Lightning Tips for Lightning Components: The Developers Speak, Episode 0.2

Dakota VanOs – March 2, 2021

The Developers Speak is a video series featuring certified Salesforce consultants at Digital Mass. They come to you twice a month to help bridge the gap between business problems and technical solutions.

On this episode of The Developers Speak, Ethan breaks down exactly what you need to do in order to design better Lightning Web Components. For more of a deep dive check out Salesforce's Dev Guide here.


Lightning Web Component Design Tips


Hi, I'm Ethan. I'm a Salesforce developer at Digital Mass. Today, we're talking about Lightning Web Component design. We're going to cover 3 tips that will help you save your development time, write fewer lines of code, and deliver a better product to your clients.

Build generic Lightning Web Components

The first step is building generic components. Salesforce has already built an entire library for you to be able to use and port over these components to fit your client's needs. They range from data tables to combo boxes and they need to be utilized every chance you can get rather than building every single thing custom.

Build maintainable LWC's

The next piece to consider to save development time is to remember that every Salesforce org has its own look and feel. The look and feel usually relate to the front-end design of how the color schemes and the text looks, but as Salesforce consultants it's important to remember that it's how the code is written behind the scenes as well. It's your job as a Salesforce consultant to see these patterns in your client's org and to fit yourself in them because, at the end of the day, you are not the person that is going to be maintaining these features. It is your clients and they need to be able to understand and maintain them without too much struggle.

Set up a local development server

The last piece of that is setting up a local development server. With a local development server, you won't need to deploy your changes to the Salesforce org to see your updates. You can just save your file and see your changes propagate, which will cut down on your development time. Designing Lightning Web Components using these principles is going to help save your development time, help you write fewer lines of code, and help you deliver a better product to your clients.

About the developer:

Ethan King's love for tech is rooted in being surrounded by techies all of his life. By middle school, he was building computers from scratch, and through high school, he started to dabble with code. Ethan continued his formal education at Anoka Technical College, where he received his degree in Computer Software Engineering.

While he was getting his degree, Ethan worked as a Web Developer and taught guitar lessons. He joined the Digital Mass team at the top of 2019 and has since gotten the Salesforce Administrator and Salesforce Platform Developer l certifications.

Outside of work, Ethan likes to play guitar, be outdoors hunting or fishing and loves a good Stephen King Novel (no, they're not related).