Cal Smith

Salesforce Architect, MVP Hall of Fame member, and Certified Salesforce Developer. I began my Salesforce journey when a Salesforce partner friend introduced me to it in 2012. I was asked to write HTML templates to generate PDFs; something that quickly evolved into creating custom controllers. I soon found myself working in sandboxes creating custom objects, doing workflow, security, writing triggers, unit tests, Visualforce pages, Flows, and more while working on a new community shortly after their initial release. There's no doubt I was "hooked" on Salesforce Development.

I've been a Salesforce MVP since I was awarded the honor in Summer 2016. Being an MVP has allowed me to meet many wonderful people and contribute to the ecosystem in ways I'd never considered before. It's blessed my life in countless ways

Authors like Dan Appleman and Andrew Fawcett have inspired me. I spent a lot of time as CrmProgDev asking and answering questions on Salesforce.StackExchange where I learned from talented individuals like Andrew Fawcett, Peter Knolle, Tomasz Duda (@eyescream), Bob Buzzard, Jesse Altman, C A Patterson, Brian Fear and Keith C to name a few of the many great developers who regularly contributed to the site when I first began.

I'm a mechanical engineer by education, who's been programming in various languages since the days of punched cards beginning with Fortran on large mainframes before PC's existed. I've also been involved with 3D in some form or other since the mid 1980's.

Until getting into Salesforce, I regularly worked with Maya, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and other computer graphics software creating art and photorealistic animations. In the mid 1990's, a growing interest in photorealism sparked a desire to learn computer graphics on the PC which ultimately led me to the internet, doing web design and owning a DTP/Graphic Design company. In the late 90's I was a Sysop in the Adobe Forum on CompuServe then later became the Manager of WUGNET's Windows NT/2000 Forum on CompuServe until about 2001. During that period, I also wrote for NT Update and Web Update Journals.

I enjoy the outdoors, especially camping, hiking and four-wheeling in the mountains. I raced bicycles on the road until my mid 30's, earning my fair share of road rash in the process. I still love cycling both on and off the road when it's not too hot here in Texas.