Jason Ouellette, Chief Architect
Building applications on Force.com has been a rewarding activity for me, as far as programming goes. 
I enjoy working at the high level of abstraction provided by the platform. Its homogeneous, single-vendor elegance is a refreshing change from open-source gluework. I’ve seen Force.com advance substantially and quickly, getting the chance to work with technologies like Apex and Visualforce before their release.
This is partly what inspired me to write, Development with the Force.com Platform (published by Addison-Wesley Professional; part of the Developer’s Library series). The book is geared toward existing developers who want an all-in-one guide to getting started building applications with Force.com (available with online preview at Amazon and Dreamforce). In this blog and in my full-time job working on Appirio’s Professional Services Enterprise(PS Enterprise) product, we go deep on specific areas of the platform. In contrast the book is more of a survey course to help readers get broad exposure to the major areas of Force.com.
As we built PS Enterprise, I discovered first-hand how much faster I could build large-scale functionality using Force.com than other platforms I’ve worked with over the years. In addition, it was very cool to see new capabilities being added all the time without the headache of worrying about how upgrades will impact existing code (and loved being able to package all the code samples from the book into a single AppExchange listing). My hope is that the book will expose a larger community of developers to the benefits of Force.com’s in an organized, hands-on way.
Myself, many of the authors on this blog, and host of other Appirio developers will be at Dreamforce. We’d love to exchange tips and tricks, combine forces on feature requests and maybe even build something together! Also look forward to discussing the new Force.com announcements coming at Dreamforce. Find me after the Day 1 keynote!
Jason
