First Steps on your new Job as a Salesforce Developer

Great, you’ve landed @ your new Salesforce Developer gig and have your local environment ready (see referenced blog post below for local setup) … What should you do next?

If you need help getting your local development environment configured for Salesforce Development, check this blog post.

Why complete the following steps?

Good practice of backing up your sandboxes (and especially production orgs) locally
You want to do some LWC development (needs to be done in an IDE such as visual-studio code)
Your team utilizes a dev-ops pipline for deploying
You want to try out linters for Apex / other plug-ins (non-existent for Developer Console)
Coding for long hours in Salesforce developer Console is horrible experience

Create a new Salesforce project locally

Open VS Code && inside your blank project folder … press ctrl + shift + p (to bring up commands) …

SFDX: Create Project with Manifest :this will scaffold a blank Salesforce project and provide you with a package.xml file

Select standard after running ‘SFDX: Create Project with Manifest`

Locate (in manifest folder) package.xml and upate it to include additional types such as ApexClass

Connect your local project to your desired Salesforce-Org Open commands again (ctrl + shift + p) and enter … SFDX: Authorize an Org

Select Sandbox or Production

Follow the prompt && provide log-in details (on success you will land in the desired org in a new browser tab)

Verify you are connected to a Salesforce Org in your VS Code project

Inside your Salesforce project open a new terminal window
Run the following command SFDX force:org:list
Verify you see Connected Status next to an Org Id with relevent Username (and whichever alias you provided in the steps above)

Perform a Retrieve Source to bring down your Salesforce Org’s meta-data to your local project

navigate to the package.xml file again (inside manifest folder)
right-click (anywhere on the file) and select SFDX: Retrieve Source in Manifest from Org (will retrieve all the meata-data for the various types specified in the package.xml file) ![sfdx-retrieve-source-in-manifest-from-org]

Great, now you have backed up the crucial customizations of your Salesforce Org and can begin to do the following:

perform retrieves/pushes of entire codebase from package.xml (not recommended for Pushes)
develop new features locally
deploy/back up classes, components, etc… one file at a time by simply right-clicking on that file and selecting the command (will only perform action on the open file)