Sounds like I'm a Salesforce shill here, but...for some context I presently work as a developer in the charitable/volunteer sector at the moment. I'm 52, with around 30 years in the biz building all sorts of stuff in COBOL, Clipper, Java, CORBA, VB, C#....and worked with all sorts of databases.
Here's my take in my current situ:
Salesforce do some mighty decent things for voluntary/charitable orgs. One of them being that if you're a charitable/volunteer sector operator you get Salesforce Enterprise edition for free. Now, despite being aware of Salesforce, until about six months ago I'd never used it, and thought "oh-oh" when a project went down this route.
But you know something I kinda like it.
I sense some "dislike" here about Salesforce here on HN, and sure it has some road humps and other things, but it's become a developer platform, and with many developer platforms you need to spend some time learning to make it work for you. But it's not that hard. I think their docs and training material are pretty decent. We also use their SFDX bits so basically we can check in an entire org to source control and run deployments into sandboxes for testing before deploying into production. Their Visual Code tooling is pretty decent as well.
Lightning, Apex, Callouts, Creating inbound REST API's...what's not to like if you can bish-bash-bosh something for a client quickly and build an working MVP?
We can build a bunch of apps for these voluntary/charitable folks fairly quickly and much faster than we could with .NET/SQL (or something else) which would otherwise cost them a lot more money.
I realise it's not for everyone, sometimes it feels a bit "Scientology"'ish once you're into the eco-system, but it's a tool.
Here's my take in my current situ:
Salesforce do some mighty decent things for voluntary/charitable orgs. One of them being that if you're a charitable/volunteer sector operator you get Salesforce Enterprise edition for free. Now, despite being aware of Salesforce, until about six months ago I'd never used it, and thought "oh-oh" when a project went down this route.
But you know something I kinda like it.
I sense some "dislike" here about Salesforce here on HN, and sure it has some road humps and other things, but it's become a developer platform, and with many developer platforms you need to spend some time learning to make it work for you. But it's not that hard. I think their docs and training material are pretty decent. We also use their SFDX bits so basically we can check in an entire org to source control and run deployments into sandboxes for testing before deploying into production. Their Visual Code tooling is pretty decent as well.
Lightning, Apex, Callouts, Creating inbound REST API's...what's not to like if you can bish-bash-bosh something for a client quickly and build an working MVP?
We can build a bunch of apps for these voluntary/charitable folks fairly quickly and much faster than we could with .NET/SQL (or something else) which would otherwise cost them a lot more money.
I realise it's not for everyone, sometimes it feels a bit "Scientology"'ish once you're into the eco-system, but it's a tool.
Use it, don't use it, it's up to you.