It was less than 2 years ago that I began to mentor Deepak. I started with asking him to learn ASP.NET fundamentals, and record his daily activities, as well as lessons learnt in an excel sheet. I would monitor the excel sheet with interest. For the first 3 days, he updated the excel sheet. But, there were no updates on the fourth and fifth day. I asked him if he was not happy with the work he was doing. He shocked me by stating that he had developed a web application in which you can put your updates and save them. The application also had provision to download a report of his task updates. I was thrilled to see a fresher thinking from this angle. At that moment, I knew he would work wonders at Suyati.

We started mentoring him on ASP.NET and he was very good in UI designing and fast delivery. His approach always had a thought of automating, and he used lightweight handling of data processing in his web programming. At this time, I was diving in deep into Salesforce. Deepak would come to my seat to discuss about technologies, and slowly I started showing him Salesforce app development. At that time, Visualforce development was just coming up, and since Deepak was very good in HTML, AJAX and Javascript, my colleague Shinto and I used to cook up many use-cases to see how Salesforce apps can be effective. Deepak was very interested in these challenging tasks. He started solving puzzles with us.

As I was constantly learning Salesforce, attending webinars, code-talks, release previews, I slowly started pulling Deepak in, and his passion for Salesforce grew. Later, I introduced him to Salesforce Success Community. I used to answer questions in the community, and I asked him to join the community to contribute. Deepak was active in the community every day and used to manage his work very well in the office also. At night, he would take his time to participate in webinars and sessions to maximize his knowledge. Later, I won the Spring ’13 Release Code Trivia Challenge and I kept pushing Deepak to achieve the upcoming titles and awards. Then we jumped into the Salesforce Kerala User Group activities. And every time, Deepak would take a mind blowing session on a feature of Salesforce.

I used to be amazed at Deepak’s contribution in the Salesforce Success Community. We called him the ‘Salesforce Coder,’ as he used to answer the most complex questions with a code as his answer! His code was always complete, and worked very well. The incredible part was that he used to write code for scenarios with his ordinary developer org account! Amazing!

I am very happy to see that Deepak has grown a lot in his professional life and highly deservers the “Salesforce MVP” title. He is an inspiration to cloud professionals and also to me. When I congratulated Deepak today, he humbly said, “I don’t know how I got MVP award!!”
The reasons for his success are:

• He is sincere in what he does
• He enjoys it
• He even loves it
• His passion drives him forward

Here’s wishing my dearest buddy the best.