"If you build it, they will come." Having a house that's already built is great.  You can keep it shiny, rearrange things inside, maybe add an addition (Sun room?)... but what if it falls down in an earthquake? (and you and your family are safely at work and school, of course)  How do you rebuild? Are there plans anywhere on how to build the house? What tools do you even need to do the build?

Build processes in the Salesforce world are usually the realm of an Independent Software Provider (ISV) Partner (a.k.a. AppExchange app seller) or large scale enterprise customizations that include unmanaged and/or managed code and packages.  However, build processes are nothing new in the land of software development... and luckily, Salesforce allows for use of some of the most tried and true (some old, some new) tools behind the build process.

In this meetup, we'll talk about ... well, that's where you come into play!  Where are you in the process of approaching, learning about, or executing with grace (or stumbling) a Salesforce build process?  Here are some questions you can ask yourself to see where you are and what you should learn as a next step:

• Do you use version control? (git, svn, TFS, ...)

• Are you using version control to backup to or build from? (idk means backup)

• Do you have more than one sandbox? (or more than one dev org for ISV's)

• Have you used ant and/or the Force.com Migration Toolkit?

• What about dependencies?? Have you used ivy or a similar dependency tool?

• What's the bigger pain point for you: getting sample data from one org to another, or metadata from one org to another?

• Have you used (or wanted to use) Jenkins or some Continuous Build tool?

We will have a couple speakers to focus on the areas that most apply to what the Angeleno Salesforce developer community is really looking for (admins, QA, dev managers, scrum masters... this is you too!).

So please, give us an idea of what you would like to focus on in the meetup when you RSVP.  You can also comment in the feed on this meetup with your ideas for build process topics!  If someone has already mentioned a topic, please comment within that if you want to also suggest this topic to make it a little easier to GROUP BY  :-) thx!