Salesforce Admins Podcast

An App to Make Your Heart Race with Nick Lindberg

 

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking to Nick Lindberg, Senior Business Analyst at University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and co-founder of the Twin Cities Nonprofit Salesforce User Group. We learn about Nick’s drag racing app and how that’s lead him to master App Builder.

 

Join us as we talk about how an app idea can come from just about anywhere, how he used his hobby to help him develop his Salesforce skills, and how it’s lead him to learn more about IoT integrations and Einstein.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nick Lindberg.

 

Always an accidental admin.

 

“I’m trying to be a pain point picking machine,” Nick says, “taking all those pain points and using Salesforce to solve them.” But it wasn’t always so easy. Right out of college, the nonprofit he helped found as a student, Students Today Leaders Forever, was trying to take the next steps and by paying a fulltime staff.

 

Tracking everything was quickly becoming a challenge, but they stumbled across Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack at just the right time. However, they needed one of the five full-time staff members to take it over. “Nick knows Excel,” they said, “so he can implement Salesforce, naturally.” Being able to learn the platform and help an organization near and dear to his heart helped him quickly progress from accidental admin to awesome admin, and he realized he could make a career in Salesforce.

 

Start your (app building) engines!

 

Building apps is something that every Salesforce admin should take a crack at, but it can be hard to get engaged if you’re working on something dry. Nick got inspired by Mike’s Top Gear app and decided to create Dragforce. “You can’t drag race in the winter in Minnesota,” Nick says, “or at least not safely,” but he wanted to feed his passion for going fast and furious. A big part of drag racing is keeping a logbook to track your interval times, so he figured he could replace that paper process with a Salesforce app.

 

If you don’t know much about putting the pedal to the metal, prepare for Mike and Nick to nerd out (more than) a little bit. There’s actually a lot of data to keep track of, and interval times are important because the driver with the highest MPH isn’t always the winner. Not to mention the temperature, the barometric pressure, and almost 20 other weather metrics can all affect your car’s performance, so dashboards are a big help for taking everything in. Along the way, Nick’s passion helped sharpened his app development skills and even got into Visualforce (before Lightning came along).

 

Mastering Einstein and IoT integrations.

 

Moving forward, Nick is hoping to enlist the services of a consultant to take his drag racing to the next level. “In the type of drag racing that I do, it’s not just about fast you go but more how consistent you are,” he says, “I need to know, going down to a thousandth of a second, if the car is going to change between each run.” He’s looking to learn Einstein Prediction Builder as a way to get an incredibly accurate picture of how his car is going to perform.

 

To make this happen, Nick recently got an IoT-enabled weather station that he’s trying to integrate into Salesforce. He’s hoping to get to a place where he can pull live weather metrics directly into the app and then run it through Prediction Builder to get performance projections with that thousandth of a second accuracy. Along the way, forcing himself to tinker with all of these things will help him build the skills he needs for work and for racing down on the track.

Trailhead: 

  • Mike G to add later
  •  

Social:

Love our podcasts?

Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!

 

Direct download: An_App_to_Make_Your_Heart_Race_with_Nick_Lindberg.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:29am PDT