Kik Minev

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Web developer playing with clouds, LAMP, Symfony, JavaScript. Currently working as a Salesforce developer as part of the Taylor & Hart team.
Kik Minev
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01.

Hey there, I'm Kik Minev - web developer playing with clouds, LAMP, Symfony, JavaScript, Salesforce Apex. Currently working as a Salesforce developer as part of the Taylor & Hart team.

Why Salesforce? Pivoted to Salesforce when my colleagues needed a quick and efficient way to optimize business processes, sales and even manufacturing processes. That’s how I stepped into the Salesforce world, though most of my career has been focused on web with PHP. Strong love for the Symfony framework.

02.

My experience

Taylor & Hart - Salesforce and Symfony developer

Currently working as a Salesforce developer at Taylor & Hart where I help with accelerating business processes in sales and manufacturing. I spend my day mostly writing Apex code and lightning components in Salesforce or PHP/Symfony for web features.

Oxxy - CTO

As part of Oxxy I was leading the team as a CTO. We started and shipped a drag and drop website builder that allows small business owners to launch a website without any coding skills. For my tasks I used the Symfony PHP framework, MongoDB, javascript for the web builder and AWS as an ifrastructure.

Webfactory - Web Developer

At Webfactory I spent my days mostly coding with PHP and Javascript. As part of a web agency I worked on various projects for different clients up until I started working on Protect Your Bubble. Really thankful to the colleagues that gave me the chance to work on this project and helped me develop my skills.

Webfactory / Protect Your Bubble - Team Lead

I became responsible for launching the US web site and lead a team of web developers to deliver and support the project. Duties were a bit different as I needed to work in Atlanta and lead the team overseas. Also, working with a Fortune 500 company has it's perks. Thank you all for the warm welcome in Atlanta!

Digitalus - Web Developer

Digitalus was a hosting company from The Netherlands(later aquired by another company). Here we worked with PHP and Javascript.

SiteGround

Epic times! Great start in the web industry.

03.

What I work with?

Back in the days I started coding websites from scratch using PHP and some custom frameworks. Throughout time I worked with ancient frameworks like CakePHP, Zend and others. Nowadays I mostly work with Symfony. Trying to keep an eye on the Javascript world as well.

PHP
Back in time I started with PHP from around version 4. Usually with Apache and MySQL. These days we run mostly nginx.
JavaScript
The beginings was vanilla and jQuery. Later I worked with Backbone and Angular. Now I try to keep in touch mostly with the React framework.
Symfony
I love how robost Symfony is. The initial steep learning curve is paying off with the projects. During the years I've worked with Symfony for SaaS products, CMS and eCommerce systems.
AWS
My experience with the cloud is in AWS where I mostly use EC2 and S3. I also have some experience with RDS for PostgreSQL. During the years I used EC2 to scale Symfony web projects and MongoDB cluster databases.
Git
Git is what I use for version control. Checkout my GitHub. I use Gitflow in my day to day work.
Docker
For personnal projects I will use Docker to maintain my developement environment. In some companies we also worked remotely, in the cloud. In other companies even with k9s on localhost. Depends on the company;)
Salesforce Apex
In Salesforce I usually work with Apex code to develop new features. It shares the Java syntax and object-oriented features, but it's limited by the Salesforce environment.
Ligning Components
Not very often I develop lighning components to extend the Salesforce functionality.
PhpStorm
Though I started with Notepad, moved to Notepad++, Vim, Eclipse, these days I work with PhpStorm and IntelliJ with Illuninated Cloud for Salesforce development.

JetBrains AI for Salesforce – the basic way to start using AI for Salesforce

If you use IntelliJ with Illuminated Cloud, you’re already doing the heavy lifting. Adding the AI Assistant just makes the boring parts of Salesforce dev move faster. It’s basically a specialized search engine that lives in your sidebar.

What it actually does for Apex

  •  The “I hate writing tests” button: Highlight a method, right-click, and tell it to write the test class. It’s not perfect, but it handles the System.runAs, the @TestSetup, and the basic System.assertEquals lines so you don’t have to.
  •  The SOQL Shortcut: Instead of clicking through Schema Builder to find a field name, you can just type // Get all contacts where the account is active and let the AI fill in the query.
  •  Fixing “Variable does not exist”: If you have a weird null pointer or a syntax error, the AI can usually spot the missing bracket or the typo in a second.

Using it for Lightning (LWC)

  • HTML/CSS help: If you can’t remember the exact SLDS (Salesforce Lightning Design System) class for a specific button layout, just ask the AI to “make this div look like a standard Salesforce card.”
  • Boilerplate JS: It’s great at writing the @wire service calls and handling the basic then/catch logic for calling Apex from your JavaScript.

Simple Setup Tips

If you’re going to use it, do these three things to keep it from being annoying:

  • Use the “Explain” feature on old code: If you inherited a giant, undocumented Trigger from five years ago, highlight it and click Explain Code. It gives you a bulleted list of what the code is doing. It’s a lifesaver for onboarding.
  • Create a .aiignore file: This is important. Put your .sfdx folder and any local data files in here. It tells the AI, “Don’t look at these files.” It keeps your local config private.
  • Prompt for “Bulkification”: If you write a quick loop, you can ask the AI: “Is this bulkified?” It will point out if you accidentally put a SOQL query inside a for loop (the classic Salesforce mistake).

The Bottom Line

It’s a tool for your belt. It won’t build your org for you, but it will save you from typing the same testMethod headers a thousand times.

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