. This was a huge highlight for me, it was the one time of the day that we all got together to support our colleagues and they absolutely smashed it. Their talk was not only informative but they made it fun – certainly the only time of the day I had a plastic ball thrown at me! Truly inspiring and have thrown down the gauntlet for next year. 

To finish up the day we all headed back up to where we started for the closing remarks, prize giving and entertainment – the amazing magician Marc Spelmann who truly blew us away. 

Due to the chaos with the trains this is where my day came to an end, however my colleagues assure me that the band and afterparty were also excellent. 

The question is – Did it live up to the hype? It absolutely did, in fact it far exceeded the hype and I already can’t wait to go back next year. It has ignited a passion in a few of us who are already getting the creative juices flowing to think about what we can talk about next year – the final question is will we see you there?