in this episode of titans of now we interview the one and only andrew ajb barnes face of the developer program at servicenow organizer of the dev mvp program host of the life code happy hour titans of now reaches a wide audience of servicenow admins devs architects and product owners so check out the description below for sponsorship opportunities if you want to know what i'm up to check out vivid charts vivid charts is a visualization and storytelling platform built on servicenow stop exporting data off platform to get the aesthetic control and experiences that you want hey everyone welcome back to titans of servicenow so good to have you here ladies and gentlemen tonight we have an undisputed titan anyone who takes servicenow development seriously will already know his name because he is the face of the servicenow developer program ladies and gentlemen the one and only andrew barnes hey andrew oh hey thanks so much for having me on thanks so much for being on at the last minute certainly yeah so i asked andrew tonight i'm like when are you gonna get on to titans and he's like how about now so here we are as always we like to start at the beginning so why don't you tell the audience kind of how you got your start with servicenow so six years ago so 2014 i was running enterprise applications for nc state university and we were looking to replace one of those applications with a newer version because the the person who had run it it was a remedy system it was super customized for 15 years and was held together by sheer will of that person and i said if my group's going to take that over we're going to have to you know move this thing up into it it was great the way it was but we needed to to look at what's going on out there in the the world new and so i went to knowledge14 as a prospective customer we evaluated some other products my team at nc state we decided on servicenow and i got so inspired by servicenow that i got rid of every everything else responsibility-wise and just focused on servicenow so that's how i got my start what was the thing that clinched it for you ooh the clincher the developer program so the servicenow developers that i met at knowledge14 the community both the actual onlinecommunity.servicenow.com but but more importantly the actual community of folks around it was just a vibrant and very connected and excited community about their product so that cinched it even more than the product itself was the excitement of the community for their product i was about to say i remember that but it's like anybody who's been in it for two days would remember a touch because it's still going strong at least in my mind it is yeah i mean it it's definitely still going strong i mean the servicenow developer community and just community in general is a is a very positive community it's a pleasure to be a part of folks who are always looking to improve themselves and help others and engage and connect and share and collaborate and that's that's just my favorite bit of the servicenow ecosystem is is its community so there's a lot of people that look up to you because you're like an apex dev in the servicenow space i wonder if you could tell us about one of your projects on servicenow that even you were like wow that was so awesome that i could do that ooh an awesome project so i've got this thing about thinking about past stuff as a developer that's just a a mental space for me is that everything that i have done was easy because it's done i completed it it was easy the hard stuff is the stuff i haven't yet solved so everything that i have done was easy no matter how hard it was at the time as soon as it's completed it's it's now easy in my brain so whenever you ask a question uh like that it's hard for me to think of one that is uh like that but i didn't say hard i said cool but cool it sort of applies the same way to me like it's not cool it's it's done it's easy but the coolest thing was an an itsm implementation that i did for a energy company that was deploying smart meters that their wi-fi interconnected in a mesh network and they were running servicenow they brought in servicenow to run the operations of all of those smart meters and that was just the coolest thing was working with all of those millions of smart meters across all the homes in multiple states and operations to monitor maintain and deploy those smart meters was using the itsm management suite but in a different way than you know you would traditionally think about it because it wasn't in the i.t department i love those stories where it goes beyond just internal support scale and really hits the commercial operation scale they're inspiring stories but they're infrequent but i'm hoping that the future especially when they have stuff like csm all that iot stuff coming in i'm hoping to see a lot more of those stories than internal support yeah i i can see that there's lots of cool stuff you can do with this platform like i like nearly anything i touch in the platform is just just fun to work with and thinking of weird and interesting and fun things to do with it as part of my job which is why my job's so much fun and speaking of your job like for on the off chance that there's people listening who don't know who you are how should somebody know you sure so i'm part of the developer program uh which is developer.servicenow.com so we provide the instances the api documentation the developer training and guides for developers on our platform that's a large part of our program on that site is our developer blog and i along with my friends at servicenow we write those blogs and then i maintain our youtube presence so the servicenow dev program youtube where we do static videos that are you know pre-recorded and then my favorite thing is live code happy hour which is our completely unscripted unprepared just doing live development on fridays typically for an hour every week and it is so much fun because doing a polished demo is it's nice to see the art of the possible with the polished demo but that doesn't really help a developer make a thing right so that's what we do with that show is show you how you can make a polished demo like the roadblocks that you hit and how to work through them and showing that no matter how you good at good you get at this you can still make mistakes everyone will make mistakes and showing you know top-tier developers make mistakes get through it and how they approach that and that we're comfortable showing things that we don't know is why i do that show if you're listening in and you haven't heard of any of these resources uh you are going to be shocked at the quantity of material that is available to you we are going to have all the links in the description so please check down there after the show like i use all of it i use the stuff that's up on the dev site the developer instance site big fan of live coding happy hour as a matter of fact live coding happy hour is what took me from thinking remember when flow designer first came out i do and at least the pitches i was in was like oh it's easier to look at than normal workflow and now your citizen developers can you know put together their own workflows and i was like first of all i mean we could probably have a nice little debate about how good an idea citizen developer is but i thought this isn't going to go anywhere like like this is just kind of like a lightweight workflow engine is that all this is but then i tuned into a live coding happy hour and to see you and dave slusher build really complicated things on live coding happy hour with flow designer really really made me come to jesus on that one for sure so thank you for that oh you're most welcome um it has been a journey with that product as it was is with any product yeah flow designer when it was first released was you know definitely not fully featured uh because nobody wants to wait three years for a thing to be fully featured before you release it that's right not how the world runs you get that minimal viable out there and then you get feedback so that you can make a better product ain't that the truth right and so you know it's it's definitely incremental hilariously this week right now we are featuring flow designer on the developer blog so all of our blogs this week will be about paris features for flow designer and they're very incremental changes at this stage so they're you know quality of life improvements and incremental improvements now um there's not huge big new features for flow designer there's some an integration hub but flow designers sort of entering into that polishing stage would you say that flow designer is now has parity with the old workflow or are they fun are they kind of two different things that have a lot of overlap they are two different things that have a lot of overlap there are just some things that are architecturally difficult to port over to a different methodology and so there's some things that flow designer does that the old workflow doesn't do and vice versa and there's just some you know architectural differences that make it difficult to bridge some of those gaps but mainly feature parity there and and we're about as close as we're ever going to get on feature parody we're doing improvements now quite a bit to flow designers so we have things you can't do in the old workflow designer for sure the uh some of the things the loopbacks aren't very easy to design and use in flow designer and in the current architecture model that's just going to stay that way you know it's funny like for having that capability in in the 12 years i've been doing stuff with workflow like i think i did one loopback it was super important that it did but it was like one use case in in quite a bit and there's probably different ways to do it without necessarily like a literal loopback and flow designer like me there's just other options to to work around that kind of use case there are and you can design things to you know have an equivalence but there's just not that easy go to line 10 kind of functionality to it to keep the interface in a manner that is designed for a lower not not lower skilled a lower uh yeah it's more accessible entry it's more accessible yeah in order to do that you have to you have to make some design decisions i wonder as an insider if you look at certain features a certain way and say why haven't more people adopted this or why don't more people think about this feature in this way so my role at servicenow is to be community centered and i've always got the voice of the developer in my brain and that didn't really change from when i wasn't working as servicenow to when i started to work at servicenow i i have been viewing the things um from the angle of developer and that's what they pay me to do so i i stay very connected to our community and i keep that perspective of the developer that you know the customer or partner developer building on top of our platform so i i keep that viewpoint all the time but is there any like specific product where you're like maybe products that the market hasn't caught up yet um there's certainly things that i wish uh had you know more adoption you you can see that in that i'll focus vlogs on them and highlight them so cicd is one of the things that i have put my uh my efforts behind because i did a lot of work when i was a customer and implementation partner on automating developer pipelines for servicenow developers and uh now there is some tooling that came out in orlando and then enhanced in paris and there's not very much adoption around that i have a pretty good idea why there isn't but that's one thing that i that is there it's usable that the toolkit is there and we just have to start using it to move away from update sets and to move towards source control and automating our development pipeline for servicenow development but that it's an incremental thing so like i understand why we're not there but i'm you know gonna work to get us there awesome now earlier you said that the stuff that you accomplished becomes easy thereafter but i was wondering if maybe you could remember one of those times it was particularly not easy while you were going through it and tell us about a time that andrew barnes thought am i am i going to be able to accomplish this am i going to make it yes there is one that jumps to mind so i was an implementation partner doing development work and i got tasked a thing that was a little daunting which was integrate with the enterprise message bus kafka and to do so some stringent requirements and timings and uh you know how we were working with that system and and to do all of this in uh to build a java app to do that and run that on a mid server and that was a daunting task you know having been focused and not done any java development in my time as a student uh hadn't done any java since then and to say build a full-blown enterprise-grade java app to run for a huge customer and to to do it at uh you know enterprise tier deployment uh level was that was a challenge it was difficult to get through this and some days i banged my head up against the wall and said can i even do this and then to get through it is the same way you tackle any problem that's large and daunting is you make a little bit of progress every time you walk up to it so you just chip away at it and and then in the end you'll get past that roadblock chip away at the stone great advice what features are you most excited about in the uh in the paris release ooh what features am i most excited about you know i'm a guy who gets excited i like new bells and whistles i like new features i like enhancements and so the early release time which is what we're in right now is one of my favorite times even though it's one of the times where i have to do the most writing which i don't like so i write a lot of blogs to highlight all the new features and what is my coolest or most excited feature it's got to be the ability to use the source control for global apps um and the reason i say that is because that has been the the lynch pin behind uh not being able to to use source control for all things in servicenow is is that capability and the bonus that came with that was not uh is when you deploy from source control um it doesn't uninstall and reinstall the app anymore it just does delta loading and that was a factor of adding in the the global because you can't uninstall global things so those those two things combined that's definitely my favorite uh paris feature for sure mine is the process automation builder that's not the right term i mean if i was towing the party line here [Laughter] that would be the feature that uh you know service now wants me to say is process automation designer is the uh the most exciting thing dropped in pairs you know from a product perspective but from a developer perspective right no i was asking andrew barnes i wasn't asking servicenow so yeah i'm glad you came with your authentic self i that's the only way i roll yeah my authentic self uh i think that's what helps uh you know maintain my role at servicenow in what we do is that we brad tilton and i our developer program we speak about these things from the perspective of a developer we don't uh we don't pass along things we don't believe in uh because that hurts everybody right okay i'm gonna give you the last word here so i wonder if you have any advice for people who are just starting their journey on servicenow or if there is something you wish everybody knew a lot more of including us grizzled uh vets what would that be starting out in service now i've helped a bunch of people uh get going in servicenow and including now my wife has been listening to me preach about the service now how good it is and it's wonderful and and so now after six years uh working on the platform uh she has trained herself up to become a servicenow uh developer and has gotten her first job doing it and you can do it is is what i'll say is the resources are out there on developer.servicenow.com and now learning uh and youtube and content providers like you and the other developer mvps produce all of the information and content needed to get started and get going and get better and improve your skills in service now and get into a better place than than wherever you're at right now um and uh one thing i'll plug with that is the sn devs slack which i was a user number two there and promoted that and have grown that into the behemoth of more than 7000 users now that we have there and uh so the community is key here uh with the servicenow space and as we sort of started with that at the beginning and so ending with it i think is uh appropriate this community is great reach out to people read their content ask questions share collaborate be part of our ecosystem not just a consumer that is the truth and uh don't worry all the resources we mentioned i am going to have links in the description so be sure to check that out after you watch andrew thanks so much for your time man it's been a real honor um it's a pleasure to come join you on here uh you're doing just a wonderful show highlighting especially some folks i i didn't know about that are seem really awesome and i want to know them more now and you've you've started that connection so i appreciate it yeah no problem it's a labor of love all right andrew we will see you around thanks everybody for listening thank you all right bye if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching