Nearly half-way through the first month of lockdown and there's the sense of an adjustment sinking in. Supermarket shelves are still a tad sparse but don't have the empty apocalypse-movie feel of past weeks. And despite lockdown being extended there's talk of peaks in infection being reached and noise about confirming a relaxing of isolation rules and a return to normalcy. A lot's been written about the pandemic and its mismanagement . There's dire forecasts about the economy and predictions the virus will act as a driver for tech adoption . The shadow that Covid casts is as much financial as it is health-related. The virus strikes at 2 things most of us consider fundamental to wellbeing  - financial security and social connectedness. IT and IT services has a certain worldwide industry mono-culture. But often, particularly for the global implementations, your team-mates can come from all over the world and I've been lucky to work with people from many d...

On a recent assignment I had the opportunity to work on a Mulesoft-SFMC integration. Mulesoft, recently bought by SF, is one of the leading enterprise ETL PaaS providers and readily integrates with third party platforms using industry standard RESTful/SOAP API endpoints. Mule Anypoint Generally I was impressed with the Mule suite of features and components. The Mule Anypoint platform provides quick, efficient integration capabilities along with out-of-the-box patterns and functionality for streamlining data flows from source to target systems. These patterns allow rules to be implemented that can schedule, consolidate and error-handle large batches of data in near-realtime if necessary. On top of that Mule has a suite of connectors allowing low-code out-of-the-box integration with third-party platforms like SFMC. Connector API limitations Like Marketing Cloud Connect the Mule SFMC Connector uses the SFMC SOAP API. The SOAP API is a good fit for most requirements involvin...

(Credit:  https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/86l0s2/someone_figured_out_the_reality/ ) One of the strangest but nicest things I've ever heard a client say was "We're interested in doing things in a more Agile way and you embody it". Nice because everybody likes a compliment. Strange because I'd never considered how I work as "Agile" in the project methodology sense. But we were both thinking of the same thing - getting good results at pace. Agile as a project methodology has been around for yonks and is now the approved way of delivering Salesforce and IT projects in general. But projects still fail (a lot) or are late or simply deliver product clients don't use. Large projects, particularly in the IT sector, often go bad says Gallup . And from experience I'd agree a lot of IT projects are needlessly painful. There are 2 interesting points that the Gallup report surfaces: Process isn't necessarily key. But people ar...