You could say Kevin O’Hara started preparing to be a Force.com MVP at a young age. After all, he was 10 when his grandfather sat him down in front of an old computer and taught him to develop in BASIC language. “He showed me how to make the computer beep in different tones, so I learned how to play Jingle Bells,” Kevin remembers. Then he learned how to change the screen’s colors. And he was hooked.
Kevin continued to advance his knowledge from that day on, and his passion led him to study Computer Information Systems at Western Michigan University. His first professional role included selling IBM software, and when that company rolled out Salesforce, Kevin was on the pilot team. It took that one implementation for him to realize he wanted to be developing on the Force.com all the time. So he launched his own business around it, called S2O. When Kevin’s business was acquired several years later, he continued consulting, providing Force.com consulting services for a wide variety of companies. In September, he left consulting and found his way to LevelEleven as CTO.
Kevin has used each of these roles to reach out to the Force.com community. He has been a multiple-session speaker at the last two Dreamforce conferences, published a significant amount of open-source code and created numerous instructional blogs and videos. In his spare time, Kevin has been building new open-source tools to help other developers be more productive with their Force.com development. In addition, he most recently started a Salesforce Developer User Group for Detroit and plans to continue to grow the Force.com community in the metro-Detroit area.
It’s been about six years now, since Kevin first became part of the Salesforce community. He plans on using his MVP status to extend his reach – especially in terms of education. “I am always looking for additional opportunities to teach within the community and help other developers learn, which is why I’m particularly excited to be offered MVP status,” Kevin said. And it makes sense: Some of the knowledge he uses to run LevelEleven’s development today comes from Force.com MVP’s of the past.
According to Dana Le, senior technical programs manager at salesforce.com, this desire to educate is part of what the Force.com team considers when evaluating MVP candidates. In fact, she says it’s the one element candidates are most commonly missing when they are not offered MVP status. Because when it comes to MVP’s: “They steer and shape the community’s focus, direction and culture,” she explained. And Kevin will continue to do just that.
For more on the new Force.com MVP’s, read Salesforce’s blog post on it here.
