Kik Minev

Blog
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.

Category: Salesforce

Agentforce for Developers: Building the Next Generation of AI Agents for Small Business

From Assistive to Agentic: Salesforce’s Agentforce for Small Business

In the world of Salesforce, the leap from “assistive AI” to “agentic AI” is no longer just a trend—it’s the new standard. With the recent announcement of Agentforce for Small Business, Salesforce is bringing its most advanced autonomous AI capabilities into accessible suites for smaller organizations.

For developers, this marks a shift in how we build on the platform. We are moving away from building simple chatbots and toward architecting autonomous agents that can reason, take action, and handle complex business workflows independently. Continue reading “Agentforce for Developers: Building the Next Generation of AI Agents for Small Business”

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. Continue reading “JetBrains AI for Salesforce – the basic way to start using AI for Salesforce”

Marketing Cloud Next Already Looks Like a Big Step Forward

I’ve spent some time in the old Marketing Cloud to say this: it works, but it’s not exactly friendly. It can be slow, cluttered, and harder to navigate than it needs to be — especially if you’re just trying to get a campaign out the door.

That’s why Marketing Cloud Next already feels so promising, even without having used it in practice. The new interface looks cleaner, more modern, and far more intuitive. It seems like Salesforce finally focused on how marketers actually work, not just on adding more features.

Everything about Next suggests less friction — fewer clicks, clearer workflows, and a platform that doesn’t fight you at every step. If the experience lives up to how it looks, this could be a huge improvement over the old Marketing Cloud and a much nicer place to spend your day.

Here is some more information that I stumbled upon on Salesforce Ben:

https://www.salesforceben.com/6-reasons-why-marketing-cloud-next-may-really-be-the-next-big-thing-in-salesforce/

Process Automation and Its Impact on Small and Medium Businesses

Understanding Process Automation

Process automation refers to the use of technology to perform recurring tasks or processes in a business without manual intervention. This can involve the use of software, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, or other digital tools to streamline operations, reduce human error, and increase efficiency.

At its core, process automation eliminates repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing employees to focus on more strategic and creative activities. From small businesses to large enterprises, automation can be applied in various departments, including finance, human resources, customer service, and supply chain management.

Continue reading “Process Automation and Its Impact on Small and Medium Businesses”

Making the Case for Salesforce: From Skeptic to Supporter

Why Salesforce is Worth the Investment: Powerful Automation for Every User

At first, I was skeptical about Salesforce, mainly because of its high price tag. I wondered if it was truly worth the investment, especially when compared to building custom software solutions. Being a PHP developer capable of addressing business needs with custom solutions, I was particularly doubtful. I assumed that custom development or other affordable but basic CRMs would always be the better option. But then, I saw real-life examples of businesses cleverly using Salesforce to automate processes while focusing on their core operations—without the constant need to coordinate the development and delivery of custom software.

Over time, I realized that custom-made software comes with its own challenges—it’s expensive, takes longer to implement, and often requires multiple costly iterations to get right. Additionally, as business requirements evolve, companies relying on custom solutions remain dependent on programmers or software vendors for even the smallest updates.

Continue reading “Making the Case for Salesforce: From Skeptic to Supporter”

Evaluating Dynamic Formulas in Apex – A Game Changer for Salesforce Developers

With the Spring ’25 release, Salesforce has introduced the ability to evaluate dynamic formulas directly in Apex using the new FormulaEval namespace. This enhancement provides developers with a flexible and efficient way to work with formulas programmatically—without having to rely on hardcoded formula fields or complex workarounds.

Previously, if developers needed to evaluate formulas dynamically, they often had to rely on custom logic, additional fields, or even external processing. Now, with this new feature, Salesforce allows us to create and execute formulas on the fly, significantly improving the efficiency and flexibility of Apex code.

Continue reading “Evaluating Dynamic Formulas in Apex – A Game Changer for Salesforce Developers”

How to Get Salesforce Instance URL in Apex Code

When developing applications within Salesforce, there may be times when you need to retrieve the instance URL for various purposes, such as building dynamic links or performing API integrations. One efficient way to obtain the instance URL is by using the getOrgDomainUrl method in Apex. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to do this in a simple and straightforward manner.

Continue reading “How to Get Salesforce Instance URL in Apex Code”

Building a Twilio call center in Salesforce. Part 1: General overview, tools and architecture

Recently I was given the opportunity to build a call center for incoming and outgoing calls that works from inside Salesforce. The benefit of such a call center integrated into Salesforce is that the sales people will have the customer data immediately available with the incoming phone call or make an outgoing phone call directly from the customer record. I’m going to share a few words about the architecture and the problems I stumbled upon when building this. Just for the record, Salesforce provides plenty of ready made VoIP solutions that you can easily install and start using out of the box. Those solutions are not cheap, but still they are ready to use and require no development time. Still, if you want to  automate business processes and have custom actions into the callcenter it’s easier to rely on a custom solution.

Continue reading “Building a Twilio call center in Salesforce. Part 1: General overview, tools and architecture”

Include static image, javascript or other static resource in a Salesforce page

When developing Salesforce pages you might need to include your own images, javascript libraries or any other static resource. Doing this is easy but it first requires uploading the resource to Salesforce. You can do this by opening:

Salesforce Setup > Static Resouce > New

From there you need to upload the file and giving it a name that should be unique for the whole organisation. Also the max file size is 5 MB. Once the file is uploaded to your Salesforce you can include it in your template with the following coe:

<apex:includeScript value="{! $Resource.your_file_name }"/>

You just need to replace your_file_name with the name you have chosen at the time of the upload.