I’m Ben Kinder, a Salesforce Architect with a background in IT, security, and platform development. I’ve worked across everything from Splunk and Citrix to Apex and Flow, and I’m always looking for ways to build smarter, cleaner systems that actually make people’s lives easier. This blog is where I share what I’ve been learning, building, and breaking — mostly around Salesforce, automation, cloud architecture, and security, with a few deep dives and how-tos along the way.
Introduction The past five days have been a whirlwind on my Salesforce certification journey. With the Platform Developer II exam looming, I set out to complete a “superbadge sprint” across some of Salesforce’s most challenging and instructive units. My goal: build both confidence and muscle memory for advanced Apex, integration, and debugging scenarios, all under realistic (and rapid!) conditions.
What follows is a detailed walk-through of my experience tackling the Named Credentials, Apex Web Services, Platform Events, Apex Callouts superbadge units, culminating in the Advanced Apex Specialist. If you’re working toward PDII or just want a practical lens on what these badges teach, read on for hard-won lessons, patterns, and plenty of debugging wisdom.
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When Agentforce was released, the obvious use cases were internal AI chat for employees using Salesforce and customer-facing chat support integrated with Omni-Channel, but Salesforce announced support for calling Agentforce from flows as well. At first the flows use case made less sense to me (especially with the price for each Agentforce conversation at around $2), but since then I’ve seen use cases where calling an agent from a flow has made sense and I have a few key takeaways and tips.
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In this post I’ll walk through the steps to download a free copy of Splunk, apply for a 10GB/day developer license, and set up your own Splunk server for your homelab. Splunk is a great tool to learn because it’s widely used especially in large companies and because it’s fun to dig in to. In the future, I’ll post about getting data into Splunk from a variety of sources including Unifi network equipment, Corelight/Zeek, Salesforce, Microsoft, and more!
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Overview This weekend I pushed through a personal cert sprint and came out the other side with two certifications and a superbadge completed. It was a focused effort to deepen both my development skills and my cross-cloud understanding — and I’m really happy with the outcome.
Specifically, I completed:
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Administrator certification The Agentforce Specialist certification The Apex Specialist Superbadge These all tie directly into the kind of work I’ve been doing — and the kind I want to keep doing more of.
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Overview I was inspired to create this blog after watching a NetworkChuck video from about 5 months ago. He talked about building out a pipeline to automatically format notes from Obsidian using Hugo, push the results to a GitHub repository, and then have GitHub send a webhook to Hostinger which would trigger Hostinger to clone his repository and update his website. I think that the pipeline he created is really cool and he has a detailed post about it on his blog so I decided to try it out for myself. I figured that if I was going down this rabbit hole anyway, I figured I might as well try to make some improvements to his pipeline and get hands-on with GitHub Actions along the way!
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