Welcome to the third of my Salesforce Career Success Journey series. This series is focused on learning about sharing our career journey and hopefully encourage others to pursue or continue their career on the Salesforce.com platform. I am happy to introduce my developer mentor, Sean Cuevo. Long story short, we met at Dreamforce ‘15 at the Developer Zone Campsite where he shared his story that he was a self taught developer (wait until you read his story)! Not only is he a great coder, he’s a got untouchable dance moves. Anyone catch us at the Pardot party? Thanks for being a fun friend and mentor/accountability buddy!
If you would like to share your Salesforce Career Success journey, submit here.
Name: Sean Cuevo
Company: Galvanize
Job Title: Salesforce Developer
Which Salesforce certifications do you have? None
[Annie: If anyone thinks they need to wait until they have a cert to get a Salesforce job, Sean proves you wrong!]
How many Trailhead badges do you currently have?
None
Describe what you do at your company.
I own the Salesforce system at Galvanize doing everything from admin tasks such as building reports, views and the schema to heavier developer tasks of implementing integrations, writing Apex to automate our systems, and cleaning up data.
Give us a snapshot of how you got your salesforce career started and/or how your career has developed.
In college I studied Finance and Accounting because at the time it seemed like the safe choice. Then the 2008 financial crisis happened and I suddenly found myself with a degree that I wasn’t really interested in with no job prospects. I had a brief stint as an auditor for the US Department of Agriculture and left that job to try to start a business with my friend involving a website to connect investors with entrepreneurs. After the foundation of the site was built, my friend and I found we need more features and had even less money, so we took it upon ourselves to start learning Ruby on Rails. A year later nothing came from the site, but that foundation in development got my foot in the door at Bluewolf as a junior developer. I started there doing some Ruby on Rails work but quickly transitioned to Salesforce in order to serve more of their clients. While the two platforms have major differences, the general principles of programming still held so the transition was not too difficult. After about a year I was confident enough to serve as the lead developer on several projects. Since then I’ve moved my way up and served as the lead Salesforce developer at a few companies.
What advice would you give to someone who is developing their career on salesforce?
Keep pushing yourself to learn and to be a better developer. There will be days where you will be overwhelmed and you feel like an idiot. The future version of yourself would agree, but only because the future version of you will be much smarter than you are now due to your efforts to keep learning. Read code: your code, others’ code, code that is not even Salesforce related and always strive to write code that is eloquent and elegant.
Are you a leader or member of a user group?
Yes, a member the Denver Salesforce Developer User Group. I’d like to thank George Sowards from RedPoint Solutions for making each meetup really informative and a great time!
Please name 1 person from the Salesforce community that you’d like to thank for supporting you on your journey.
James Hindes, currently the Managing Director at Bluewolf. He is an incredible manager and mentor. He helped guide myself and many others on how to grow both personally and professionally, even after I left the company.
[Annie: True mentors are with you always.]
What’s the one Success Community group you can’t live without?
Google is usually my go to resource, but salesforce.stackexchange.com is often the result.
Follow Sean on:
Twitter: @squizzleflip
Blog: http://www.socalledprogrammer.com/
AnnieForce 
Inspiring Story Annie 🙂
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