Brain Fear: Okay, fine.
I guess I can show myself.
I had a reason before, but I don't really now.
And so it was probably about 2014 before anybody outside of my close friends knew that I was
that guy.
Joshua Birk: That is Brian Fear, A Salesforce developer
at Camping World.
And that guy he is talking about is SFDC Fox, an alias he created years ago to be able to
help developers on the internet.
Now, several hundred, thousand Kira points later on Salesforce stack exchange, we sat
down and talk about his origin story.
I'm Joshua Birk, a developer evangelist at Salesforce, and here on the Salesforce developer
podcast, you'll hear stories and insights from developers for developers.
Now Brian's always been a bit of a geek and it sounds like maybe in his early years, he
might've had a little bit of an issue with authority.
This is him talking about his school years.
Brain Fear: I've done a lot of stuff with [inaudible 00:00:58].
I had a class, I was completely bored in and I wrote a basic program to emulate the sound
of a ringing phone from the nineties to confuse my teacher.
That was fun.
Joshua Birk: Now, if you ask Brian why he spent so much
time helping people, he will tell you, it's just one of the things that he loves.
It's the thing that he's always been doing.
His first real job after McDonald's was in customer service.
And that job led to a job in Salesforce and Brian and I share a few things, and one of
them is that when I started working with Salesforce, I didn't know what CRM stood for either.
Brain Fear: So I got a job at a call center and I was
activating satellite radios for SiriusXM.
And after a few months there, Salesforce had just started a new support contract with this
call center.
We were going to have 13 agents and one of the agents, our TB agents dropped out at the
last minute.
And so my managers recommended me because they saw I was good with computers.
That was pretty much it, I'd never heard of Salesforce, I didn't know what a CRM was,
I had dabbled in databases, but apparently that was enough to get started.
Joshua Birk: So Brian gets this job with Salesforce.
He's working in premiere support, but the role of support and what he really wants to
be able to do as a developer, they're really in conflict.
Support is putting restrictions on what he can do.
He's not supporting the API.
He can't share code snippets.
He can't work with other developers like a developer only as a support person, and so
he comes up with a really creative solution.
Brain Fear: So in 2007, I discovered the Developer Force
Forums.
And so I created my moniker back then and I was concerned about possible termination
if they found out I was supporting outside the box.
So I had this anonymous moniker and it was the Salesforce Fox and customers would call
in and I'd say, "Yeah, I'll create your case for you.
But in the meantime, you can go to devoteforforce.com and ask your question there, and someone will
help you out."
And you can almost hear the air quotes around someone even back then.
[inaudible 00:03:07] And so I did, I'd go on my break, I'd go on lunch, after work,
answer their questions.
And people were grateful for it.
Joshua Birk: They're grateful for it.
Brian's grateful to be able to have this level of access to the developers, to interact with
them as a developer and well, this person that nobody knows the identity of, they're
spending a lot of time on forums.
Brain Fear: They didn't really have a scoring system,
but when they finally implemented it, I had the most points in the entire network or second
most something like that.
My profile is still shows that I'm on all star will just a top Contributor Tag, whatever
they call it.
Joshua Birk: So, yeah, seven years later, Brian hasn't
even been active on these forums and SFDC Fox is still one of the top rated answerer
for questions on the forums.
And that should give you a little bit of a preview to where we're going with his life
story.
And he's kind of a superhero at this point, he's got a double life, he's got a secret
identity, he's got his day job, but then at night he's out fighting bugs and he's trying
to make sure that nobody figures out who that superhero is.
And sure enough, there are people trying.
Brain Fear: They sort of suspected that I might be doing
support outside of boundaries.
What they ended up doing was they blocked access to that website on the corporate network.
And so I ended up writing a proxy and a visual force page to get around it so I could continue
to answer questions.
That was kind of funny.
Joshua Birk: Now, I kind of feel like I need to add an
asterisk here.
And if I could imagine a letter from our legal department, it would probably say something
along the lines like, "The Salesforce developer podcast does not advocate any behavior that
might end in your termination.
I want you all to keep your jobs."
And it kind of turns out that Brian saw it that way too.
He sees this as a conflict.
He doesn't want to be in this position where he's going outside the bounds of his job.
And so he leaves and he ends up getting another one.
After some freelancing, Brain eventually ends up at Camping World, which offers plenty of
work for a developer to chew on.
Brain Fear: Oh goodness.
So we are working with 5,000 active users plus another 2000 empty licenses that we're
filling out.
We have technically multiple orgs all crammed into one.
We've got, as you may have heard, we acquired Gander Mountain, for example.
So we've got Gander Mountain employees.
We've got Camping World employees.
We have a Good Sam employees, Good Sam is their sister company.
We have millions upon millions of records and we have, probably a good eight or 10 different
integrations for our sales and marketing and all that other good stuff.
Joshua Birk: But now let's go back to the start of our
origin story where remember, Brian loves a few things, one of them is developing on the
Salesforce platform and the other one is helping people, and just about this time is when he
discovers the Salesforce stack exchange.
Brain Fear: I found myself on the Salesforce stack exchange
and I thought, this is really cool.
I think I'd like it here.
And so I just, I went in, I created a new account and I just started doing it.
It was great because I felt like I could get feedback.
"Oh, Hey, look, I got 60 points.
I must be doing something right."
It was nice to get that feedback and the comments, you would get an email notification, they
have a lot of nice features.
Joshua Birk: To be more specific the Salesforce stack exchange
seems like a piece of software genetically engineered for a guy like Brian, Fear, somebody
who is willing to take time when he has available to him to help people on the internet and
is trying to do really good, precise, technical enablement.
And so he's found this place that he can really finally go and be SFDC Fox.
And the other nice thing is, well, he can tell his bosses.
Brain Fear: Yeah, they were aware of it and they were
impressed.
I had, I think I had just broken the hundred, thousand point milestone at that point.
Joshua Birk: Well, I want to frame Brian's modesty there
in very specific ways.
He is talking about breaking the 100,000 reputation point on the Salesforce stack exchange.
He is now over 285,000.
In fact, I believe 296,000, he has topped out.
The vast majority of stack exchange users maybe get a few hundred.
If you're very active, you might get a few thousand.
One of the stacks that I was previously very engaged in, and not the Salesforce stack coincidentally,
but I had about 10,000 reputation.
And according to stack exchange, I'm still one of the 3% top users of the stack and I've
affected a few hundred, thousand people.
At 285,000 reputation, Brian Fear is in the 0.05 percentile responders on the Salesforce
stock exchange and his answers have impacted over seven million people.
It's a Herculean effort that he is able to kind of keep up this superhero lifestyle of
helping people on the internet.
Brain Fear: So I've always loved to help people.
And I think I have my grandmother to thank for that.
She would give you money to help you out with something or she would drive you somewhere
or she would do whatever she had to do to help other people.
Joshua Birk: I asked Brian for a few tips on what developers
should know when they're going to the Salesforce stack exchange, how they can be successful
on how they can help Brian be successful when it comes to answering their questions.
And there's little things like for instance, always make sure that you are correctly tagging
your posts.
Because Brian is an expert in a few very specific things on the Salesforce platform.
And so if you want his eyeballs to get on it, tag your questions correctly, that way
when Brian is going through and he's doing his daily routine of trying to help people,
he can find your question.
I also asked him what makes a good question versus a bad question.
Brain Fear: So a good question will have a question in
the subject header area, it won't be a statement like, "help me please" or, "I only have 50%
code coverage, please help."
That's not a question that is a statement or possibly a cry for help, but it's certainly
not a question.
The body of the question usually should have a problem statement, what's wrong.
It should have any relevant code.
It should have any research that you've done like, "I tried searching Google," or, "I wrote
this piece of code, but it didn't work or," it's just something, it should basically have
all the information that we would need to troubleshoot.
Brain Fear: And also the question has just the code that
we need, not your entire 30,000 character [inaudible 00:09:45] class.
We don't have time or the resources to debug something like that.
Usually a good question will be up to 50 lines of code.
Yes, that's the ideal situation.
Bad questions, they have no code, they have no explanation or they have something like,
"I have a business requirement to do XYZ."
Well, that's, that's great, but that doesn't help us.
We want to know what you're trying to do, yes.
But that can't be the only thing in your question.
Put some codes or some screenshots or anything that helps.
Joshua Birk: And then finally I asked Brian, what are the
questions that you get all the time?
Brain Fear: The question about how do I [inaudible 00:10:19]
my code is one that comes up all the time and it's always the same answer.
And I don't have a specific [inaudible 00:10:26] to one question its just, it happens so many
different times.
It's all these different questions, but I also wish that people would read more about
a lot of the optimizations.
When do you use maps?
When do you use a sets?
How should you handle exceptions?
That comes up over and over again.
Joshua Birk: And that's our show.
Now, before we go, Brian did share one piece of Salesforce trivia history with me, which
kind of shocked me, actually.
I had no idea that the red square S force logo that some of us knew and love back in
the day, well, that was Brian.
Brain Fear: In my case, the red Salesforce logo was created
in blender.
I literally created a cube, slapped an S on it, and repeated it on all six sides, see
the other three sides, but it was, that's what it was.
And amazingly enough, I won that contest.
So that was pretty cool.
Joshua Birk: And that's our show.
Remember that you can go to Salesforce stack exchange yourself, and you can get your questions
answered or even better, see if you can provide some answers yourself.
Now, if you can take them on and go to podcast service of your choice, like, and subscribe
to us, that'd be great.
You can catch more information at developer.salesforce.com/podcast.
Thanks everybody.
This transcript was exported on Oct 15, 2020 - view latest version here.
episode5 (Completed 10/15/20) Transcript by Rev.com
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