The five things to remember from Module 1

If you remember nothing else tonight:

1. Mule application
   = deployable integration application

2. Flow
   = pipeline of processing steps

3. Mule Event
   = payload + attributes + variables

4. DataWeave
   = transformation language

5. Connector
   = adapter used to communicate with external systems

And memorize this picture:

                      MULE EVENT
                          │
              ┌───────────┼───────────┐
              ↓           ↓           ↓
           PAYLOAD    ATTRIBUTES     VARS
              │
              ↓
         DataWeave
              │
              ↓
          Connector
              │
              ↓
         Salesforce

---

Your end-of-bootcamp target

By the end of these two days, I want you to be comfortable solving something like this verbally and in code:

“Build an API that receives 1–500 customer records. Validate them, map the external schema to Salesforce Account/Contact, upsert them using external IDs, preserve parent/child relationships, handle partial Salesforce failures, retry transient failures without duplicates, return useful error information, log everything with correlation IDs, and provide automated MUnit plus external API tests.”

That's sufficiently close to real MuleSoft development that you won't have to bluff your way through the interview.

Next: Module 2 — actually building a Mule flow

We'll build a realistic HTTP → Mule → Salesforce Account/Contact integration and I'll show you both the graphical mental model and the Mule XML underneath it. Then Module 3 will be the DataWeave crash course, which is probably the single most important part of these two days.