1500 Trailhead Badges

I’ve reached the milestone of 1500 Trailhead badges. This should represent the half way point to the next major milestone of 3xAll Star Ranger. But as we’ll see I’m not quite there yet and it’s looking like reaching that milestone will be a bit harder than the first 2 All Star Ranger ranks was.

So, what’s the issue. Well as you can see I’ve overshot the 1500 badges slightly - I’m at 1504. However to be half way to 3xAll Star I’d need to be at 750,000 points. But I’m slightly under 740,000. Somewhere around 1400 badges I reached an inflection point. Up to there I was consistently above the 500 points per badge average required to keep track with the ranking system. However as I’ve completed so many badges on Trailhead now I am finding it harder to find badge I am interested in completing that score 500 points or above.

This is compounded by the fact that most new badges are worth under 500 badges. Let’s take a look at the last 10 new badges (which I’m working through completing)

Out of these badges only 1 is worth over 500 points. They average 310 points only. Not nearly enough to keep that all important 500 point average. I currently expect I’ll need to get to over 1900 badges to actually reach the required 900,000 points for 3xAll Star. Which is the vast majority of the remaining badges available in Trailhead today!

2xAll Star Ranger

This is a bit of a made-up achievement but I’m still proud to have reached it. The Trailhead ranks top out at All Star Ranger (600 badges and 300,000 points). I have now got double the requirements for All Star Ranger. So thats 2xAll Star Ranger!

Whilst most people who use Trailhead won’t get close to this number of badges I’d encourage people to do as many badges as possible. I’ve learnt so much in reaching this level. It’s taken a bit less than four years to get this far. However there is still much to learn.

SuperQBit tells me that there are plenty of people out there on many more badges and points (well over 2000 badges and 1,000,000 points). So that’s something for me to aim for!

One Thousand (and One) Badges

At the start of the year I set a goal of reaching 1000 badges on Trailhead this year. That was always going to happen. But to do it in the first quarter is a bit of a surprise, I did find the hundred-odd badges I needed that fitted me well.

I had meant to make this post on exactly 1000 badges. Obviously. But one of those pesky community badges from completing a quest snuck in!

This sort of number of badges leaves me on about 465 on SuperQBit and just outside the top 200 on points. So plenty of people out there who have done a whole lot more. More than twice as many in a few cases!

I’m not setting any particular target for the rest of the year. I’m probably going to focus more on completing the last few Superbadges and Certifications

Finding Out What a Trailhead Hands-on Test is Doing

I recently completed the Apex Web Services Superbadge Unit. During this I was finding the specification of the API that I was meant to be building somewhat lacking in detail. It was not particularly clear on exactly what it wanted to be returned. As the tests failed over and over I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be easier if I could see what was being tested”. Turns out you can.

This will work for any if the hands-on tests in Trailhead where Trailhead executes Apex to drive the test. Not all tests do this. Some simply interact with records using the API. However if Apex is being executed we can capture that. To do so go to Setup and search for Debug. Go to Debug logs and add a User Debug for your user. Run the test again.

Take a look at the logs (reload the logs page). You’ll see an operation at something like “services/data/v30.0/tooling/executeAnonymous/”. Maybe a few in a row if a few tests executed one after another. Open the one that failed and at the top you’ll see the Apex that was run. Something like this (this is from the Get Started with Apex unit):

Execute Anonymous: List<String> strings = StringArrayTest.generateStringArray(10); System.assertEquals(strings.size(),10); System.assertEquals(strings[0],'Test 0');

Now you know what it’s doing it’s easier to write your code to actually do what it wants. Note this is a terrible test. You can write code that does not meet the required specifications and pass this unit. Even better for the Superbadge unit I mentioned: they also want test classes. Take the various tests the unit performs and you’ve basically got your test class written!

How Super is Super

As I continue to rack up the points and badges in a completely pointless quest to move up the Superqbit leaderboard I’ve been on a bit of a Superbadge rip recently. I’ve not quite completed every available Superbadge on Trailhead yet but that is at least in sight. As I’ve been working my way through them I’ve noticed a few things

Modern Superbadges vs Original

You can easily and immediately tell the difference between the original style of Superbadge and the modern once. One glance at the number of points for completion of the badge and you’ll know. Old school Superbadges will be 8000+ points. Some of them range up as high as 16000 points. For one badge! Modern superbadges break this down into a series of smaller Superbadge units. Each of these will be 1500-2500 points and each counts as a Superbadge on its own.

This has somewhat devalued the Superbadge. In the past each Superbadge was a considerable investment of time and effort. Perhaps 10-20 hours. It really meant something to get one. For me this meant spending a weeks worth of evenings to get one. With the new ones I can generally bang out a Superbadge unit a night. On the third night I can probably also do the “capstone assessment” to get the overall Superbadge. As you can see this means that, at least for me, the total badge has got easier. As can be seen from the points when are now consistently down in the 9000-10000 range rather than the 16000.

However by making them a bit more bite sized (although 1-2 hours once you’ve completed all the prerequisites is still a bit of time) it makes them much more approachable. I am far more likely to take on a Superbadge that I can complete in one night that one of the old monsters that takes a bit more effort to build up to. A good example would be the Lightning Web Components Specialist Superbadge. This is one of the handful I have left to do. It’s one I can do (both technically and I’ve completed all the prerequisites), It’s in an area I am interested in, But it’s 16000 points. It’s massive. So it’s still yo be done. Were this 4 separate Superbadge units I’d have done them by now

Not all Badges are Equal

The Apex Specialist badge is 13000 points and takes some time. The Advanced Apex Specialist badge is 16000 points and even harder. The Selling with Sales Cloud Specialist is 7000 points and is 90% data entry. It can be completed in a couple of hours. This disparity in complexity is somewhat disheartening (but does make for some very cheap points if you are levelling up).

Supersets?

Why are there only 4 Super Sets? And why is one this a Billing Super Set? Is Billing really a quarter of Trailhead?

Where is the Flow Super Set? There are probably more Flow Superbadges than any other subject.

It feels like Super Sets are a concept that was launched and then somewhat abandoned.

What’s Missing

The most obvious Superbadge or badges that I’d like to see added are in the AI area. Maybe we’ll see these in 2024

Road To All Star Ranger

As of today I’m an All Star Ranger on Trailhead. When I first started on Trailhead this rank did not even exist! At that time Ranger seemed like a challenging goal. All Star Ranger requires 6 times the number of points and badges. I think if that had been the top rank I’d have believed it was impossible. And yet here I am less than 3 years later. I thought I’d have a small look back at how I go here.

I was interviewing for a post with FinancialForce in late 2020. During the process I was told about Trailhead. Once I accepted the offer in December to start in January 2021 I knew I had to skill up. I knew nothing about Salesforce and my Java knowledge would only take me so far!

I earned my first badge on 17th December 2020.. By the time I started on the 4th of January I had 29 badges and a good basic grounding in Salesforce and Apex. A lot of my initial training was in Trailhead so I kept racking up badges.

For a lot of that first year I was doing pretty well at the development side of my job but me platform knowledge was something I felt was lacking. As I moved into Architecture I needed to keep widening my knowledge so I’ve kept on the trail.

600 badges may seem like a huge number (although in the context of Trailhead it’s not really all that many). But over the 1003 days it’s taken to get to All Star Ranger it’s about 1 badge ever 1.5 days. So all it takes is consistency really. I would say that as I’ve ranked up the points have become less of a challenge. It’s all about the badges.

Now that I’ve reached the top rank what’s next. Well the obvious answer is to start gaining certifications. But there is always the SuperQBit Leaderboard!

Turning Off "Use Partitioned Domains" for the Data Integration Specialist Superbadge

As part of my “quest” for All Star Ranger status in Trailhead I was completing the Data Integration Specialist Superbadge recently. Nothing in the badge is particularly challenging but I did hit one slightly frustrating point that I thought would be worth pointing out. I’m not going to offer any solutions to the challenges in the Superbadge itself so if you’re looking for solutions this is not the blog for you!

The superbadge calls out that you (may) need to make a change to your org setup as shown below.

If you are like me you probably skip most of the setup text in Superbadges and jump straight to the challenges to see what you actually need to do. I don’t see a lot of value in the positioning story - it adds nothing to the challenge. So I missed this.

If you miss this you’ll be able to complete the first few challenges and will suddenly hit a wall where the test just fails. And then you’ll go back up and see this note. If this happens don’t do what I did and just rush into making the change in your org. If you do this you’ll not only disconnect the org from Trailhead but you’ll not be able to log back into it and you’ll have to create a new org and start again from the start. Annoying!

Turning off “Use partitioned domains” changes the domain. This will disconnect the org from Trailhead. So before you turn off and deploy the changes make sure you have the username and password for your org. You can then reconnect it to Trailhead and continue with the superbadge.

Good luck on the trail!