Ana A. has been working as a developer on our team in Ecuador for more than six months. During this time she has achieved her Salesforce Platform Developer I and MuleSoft Developer – Level 1 certification. Let’s look at what MuleSoft does and why getting certified is a good career move.
Understanding APIs
To understand MuleSoft, it is important to understand what an API is. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s like a user interface but is not built for humans to understand, it is built for software. MuleSoft allows the software to connect with other applications. To sum it up, MuleSoft is an API and integration platform that allows businesses to connect their data, applications, and devices with others. The entire MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™ is designed to make it easier to create, maintain, and share APIs. They’ve created an entire API ecosystem around it, expanding the API ecosystem to include not only software developers but non-developers like Salesforce administrators with MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce.
Importance of integrations
You’re probably asking yourself, why are these APIs so important? In MuleSoft’s recent survey of global IT leaders, they found that “the average enterprise has its data scattered across as many as 900 different systems, some of which don’t even belong to the organization.” Combine that with their estimate that enterprises spend $3.5 million USD per year on integration, and you’ll see that there is an incredible opportunity for developers certified in integration ecosystems like MuleSoft. The first step in getting the certification is to understand all of the MuleSoft capabilities, features, and tools.
Certification MuleSoft Developer – Level 1 (Mule 4)
There are four MuleSoft certification paths you can follow. We are just going to focus on just the developer path. To start working on your first certification, Ana highly recommends taking the course Anypoint Platform Development: Fundamentals (Mule 4). This course has 13 modules and is composed of videos, walkthroughs, model quizzes, surveys, do-it-yourself exercises, and a self-assessment quiz. For you to complete this course, you must finish every part, then score over 70% on the self-assessment quiz. The best part of this course is that MuleSoft allows you to make two attempts at the certification for free. Ana also complemented her study with these additional resources:
- Youtube video: MuleSoft Training For Absolute Beginners
- MuleSoft Blog: Mule 4 error handling demystified
- MuleSoft Blog: Mule 4 error handling deep dive
- Patryk Bandurski, MuleSoft Ambassador: Error Handling in Practice Quiz
- Youtube video: Three-layered Connectivity Architecture Explained | Technical Introduction to MuleSoft
The easiest thing about MuleSoft for Ana was learning how to design an API with RAML, which is a RESTful API modeling language that is easy to learn. In Anypoint Platform, you will find the design center, the exchange tool, and the API manager. Ana enjoys working with the platform because it is very intuitive. It even lets you design and implement APIs using drag and drop components.
The most difficult part of getting certified for her was the error handling topic and order of execution. Order of execution can vary depending on the flow you’re building or if the calling flow has scope for error handling, but she was able to master the subject with the additional training resources shared above.
Salesforce and MuleSoft
If you’re a developer already working with Salesforce, you’ll be interested to know that MuleSoft has a Salesforce module with many connectors. It allows you to build an API that can manage a Salesforce org, database operations, or metadata operations like creating, updating, inserting, or deleting records and more. An example would be a connector called ‘create a record’ , which allows the API to create a record (or whenever an object is needed) specifying the configuration or a specific organization.
The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform also works with Salesforce Experience Cloud through a managed package called MuleSoft Anypoint API Community Manager. It allows companies to create developer communities around the APIs they are managing with Anypoint Platform. This helps them better manage access to their APIs and it helps their developer communities more easily adopt those APIs, and a great advantage is that the company can brand their APIs.
Training at Oktana
When Ana was studying for this certification, she heard a lot about the power of MuleSoft, and how this could improve her career, so she wanted to try it.
“Oktana helped me a lot with all the resources to start my training. I also had a mentor in the company, so he helped me every time I had a question. This was very helpful”.
Ana A.
Our team is constantly growing, in Ecuador and across the Americas. If you want to enhance your career with Salesforce and MuleSoft, apply for one of our open opportunities. Our training team works closely with the developers to help them achieve their certifications, just like Ana did.
Tips for your first MuleSoft certification
- Every time you finish a module in the MuleSoft course, play around with Anypoint Studio. Practice creating new flows with different connectors that you learned in the course. That way you can debug them and understand how the order of execution works for each component or connector.
- The exam has many questions about the order of execution, so make sure you understand that properly.
- Ana encountered problems installing the exam proctor software on Mac, she recommends taking your exam on a Windows system to make things easier.
If you want to know more about MuleSoft, we recommend reading about our latest MuleSoft projects to get a better understanding of the great things you can achieve.
