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CJ & The Duke host ServiceNow Developer Advocate Brad Tilton. We discuss Hacktoberfest, code snippets, the Docs program for api samples, ServiceNow source control, & the new UI Builder.
Authentic, Authoritative, Unapologetic ServiceNow commentary by Cory "CJ" Wesley and Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk
[00:00:00] Duke: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another CJ and the duke as always. I'm your co-host Robert, the duke Fedoruk
[00:00:07] CJ: And I am Corey CJ, Wesley.
[00:00:09] Duke: No sponsors today because we have a very special guest from mothership leads and gentlemen, Mr. Brad. Brad, how are you?
[00:00:17] Brad: Hello. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:20] Duke: And we appreciate you being here.
[00:00:22] CJ: Absolutely.
[00:00:23] Duke: So I'm pretty sure everybody knows who Brad Tilton is, but just in case, , why don't you give a brief intro?
[00:00:29] Brad: Sure. I am a senior developer advocate, , with a developer program at service now. and what that means is I am talking to service now, developers. , and when I say service down developer, I mean, anybody who's building stuff on service now. So you may not think of yourself as a hardcore developer or quote unquote developer.
but anybody building something on service now, I think is a developer, no matter what your level of coding is, so I've been in this role for, coming up on two years. I've been at service now for about five years. And before that I spent eight years in the ecosystem, as a customer admin and developer.
And then I was with a partner for a while, doing all sorts of things. So I've been in the ecosystems and. And it's been a lot of fun to watch everything grow and, have some relationships that have been really long in the ecosystem as well.
[00:01:24] Duke: Actually one thing what do you do at service now?
[00:01:27] Brad: Yeah. So at service now I'm a developer advocate. So I work in the developer program. I've also done some, technology partner. Technical advisory stuff. And then I've worked in the outbound product team for our platform, , which is now our creator workflows product. So right now I'm with the developer program.
So I am working with developers who are building apps on the platform.
[00:01:49] CJ: love the way that you say it like a developer to you as anyone who wishes building anything on the platform. I think imposter syndrome right. Is a little rampant in the tech industry.
Right? Because some, this stuff comes really easy to some folks and some folks it doesn't, and the easier it comes to you and the better you are at it, it seems like the more prone you are to thinking that you're missing something. And so letting everyone know that if you're out there and you're working on the platform and you're building anything, it doesn't matter how complex or how simple you're developing.
And just dive in on that, right? own that and continue to upgrade your skillset.
[00:02:22] Brad: I totally agree There's lots of different ways to get into it too, which is, a lot of fun. You know, you've got people that are, maybe designers or front-end people that don't have a lot of. Formal development expertise that kind of get in through service portal or whatever the front end development tool of the time is, and then end up doing other things.
You have people that come in because they're PowerShell experts and they've done a bunch of orchestration and then they get into other things. and so, you know, there's lots of different ways to get into building apps on the platform and automating things. And, , it's really more of a. how much time you want to spend learning and, how interested you are in it is probably the biggest hurdle, rather than, having formal development experience, which I don't have any, I don't have a computer science degree or anything like that.
[00:03:11] CJ: Yeah, you can tell me that,
[00:03:13] Duke: No. Wait, I just like to ask next. Wow.
[00:03:20] CJ: you know, I, I say it as, as someone who sat through like a, you know, one of your knowledge sessions in the past. you've couldn't have sold me that you don't have a degree in this stuff, so, yeah. Kudos to you.
[00:03:30] Brad: Well, I think that's really. That's kind of the power of the platform, right. if you are interested in learning it, there are lots of different ways to learn. And, , I was on the service desk and, always loved doing web development type things. And, you know, had the opportunity.
They were like, Hey, we need somebody to learn this new platform that we're going to be using. And I volunteered for it. That's how I got into it. It was just really me getting in there and doing some learning, over the.
[00:03:58] CJ: Nice.
[00:03:59] Duke: for you.
[00:04:00] CJ: Yeah. And gray for everyone out there listening without a degree too. I mean, that's a great aspiration.
[00:04:06] Duke: No doubt. can we just go on a tangent here? Because. When I think back where my 13 year career service now and all the people.
You know, got to rub shoulders with and just the prodigious amount of talent that has put this ecosystem up on his back and run for the touchdown. there's almost a visible relationship between the people who are so excellent that I've met and not having a traditional comp side degree or development background.
Do you guys ever feel like HR departments kind of. They look too hard for what they think they should be looking for, that they missed this forest through the trees.
[00:04:39] Brad: Yeah, I, think, uh, I think that that can happen, you know, if you look at some, job descriptions and you look at some of the requirements and they don't actually match up with what somebody actually needs for that, job, whether it's a developer admin or something like that.
Uh, I think there's absolutely some of that out there. , And yeah, I mean, you, you don't, have to have a lot of deep programming, knowledge, to. build apps and be successful. again, I think it's really more about, what you're willing to spend time on, learning.
And, one of the reasons I really like this ecosystem and the platform itself is that you can come into it, , with different backgrounds and especially on, Larger teams. It's really nice to have a diversity of background and have people that have direct process expertise that are coming in and learning the technology.
And then you have some people that are, really deep, coding and their, their learning process. And, you know, it's great to have a combination of all of those skillsets on team.
[00:05:40] CJ: Absolutely. Right. Like, I love to have a diverse team.
like that, they all bring something different based on their bank. And various places and it helps bring additional value to the client in my experience.
[00:05:51] Duke: so we're recording this on October 18th and understand there is this thing called hack Tober Fest going on. And, I know that the dev MVP program has a lot of people heavily involved in that. What can you tell us?
[00:06:05] Brad: Yeah. So hack Tober Fest is an event that runs every October. It's been around for a number of years. I don't remember which how many, how many times it's been around. I think we've done this as maybe our fourth or fifth year as the service now developer program participating. but heck Tober Fest is an event it's sponsored by digital ocean and it encourages participation in the open source community.
overall, not just service now, and we have been participating and giving service now developers a way to. Participate and , you have to do four things to, qualify, to get the swag from digital ocean, which is a t-shirt and stickers and some other things. and so, , we're trying to give service now developers, a place where they can contribute to October.
and, you know, earn some of those points. So we actually have a blog up at, devlink.sn/oktoberfest. and that blog is really the best place to go. If you're interested in participating, , it's got a link to the HEC Tober Fest website where you can register, and then it's got links to the five ways that we, as the service now developer program are participating in a hack Tobar Fest and those are.
The big push this year is our code snippets a repository. there's a link to that on that blog post. but this is a way for you to. take a look at some of our API APIs that may not be very well-documented or they may be documented.
They may not have examples on how to use them. and you can go in there and write a little code snippet for how to use that API, and submit that, and that counts towards your hacked Tober Fest participation. We've got a way for you to build an app and app engine studio, and then, sync that to get hub and then link to it from one of our repos.
You can do integration, hub, spokes, instant scan checks, and then also any syntax editor macros that you want to participate. So those are our five primary ways of participating this year. we've actually gotten, I think we're. four or five X more participation this year than we've ever had.
And a lot of that is because of, Earl dookay, our newest developer advocate, built this really cool, code snippets, repo that has integration into the S and devs, slack community, , where you can, do a lot of things in there through this slack integration. so I do encourage everybody to check out that blog post, uh, it's the best way.
To get in there and get involved. You still have til the end of the month to make your four approved pull request. and those can be on all five of the, different ways we have to participate. They can just be on one of them. any four pull requests against a hack Tober Fest, repository. and it's, it's pretty easy to get involved.
, at this point, there's a lot of history you can go in there and look at what everybody's doing and do something yourself. And so I would encourage everybody no matter what you think your level is in service now, there should be a way for you to get to those four pull requests, in hacked over Fest.
still.
[00:09:14] CJ: I'm looking at the blog, now, and, I looked at it previously. It was one of the things that prompted me to reach out to you to ask you to be on the show. And I mean, this, this is just awesome. And, you know, going in and looking at the GitHub with, the code snippets. like, this is amazing.
Like, I dunno, like I'm literally having like a geek out moment right here, just looking at all of this stuff and I don't know, it reminds me of old school Wiki combined with I don't know, like, all of the best insights mined from the community. with all of that, all of that code exchanging, right.
Just kind of taken out and distilled down and put into one place so that you can then go and, and just, peruse like some of the cool stuff that people have built. this is awesome. Like there's an entry in here for an XL. I mean, yeah, I'm sorry. I mean, just looking through this stuff and I'm like super excited for this.
I'm definitely going to, get my, um, four, um, pull requests in before it ended a month so I can get my swag, but I think I'm going to be contributing to the coast. Nip is as well, and probably doing a lot of review there as well. And this is just really, really awesome stuff. You haven't check this stuff out.
Definitely. I would say everyone listening. I go there now and look over all of this stuff. This is just, this is literally literally you get on this blog post and you'll have the same level of geek out that I'm having right now, because this is just really.
[00:10:36] Brad: Yeah. I mean, the, the service now community over the years has always been, in my experience, a pretty positive place in terms of people wanting to share what they've done and kind of give back. NA to everybody and help people out. And this is just another way to do that. It's, it's been really fun to see.
the interaction that we've had is, as I mentioned, it's a lot more than we've had in the past. And, , that's been really awesome, as somebody whose job it is to, make sure the community is. Kind of going well and everything it's been really fun to see. and that code snippets specifically, , we do a developer survey every year.
so if you're listening to this, we usually put it out, at the end of Q1, And so we survey a lot of developers and they tell us, you know, what they think about our products and the program and the community and all sorts of things. and the number one piece of feedback we got was that, we don't have enough code examples, on our API documentation.
And so this was one way to say, okay, how do we get more code examples out there? And so this code snippets, repo was one of those things. And then at the same time, something that was happening that we weren't actually aware of when we came up with this idea for heck Tober Fest, was that there's another program.
That's run by the docs team that they just went live with, where you can formally submit a code example. I think we have about. 700 API APIs that don't have code examples. And, uh, you can go in, there's actually a link from the code snippets repo. We have another blog post, I think it's, devlink.sn/code dash.
Example dash program, maybe something like that, but there's a link from the code snippets, repo. but you can go in and submit a code example for one of those 700 API APIs. and if it makes it in there, I think we'll send. a gift card or a t-shirt or something. and you know, you'll know that your code made it onto the official documentation.
So this is both a, you know, Hey, we have this repo that anybody can go reference, but then there's also, uh, you can actually contribute to the docs. And that's something personally that I would love to see us do more of, because I know we have a lot of developers out there who would love to contribute to our documentation and API example.
[00:12:57] Duke: I'm getting like super warm fuzzies about,
[00:13:00] CJ: Right.
[00:13:03] Duke: you know, what I'm talking about, right. The Wiki. feels like it's feels like the old school Wiki, where you had that back channel account. You can actually talk about what the Wiki was saying. And like, I know docs has that stuff. You can comment, but to actually contribute doing the chef kiss over here.
[00:13:18] Brad: Yeah, it's out there. Go can go check it out. And, you can submit a code.
[00:13:23] Duke: And for those listening, we are going to put all the links for all the stuff we're talking about in the description below. So just be sure to check that, now or at, you know,
[00:13:30] CJ: . This is all interesting stuff.
And I'm going to switch gears here a little bit though and ask about source control is one of the things that I keep hearing about these kinds of rumors, that there's a new way of doing source control or update management in service now across instances. And, uh, I wonder if you're at a guy who can give us a little bit more information on what the future of this is,
[00:13:52] Brad: Yeah. I can definitely speak to that a little bit. I am a guy that knows some about our source control integration. Although we have some people like Andrew barns, who are always talking to customers about how they can do this a little bit. , and we do have a, of, some of the resources we can put in here.
We did a creator toolbox that kind of shows how you can manage your development through source control. But , one of the reasons that I like hack Tober Fest, is that it does encourage people to get into get hub and learn how the process works and get hub a little bit. I know for me, when we first came out with this source control integration with GitHub through studio, it had a lot of limitations at first, but it was still, , kind of intimidating for me as someone who was not a professional developer who did.
Source control. And I, and I think that's true for a lot of service. Now, developers, we maybe got into service now and started doing things and we used update sets, to capture everything and move those things through the stack, uh, to where we may not have a lot of. Experience with source control and it's intimidating.
So what this allows you to do is really get into get hub. the barrier to entry for October Fest is pretty low. Uh, you just have to know how to fork a repo and make a pull request. And there are step-by-step instructions on how to do that. and that introduces you to how these things work, and get hub and, managing, your development through source control. It's really, you know, where we're headed with the product. We've made a lot of, enhancements over the last, I think four or five releases on what we support through source control. Orlando was a really big or Orlando or Paris w was a really big. released for us where we started supporting, global files through source control.
and we did some Delta loading, to where, previously, if you, installed an app through a source control, it would delete the previous version of the app. And then re-install the new version. And so you lose data and things like that. we don't do that anymore. And this really lets you, manage your development across multiple development instances.
you can use branching and merging, to manage different versions of your application. so , you can be working on a new feature and then have to do like a bug fix and switch branches. And then deploy that branch. Uh, and so source control is really all about making it easier for developers to manage development, especially across different versions.
Uh, and then we have the app repo that lets you deploy those applications through your stack. And then the cool part about everything is that, it's all. automateable right. So we've got integration, hub spokes, there's API APIs, uh, where you can say, Hey, I'm going to commit this to get, and then you can say, Hey, this is committed to get, I want to automatically run some ATF tests.
Uh, and then if everything passes, I want to go ahead and automatically deploy this to my test instance. so this is really where you can do some of that CIC de. and automate your whole process, uh, in terms of development. and hopefully, you know, that reduces the amount of bugs and errors.
And, you know, we're still looking at, how do we make things easier? how do we make it easier to have more development instances, all sorts of things like that. , but you know, managing your development through source control is really the direction where we're going, with develop.
[00:17:12] CJ: this is amazing, right? Well, first of all, I felt like it. It starting to professionalize the developer, in service now. Right. And, that might not necessarily be the right word to say, but, like you mentioned, we all kind of, not everyone, but a lot of us got into service now, just kind of by like, sideways transition from another position.
And, and, um, and it something that we weren't necessarily doing, you know, professional development, we kind of got thrown on the platform. It's like, Hey, figure this out. Or, Hey, we need someone to do this and you stick your hand up or you're the only person who has cycles or what have you. And you just kind of figure it out.
And eventually you realize this thing is like really fricking cool. And then it's, six, seven years. And you're a great service now developer, but you're not a formerly trained developer, right? You haven't used GitHub and source control and you don't have like this whole background of, team-based development, you know, with, branching and all of those sorts of things.
by. At the same time there's been this, tension with update sets as well. That as the, platform has matured, maybe they just haven't been good enough. Or, they're trying to make them good enough to accommodate all of the new features and service now, and kind of, you know, a team development and all sorts of things like that.
It felt like something new was new. And this feels like a great direction to take the planet.
[00:18:31] Duke: And I got to say in the last few years, you know, we're trying to attract a lot more professional developers into the service now ecosystem. And I've heard a lot of, not friendly critiques about how, oh, what's this updates, that stuff. And it's just. I think what people have to realize is that when this all first came out, like service now had to invent a way. to move its code from insistence since I don't think get hub existed 13 years ago, maybe I showing my ignorance here, so, correct me if I'm wrong, but what else were they supposed to do up until now? So, it speaks volumes to me that a ship, the size of service now can just move into what has emerged as the standard.
And they could do that, over the course of a couple of versions.
[00:19:11] Brad: one of the previous dev advocates, I don't remember whether it was Josh or Dave used to say, we make we being serviced now, , make the hard things easy and the easy things hard. Uh, and, and that was referring to. It's really easy to spin up a new app. you can create a table, you can create a flow.
Uh, you automatically get a whole bunch of stuff with that, that lets you, automate this process real quickly. , but then when it's time to deploy that thing, I was supposed to do this in an update. Um, and so I think what we're working on is making those easy things that are supposed to be easy, actually be easy.
So, using source control, from the beginning, and one of the great things that the source control integration gives you, that, uh, is not, obvious right away. is, there's this little feature that I love in source control, where if you have an app and it could be a scoped app or a global app that's connected to source control and a developer goes in and makes a change to a file, in that like a business rule.
And then a second developer comes along and tries to change it. And that first developer has not committed their, a update to get a it'll actually tell you. Hey, somebody else worked on this and it's still sitting in the instance and hasn't been deployed to get, so you can either, update it as them or not update it.
But it's, a little bit more of a, you know, it's not quite file walking and that sort of thing. but we're getting better. And in the way of, managing multiple updates to something, where if you are using update sets, Uh, you would not know that that happened until you had an error or you were batching or merging your update sets or whatever you're going to do.
So that's a little source control feature that I really like, uh, as somebody who's worked on projects in the past where multiple developers are working on the same thing. but there's some little things like that, that really make the source control integration, powerful.
[00:21:08] CJ: Yeah, I've been in that situation before now. And that sounds like a great. new feature. I mean, you've been on a, on a team. you're going live. , and you got a bunch of folks and we're all, you know, building all over the place. And now we've got to get all of this stuff out of the dev and VR environment and a production and wait.
Oh, did you work on that business rule? Crap. I worked on a business rule. Okay. Like who, who worked on it last? Or what did you do? Right. and sometimes the only solution for that is to actually rebuild business role, To take into account the changes, you know, developer a may, along with the changes that developer be made and then redeploy that as a new update.
And, that's fine if you only have a couple, right. But when you start getting it to.
the point where Mescalin and to dozens of these things, I mean, it can really hold up and implement. So yeah, this is great.
[00:21:54] Duke: So as somebody who, doesn't have a whole lot of familiarity with get and source control, is it something where. if I'm working on this script, include, say, I put it up into the repo every day.
[00:22:05] Brad: so generally, the way our source control integration works is you have an app and that app gets, committed to get. So that could be a global app. It could be a scoped app. but when you are, you know, you're, you're generally committing it to get when you have. Completed a story or, or whatever your development work is.
So you know that in terms of like how often you're committing, that's probably more of an organizational, , philosophy than , an across the board standardization. Although I could be wrong there. but yeah, it is still something that needs to be, planned and communicated, moving from update sets to source control is not going to magically make all of your processes work perfectly.
it's going to make it easier for you to have processes, that work consistently, I think, but you still need them and still need to communicate and have somebody managing that.
[00:22:57] Duke: I was wondering if it, if it could possibly alleviate any of that, like Corey and I talk about it every once in a while of the whole, you're halfway done and they're like, oh, we're doing a clone. Make sure all your stuff's out in an update set now.
[00:23:08] Brad: Yeah, it definitely helps with that sort of thing. the part you get with source control that you don't get with update sets is the branching. , I think they call them like scratch branches sometimes where you create a branch just to hold some of the development you're doing, , And then you can, switch to your main feature branch and do some bug fix and deploy that and then switch back to the other branch.
So get hub can, basically, those branches are different versions of your application, that get hub can hold on to, more than one of them at once. , which is where a lot of the power.
[00:23:39] CJ: Yeah, I love that functionality right there that just gives me, like, I could just think of so many times that would have saved my button, the pass, you know, saved the whole bunch of time.
[00:23:47] Duke: So in the green room you were talking to us about,
[00:23:50] CJ: only liking red eminent.
[00:23:55] Brad: I like all and M's.
[00:23:57] Duke: , you were talking to us about like source control and the repository being two different concepts and importantly different. Can you talk a little bit about.
[00:24:07] Brad: That's a great point to come back to, I think there, there are a few different points of confusion, uh, when it comes to, , managing development through source control in the app repo, and one of them is, we say app repo and then we say source control, but then.
You have a GitHub repo and there was some confusion there. but what we're saying is source control is really used for managing your development. Right? You've got a, you can use branching and do some merging and, Code reviewing and get, if you're going to do that. and that's really about managing your development, maybe across multiple dev environments, maybe just one, but w when it comes time to deploy your application, that's when you can go through the app repo, which is a service now specific thing, where you publish your app to the repo and then install it, , on, you know, your test instance, and then your product instance where update sets were.
Kind of trying to do both. and this new world, quote unquote, , you've got source control for managing dev and then apropos apropos for deploying it. and, , you're also able to automate the deployment of your app through the repo, So that's really the big difference. Apropos is for deployment and source controls for managing dev
[00:25:22] CJ: Would you say that you, you guys have seen a lot. Uptake and the use of both of these, now, or is this still very much in trying to get the word out and get folks to understand that these, features are available and that then, you know, folks should be starting to utilize them and unlocking this new function now?
[00:25:39] Brad: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't have any like raw data available to me. So anecdotally, I would say we definitely have customers that are using, , the source control integration and an app repo. And then we still have a lot of customers using updates sets. There are lots of customers that have built their own, really impressive, systems for automating, , development, using update sets, , or managing your development, and then automating the deployment through update sets.
Uh, and so, you know, those all still work, It's just, using GitHub and source control unlocks some things that you don't have when you use update sets. So I think where we are is in kind of a transition phase where we are trying to do some advertising of this functionality, but we do have some customers that are using its success.
[00:26:26] CJ: Nice.
[00:26:26] Duke: Okay. I got a question for you, Brad. , lot of people are talking about the new UI builder slash seismic. And everybody's still trying to figure out what is it, was it do? How do I learn it? Especially, you know, there's a lot more people saying this is going to be the new normal, rather quickly.
what could you do to help our audience get a leg ahead?
[00:26:46] Brad: Yeah. So, uh, the now experience UI framework, uh, is this new, a UI framework foundation, that we released, a while back, , and UI builder and the Quebec release, , is. Kind of a dragon drop, Wiziwig way to drag these components that were created using the framework onto a page and they can talk to each other.
and there's a lot of power there. it's been a lot of fun for me to get into, um, kind of a front end guy, in terms of where my expertise lies. and so I've been doing a lot of exploration of it and, you know, I've got a UI builder by it's video series that I did on a lot of the Quebec functionality.
But we actually have, I think this month, we've got a number of UI builder, , modules that are out on the developer site, , learning, , area where we have a UI builder course, and then the course has different modules. And we started with the, uh, pages module. And I think we have really. Two more at this point.
there's another one coming out, like in the next couple of weeks and then there's another one being written also. so I think we've got pages, events, data, resources, I think we're going to have like client site interactions, EVM. so if you're looking to learn UI builder, now's a really good time.
because while I have spent a good amount of time, Doing UI builder enablement. My enablement is basically like I go in and I learned some things and then I blog and do videos about them. And then I learned more things in blogging and do videos about them. It may be, is not the best way to actually learn a thing.
but it's the easiest way for me to enable a thing. but what we have now is we have our, professional, learning, content writers on the dev site. , excellent at their jobs. And that if you've gone into the dev site and taken any of the courses, they are, you know, full on doing UI builder content right now.
So if you go into the dev site and click on learn, you know, you'll get a list of courses. And one of them says UI builder, and, you can go in and look at the, I think currently three or four modules, and that's going to grow, to, I think, five or six by the end of. so there's a lot more content available over the last month.
, I think we're going to have a now learning, UI builder fundamentals course at some point this year. so that'll be there as well. So we're really ramping up on, on UI builder. , and then, UI builder will also get a lot of product updates as well over the next few releases.
[00:29:12] CJ: I've I feel , like, how did you guys know? Right. that this was needed, you know, just like dive in into the UI builder. And like, I haven't really utilized it much. Intimidated by it to be quite honest. , so when I, when I hear all of this enablement, that's going on around it, on the developer side, and the learning and the courses that a, an a fundamentals and, you know, all of this stuff, that's being packaged around it to kind of get you up to speed on it.
yeah, that makes Me really happy to be honest.
[00:29:41] Brad: Me too. Me too. I, you know, I've done a lot of it, but when we get our professional learning content, people in their building on it, that, that's what I meant. It makes me real happy. We're going to have some really good content.
[00:29:54] Duke: How accessible do you think UI builder is going to be? it kind of an every man tool or is it more a pro coder?
[00:30:01] Brad: That's a good question. I would say, , right now it's probably not quite a like no code tool. You know, it's not at the same level as app engine studio is where I can, point a lot of people at app engine studio, and they can come in and figure out how to build a working app pretty easily.
, so I don't think it's something where you can just point like a low code user and have. Build an experience really quickly. It does take some time learning how it works. but I would say the level of code required is much lower than something like service portal. so, you know, service portal, if you really want to make it do something that's outside of.
You know, all of the widgets that you have, you have to build custom widgets and then you have to get into angular JS. , and so, I think with UI builder, , there's not quite the level of coding required. , although there is some, complexity and learning curve and, figuring out how it works and, that's going to get easier.
, , the UI builder team, I'm pretty close to them and. They're aware of where the, complexities lie and, , working on making it less complex and more accessible.
[00:31:09] CJ: So you mentioned it, a service portal in there, and that made me think of something I was thinking about earlier in our conversation and the fact that you mentioned that you're a front end guy and, you know, I started put two and two together and there's a lot of service now front ends at this point.
Which one is your favorite?
[00:31:24] Brad: Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, I like change. I like new stuff. So I think my favorite is UI builder. just because of what I'm able to do with it without heavily writing code. , so , we did a creator toolbox episode over the. Where I took, the, I think it was the custom widget training from the dev site, which was actually, it was a creator con lab that I wrote, probably four or five years ago on building like a notes app, in service portal, using a couple of custom widgets that talk to each other.
And, uh, and then they.
[00:32:00] CJ: think I was in that one.
[00:32:01] Brad: Yeah, they kind of turned to that into the training and, made it a lot better and, everything, and turned it into training. And so we actually replicated that on a, like a 40 minute, creator toolbox episode where. Did functionally the same thing as the service portal thing.
and we had written maybe three lines of code or something. It was, it was a lot less code. Uh, and it was kinda neat to like, take that thing that I had done a while back and replicate it, quicker than I could have done it. If I tried to replicate it at a service portal right now from memory.
and, yeah, so I think UI builder is probably my favorite. you know, I'll always have kind of a sweet spot for CMS because that's really where I cut my teeth in the, in the service now ecosystem from my first knowledge presentation, I think was that knowledge 10, uh, on a CMS. and so I built out a lot of CMS portals for customers back in the day, but I do really enjoy using UI builder.
[00:32:57] CJ: So you, you were deep in the, , in the bowels of jelly back in the day.
[00:33:01] Brad: That's right. All there. I was all over the slightly loony blog posts on the community and yeah, that was, uh,
[00:33:10] Duke: People don't even know have a slightly loony anyway.
[00:33:12] Brad: yeah.
[00:33:13] CJ: So one more question. Um, Brett, cause we're getting, we're getting approaching time here. , but one of the things that I wanted to ask and, and duke and I have talked about this before on the, on the podcast here, how do you stay on top of all of the new development that's coming down the pipe, here and on this side of, service and all that and say the outside of service now, right? Like we have. it's is really hard to keep up with the pace of innovation. And I love the pace of innovation, right? I'm all about new and shiny and making things better. But when it comes down to it, like is really hard to really say, okay, I'm an expert in a certain percentage of the platform.
Like I could five years ago. How do you, how do you keep up?
[00:33:55] Brad: Yeah, it's tough. I mean, the platform is so big now compared to where it was, back when I would, you know, the day that they released the new release notes on the Wiki, I was just in there, looking at every single problem that was closed and what the thing was. And, you know, I would read all of the release notes and that that's not even a thing I could dream about at this point.
The platform is so big. , but for me personally, I am focused on, building apps on the platform. So I generally don't keep up with ITSs and CSM and HR and all of those things that are outside of building apps on the platform. But even then, it's really difficult for me to stay up to date with what's new with the platform.
So I kind of start with. what's new with studio, what's new with app engine studio flow designer integration hub, and I'll, you know, look at release notes. I still, the first thing I do is read release notes when they make them available to us, which is a little bit earlier than customers and partners.
, and then, we do some internal enablement, that, we actually have a lot of internal enablement, at different points in the development process that I've actually had to stop myself from, like UI builder. I am really interested in. So I kind of have to keep myself from looking too much at what's coming out in the future in UI builder, because it may or may not actually make it into the release.
but yeah, I just kind of have to narrow what it is that I'm interested in learning about. and you know, a lot of my, job right now and Chuck and Earl, is we do a lot of new release enablement. And so we have to figure out. All right. What's all the new stuff. And then, okay.
What is the new stuff that developers are going to care about? And then also, like, what are the, what's the new stuff that they may not think they need to care about, but they really do need to care about, and we need to especially amplify those things. so a lot of my time is spent on, learning the new things, coming out, , talking to product teams and, , talking to developers.
I think sometimes. , we think something's going to be really obvious and then you start talking to developers and it's not that obvious, and we know that we need to spend more time enabling that area. so yeah, I think specializing is about the only way to do that. At this point. You, the platform's too big to stay on top of everything.
[00:36:09] CJ: it was kind of what I figured.
[00:36:13] Duke: All right, guys, we are at time. Corey, if somebody wanted to reach out to you, how would they do it?
[00:36:17] CJ: Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn at Corey Wesley. I accept practically every connection request. Uh, you can also find me at, , take guanine.com where we do practically everything servicing unrelated.
[00:36:26] Duke: And you can reach me@wwwdottheduke.digital. There. You can find my upcoming course hired the definitive guide to profiles that when service now jobs and, Brad, how are they reaching?
[00:36:37] Brad: I am on LinkedIn and Twitter at whatever the thing is slash Brad Tilton. And I also accept pretty much all requests and, feel free. to reach out to me, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to send me a message or something. but. I always respond. And even if I don't know the answer to something I will usually tell you where to go to try to find your answer.
[00:37:00] Duke: Alright, thanks for joining us, Brad, we'll talk to.
[00:37:02] Brad: Yeah. Thanks
[00:37:02] CJ: I really appreciate it.
[00:37:03] Brad: Thanks for having me.