Camp Apex: Where Salesforce Beginners Can Learn to Code for Free

To a complete novice, learning to code can appear to be a very daunting prospect.

But anyone looking for a “start here” point, completely free and beginner-friendly, now has a handy resource in the form of Camp Apex, a website founded by software engineer Saman Attar. 

What Is Camp Apex? 

Complete beginners can start with the Apex Fundamentals course and learn about the basics of programming concepts and the syntax of Apex. By the end, learners should have a decent understanding of Apex and be able to easily write simple programs.

From here, aspiring coders can take the Deep Dive class and go on to learn about SOQL, DML and Triggers. 

Saman told Salesforce Ben he got the idea from Trailhead, which is how he learned Salesforce skills to begin with. 

He said: “[Trailhead] is not how I learned Apex and it’s not how most people are learning Apex, and that’s simply because the content’s not there for beginners. There’s a lot of great content around some of the more advanced Apex topics, but there’s no content around how you declare a variable, what is a variable, and you don’t get the opportunity to practice that.”

Saman said that he noticed people would leave the platform in search of YouTube videos and the like, and there is “great content” out there, but you lose the hands-on experience and practice which makes Trailhead so effective. 

He said: “I built Camp Apex in a way that you get a very mini bite-sized lesson that takes you about two to three minutes to read about a topic and then pair it with a challenge that you solve right there on the other side of the screen.

“When you do this, you can start from something really small like just learning how to comment out code and you can take it all the way up to object-oriented programming, so queries, triggers, and so on.”

Saman told Salesforce Ben that “at no point” was he ever motivated by using the site to make money for himself.

“I really saw this as a way of honestly getting in volunteer hours and helping out the community, especially when there’s so many other people that came before me in Salesforce that have just given their time to open source projects, answering questions on Stack Exchange, and speaking at conferences and trailblazer meetups.”

Looking to the future, Saman said that coding competitions may be on the horizon, and he wants to push the idea of “engineering excellence” within Salesforce.

Camp Apex: For Developers and Admins

It’s not just a helpful resource for aspiring developers either. We discussed the concept of the “Admineloper“, referring to a Salesforce Admin who has learned developer skills to make them even more effective at being an admin, rather than looking to change roles entirely. 

Saman said: “Just based on my personal experience, some of the admins that I’ve worked with that have been really effective were the ones that were able to just open up an Apex class and at read it. 

“It gives them the ability to be more independent and in my experience there they’ve been more successful. Do you need it holistically? That I can’t answer. But I’ve seen the value added from the teams that I’ve been on.”

We asked Saman about whether now was a good time to be getting into developing, considering the rise of artificial intelligence. 

Marc Benioff recently said that Salesforce would not be hiring more software engineers in 2025 amid a productivity boost from AI. 

Saman said his role as a software engineer specifically has “never really been about writing code”, instead being more about using code as a means to an end to solve a problem. 

He added: “At least based off my interactions with the prompts I’ve been able to interact with, AI is definitely not there yet in terms of being able to take in the whole context of an application and being able to understand and empathize with a user’s requirements and walk them through some of the tradeoffs around technical decisions.”

Saman said that a lot of the work that software engineers do day-to-day is focused around answering those types of problems and then just applying code as a way to solve them.

“I by no means think it’s going to replace any of us, especially not anyone on my team that I work on in my day job.

I wouldn’t be worried about it as someone who’s just getting into the field. If anything, I’d be excited that I now have someone that I can bounce ideas off of.” 

Saman said that if he had access to Claude and Chat GPT and was just getting started, he would practice on his own, but then provide snippets of code to ChatGPT and say, “Give me some feedback about this code”. 

“There’s going to be folks that you’re competing with on the job that are probably just so reliant on ChatGPT and Claude to the point where they’re not thinking how to code,” he said. “They’re just putting in their inputs.”

Saman’s message to ecosystem members, and even complete beginners, is that no matter who you are, Camp Apex is out there for you. 

“It’s free for a reason,” he said. “Go try it out.”

Final Thoughts 

Learning new skills and changing careers can seem an intimidating prospect, especially when that involves getting to grips with a technical subject you’re totally unfamiliar with. 

But Camp Apex is made with this in mind, so anyone with the willingness now has the tools necessary to dip their toe into the world of coding and see how they like it.