My name is Boyd Petrie, a software developer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. My start into technology began at a young age. In between Boy Scouts, gymnastics and orchestra, I started to delve into the world of home computers.
My introduction was when my dad brought home a TRS-80 and then a Tandy 1000. Starting with old school Basic, I started learning how to write code. Before the days of the internet, a lot of my time was spent at public libraries trying to find books and whatever information I could get my hands on.
After learning how to use a modem that my dad had brought home, I was quick to log on to various BBS’s around, then learning how to launch an internet browser (RIP Netscape), and discovering the World Wide Web.
I started writing HTML from scratch in Homepage, and created my first website of movie reviews: Respect’s Movie Reviews. Built almost entirely from scratch, and without understanding what a domain was (let alone what web hosting was), I started from the bottom and taught myself along the way.
After starting my working life as an employee, I discovered SQL. After some instruction from internet forums, I quickly learned how to query and manipulate data. The relational database systems made things easier to understand, so I was able to utilize those skills to move up in my career, learning ASP.Net, SQL Server, etc.
Salesforce
Learning Salesforce has been a challenging and bewildering experience. At times one of the most solid applications around while also one of the most frustrating, Salesforce has given me plenty of opportunities. Working to admin and manage 300+ client orgs can be a difficult task. Service Cloud helped, and I learned how to use various tools such as VS Code and Data Loader to manipulate and maintain these orgs.
Coming from a SQL background certainly helped, although Salesforce’s internal version — SOQL — is a fairly limited language compare to SQL. Understanding an RDBMS helped me support customers and get their data properly formatted to their specifications.
