Nobody tells you upfront how opinionated Salesforce is. You come in expecting an API integration — something you've done dozens of times — and about two days in, you realize you're not just connecting to a database. You're connecting to an entire ecosystem with its own vocabulary, its own security model, its own way of thinking about data relationships. That adjustment period is real, and skipping it mentally is how projects get into trouble early.

I want to walk through what building a Salesforce-integrated application actually looks like from the ground up — not the happy path from the documentation, but the version with the decisions, the friction points, and the things worth knowing before you start.…