now uh this is recorded and it will be available on the community link that i have provided in the chat this is a blog uh brad and other uh subject matter experts will go ahead and subscribe to it so if you have questions after this event you're more than welcome to post them on the community all right all right let's see well we've got a few participants should we wait a moment longer brad okay sure maybe give everybody another another minute or so doing laughs with 20 dual 24-inch monitors easier that's so true can't imagine just bringing a little laptop you know yeah it was always painful to see people on their phone with like the lab guide and then have you know be working on their laptop and you're like holding it right up close to your face yeah i think you just said laptop and ipad doesn't work out either um and during this session i'm going to allow all of you to unmute and fluff if you would like to um chime in and interrupt brad that's fine for your questions if not you can also use the chat um to type in your questions as well or comments so we do appreciate that all right should we go ahead and get started sure all right brad all right well welcome everybody uh to this uh success meetup we are going to talk about the developer program and then do some q a so i will start by introducing myself there we go my name is brad tilton i am a community mvp uh i am currently a developer advocate with the developer program at servicenow i've been doing servicenow admin and development work for about uh 12 years uh this is my seventh knowledge uh to speak at definitely the weirdest one uh to speak at uh you know there are some great things about it being virtual uh and you know all this content that you can consume virtually over six weeks but i definitely miss seeing people in person i've been an admin a developer a trainer an architect among other things on servicenow and my expertise has probably been in custom apps and front-end development although at this point i think i've touched just about everything at least a little bit my uh my profile links are down there um and uh i am based out of texas so let's go ahead and hop into the agenda uh so i really want to hit two things the first one being just an overview of the developer program just go through some of you know what we offer through the developer program at servicenow and really walk through some of the content on the developer site which is really our our main our main way to interact uh with developers and then do some q a hopefully we get you know 15 minutes of slides and 15 minutes of q a but we'll see we'll see how it goes um but yeah that's that's the plan uh so if you do have any questions while i'm talking feel free to type in the chat or or unmute yourself and we'll do that i i do have the chat up here it is it is a bit of a quarantine beard um it started before the quarantine but i can't i can't get anybody to trim it for me and and so we're just kind of letting it go all right so let's start by getting into uh personal developer instances so this is uh generally people's favorite thing about the developer program it's not unfortunately i'm not people's favorite thing about the developer program but personal developer instances are pretty nice um so pdi is what we call them for short and you know i my guess is that most of you if not all of you have either used one or currently have a pdi checked out but they're really useful for using as personal sandboxes personal learning tools we offer early access which is something we do pretty consistently about two months before our releases become generally available you can upgrade to the newest release and a pdi uh that probably looks like sometime late july although uh you know don't hold me to that depending on what the release date is uh for paris um and then it's also a good place to like try out new plugins um all sorts of uses for those personal developer instances but if you have not used one you definitely should try it out and then the other thing you should definitely do with pdis is back up your work we did introduce a feature that allows you to restore your pdi from a backup um but i would not say that it is 100 reliable i've seen people have issues with it so you definitely want to connect you know if you've got a scoped app that you've created you want to connect that to a git repo or export your work as an update set however you know however you prefer to back up your work or do all of those things which some people do so after the pdis we have a learn feature on the developer site and a couple of things i wanted to call out apparently it did not save the middle is supposed to say courses not text here um but the learning plans on the left uh is really um the content is the same in both of these first two columns except with our learning plans they're organized and more of a skill set uh type organization where you have you know new to servicenow admin and developer have slightly different content there's a lot of overlap and then in the middle we have our courses which our learning plans are made up of courses but the courses or are really topic based and one of the nice things that we do we have a couple of we have a couple of people that are awesome ben and mary ellen who write all of our developer content our learning content and uh one of their big things is that they want all of our content to be really modular so that you know you can start any one of our courses and you basically pull down whatever you need to do that course from git you don't have to have completed a previous course uh and so if there's one if you really want to learn about rest integrations through integration hub you can just start right there you don't have to go through you know a fundamentals course or anything like that although it would probably be helpful um so those are you know those those courses there's one particularly that i wanted to call out which is our source control course it came out i think mid april so it's been out for about a month um it's probably i i went through it to kind of test the content and i probably learned more from that course than i have from any other servicenow course it really goes uh pretty in depth uh into our orlando git capabilities uh with the selective commits and branching and things like that and some things that i had not even realized uh that we had put in the orlando release so there's some really good content in there and then now learning has some developer content as well oh i'm going to i'm going to speed up because i want to make sure we have question time the other thing that we offer through the developer site are reference materials and guides so reference material is all of our apis and then we have all of our now experience material is offered through that as well if you're not familiar with it now experience is our new ui framework that was introduced in orlando which workspace is built on and in orlando it lets you build components and add them to workspace and then we also have a lot of guides so a couple of best practice guides and then some guides on basically how to use the site and developer instances and then lastly developer program connect i already see that i did not put the developer community in here for some reason uh maybe because i think it's on the title of the session or something like that but uh on the connect we have a blog that the developer advocates myself and andrew barnes are on pretty regularly writing content now we have a youtube channel which the main thing we do on the youtube channel is our live coding happy hour show we do that every friday afternoon at 3 30 central uh and uh and that's a show where we spend an hour we take some topic or some task that we want to get done that we have not practiced uh which if you've watched the show is really obvious normally that we have not practiced it and uh we try to we try to go through it and get it done uh and you know run into the same obstacles that anybody would run into when they're doing development we also have a javascript series that chuck tomasi put out and then we've got some other videos on there and that's that's an area where we're looking to ramp up a little bit as well and then we've got uh share on the developer site and we have we've got a servicenow dev program github repo that most people aren't aware of and it's that's the name of it servicenow dev program and i'll put a link to it on the community article associated with this session but there's a lot of good stuff in there lots of examples there's some some new now experience component examples on that on that github that were just put up a couple of weeks ago and then one of the other big things that we do is our developer meetups which are all happening virtually right now which are kind of nice if you have done one of the virtual meetups you know you can connect with people that are not necessarily close to you you wouldn't be able to do in person but i expect those will start back up in person at some point uh in in the future is i think about as uh specific as anybody can be at this point uh and then the other thing that i didn't have on here that we also link from the developer site uh is the developer community where you can really get in there and ask questions uh and search content there's a ton of content questions that people have already asked which is a really good resource all right so that's my that's my dev program overview and we've got some q a now and i'm going to go in here so topics for discussion are developer program developer site developer content or developer focused or if there's something else you want to talk about within reason feel free to unmute yourself and ask a question or if you would rather type your question and into the chat we can do that as well and then i have some initial questions uh if nobody has anything they want to start with um i've got a few things that i would like to know so you know if you have any strong feelings about the developer program uh what's you know what's something good that you feel like we do for developers like pdis is usually a pretty good example of that uh is there something we could be doing better uh and then are there specific content areas that you'd like to see more content from the developer advocates and either on youtube or our blog but yeah so we have a couple of questions so the github link uh i can let me yeah i can post the link to that github right now and then the next question was demoing so with the demo question do you want to see the repo that we have or do you want to look at the source control capabilities in orlando i think i got the github link just the github okay i can do that i already did it i put it in oh yeah we have the link in there um but uh yeah so we both pasted the link in there there's a lot of a lot of examples in there the a couple of the big ones are the now experience component examples has four different examples of components that you can pull down for now experience and then we have uh on the live code happy hour show last friday we built a component that connects to servicenow and grabs some data and that's also posted on there and then we've got all all sorts of other things up there as well but those are probably the two main ones for the moment that are helpful to people all right the the free pdi is a great feature i i agree hey brad can you hear me yeah um this is uh matthew collins i had a question about if there's any plans to kind of consolidate some of the uh documentation that's out there right now um i've i've kind of noticed when i have questions about something it's i can usually find an answer somewhere but it's spread out between either like the um like the the learning site or the developer site or it's in different places is there any talk about kind of consolidating that or like updating that as well yeah so there's there's there's a couple of answers to that question um the first one is uh and this is this is more my opinion than than some sort of official uh stance but i think we do have um you know we do have this idea that the doc site is really um feature documentation um this is how this is kind of how something works and then the developer side is really api references things like that and then if you need to ask questions you have that on the community and then you also end up with some documentation on high like some kbs and things like that and we we definitely have heard that that's a pain point for customers so i know there are some efforts going on to um if not centralize the content make it easier to find all the content from one place um so i i don't i'm i'm not quite sure exactly where that effort is but it is definitely something that we've heard from customers that i've experienced i mean half the community blog posts i think i've written are basically like hey here's where to find all the content on atf or mobile or something like that because it is all over the place but yeah i mean it's it's an issue that that we understand is out there for sure all right thank you anybody else hey brad this allen is this you hear me this thing works yeah i can hear you so um my i know that servicenow is really pushing them to for everyone to build scoped apps everywhere the studio forces you into it and i've been doing a lot of development right now in the service portal in scoped apps and it seems like everywhere i turn the standard stuff that works and global doesn't work in a scoped app is there and the documentation is very limited on what different functions and apis you can use for scoped app versus global and the developer community doesn't really have a lot of community forums that talk about a scoped app is there any uh thoughts or or plans to possibly do more information build more apis out or give more documentation on how to build a scoped app versus a global when you're because when you're using the scope you'll for example like gs info doesn't even work so to do a lot rgs log doesn't work and i can't say how long it took for me to figure out that that's what was causing my my my screen not to work yeah so i i think uh some of the the apis being different between global and and scope is uh you know is definitely an issue um and you know there there are there are reasons that uh that things are the way that they are that uh you know make sense but it can be painful at the same time so you know i think when it comes to um if you're building a like a net new um app like a net new scoped app where you're not doing a lot of interaction with global tables or you're not i think with service portal a lot of the issue comes when you're like cloning a global widget into a scoped widget and then all of a sudden all the stuff that it calls isn't callable anymore and you run into issues there but yeah so moving forward i mean we're definitely um we definitely have scope in mind when we're releasing new things like if you look at the now experience framework uh like it's all just scope native like you have to work in in scope like the components automatically create their own scope um right so there's no you know no global even comes into play there so i i would say you know as we move forward we're definitely making things more like scope native and scope aware [Music] but for things and most of our new like we released a set of applications today a new set of applications and they all came through the store they're all they're all scoped apps which is really our kind of our direction so it should be it should get easier to work with uh scope because every you know we're kind of moving towards at least all of the new things uh being in scope and i think we've been going that way for a while um but there are i mean it is still hard when you're like working with the global globally scoped itsm stuff um and you know if you're cloning things that are scoped uh not i mean cloning things that are scoped um are you know that's kind of one of the reasons there's not a like a global to scope conversion tool right because you have all of this global stuff that doesn't work in scope or it's it's called something different in scope i think at this point most of the functionality that you have in global is available in scope it may be a different api but it's probably there uh there are some exceptions to that but um thanks yeah i don't know if that actually answers the question yeah you know it's one of those things where it just kind of is what it is but like there's no date time you till it the daytime utilities aren't there so you have to come up with ajax calls and a bunch of other stuff or work with it behind the scenes so it's just it's more like more where can you where how do we get more information now about what does work and what doesn't work because half the time things aren't working is because it's a scope issue not because you've miscoded it yeah yeah i mean and the apis are there but it isn't something that tells you while you're coding it like hey this is the i noticed you're in scope right now but you're calling the global api and you know maybe we'll get to that point but yeah i don't know okay all right so we've got uh we have a few things that have come in through the chat um uh kim has scoped service portals um our service portals and apps i think would be scoped um which is definitely doable i i think the issue comes when you're cloning a global like a globally scoped widget into a private scope uh the idea portal i also like the idea portal a lot it's really nice to be able to see what all of the customers are are wanting and have everybody be able to see what what customers are wanting what kind of new features and a lot of those ideas you know have been implemented at this point and it's a great tool for our product teams to have to you know we've always accepted input from customers but in the past there's been a lot less transparency and so i think everybody likes the idea portal internally and externally um so shane asks what do you think servicenow could do to get more on share between share store and community and the idea portal there is a lot of stuff all over the place yeah so there we are definitely talking about in the developer program um like how we can make share better so i think that would be both more content and you know make it easier to to both put content on there and get content off so that is definitely something that we are talking about actively at the moment i think that's all the chat questions anybody anybody else have any more questions i think we have five minutes any uh any content areas this is probably the question that i i want to hear the most about is uh as we move past knowledge you know what like what areas of the platform do people want to know about and feel like we need more enablement content for because that's that is one of my uh you know one of the parts of this role for me is really diving into some of these areas and and writing guides and blogs and videos and things like that uh service portal widgets uh yeah that's a good one uh we do have a training on it uh but i don't think there's a ton of like i think there's a ton of best practices and things like that out there so that that's a good one i think hand-in-hand with that now experience is one that we've been trying to get into because it's so new uh and will end up being such a big part of platform development uh pa that's a good one um yeah pa is good we have some really good pa is not one of my areas of expertise but we do have some really good pa expertise and so i would like to see us get some of that expertise into some of our developer content for sure going from classic mobile app to the new uh mobile app uh it is definitely a huge change in how the old mobile experience works versus the new mobile experience um yeah the the mobile it's it's really powerful and you can do all sorts of things with it but it is kind of a net new functionality so we do have some training on that uh and for the mobile piece i'll post a link our mobile product team is actually putting out a lot of um i think they're calling it like mobile university or something like that and they're doing it on youtube i think right now there's like five or six six hours of youtube content uh where they are they've put out this this mobile content and it's it's pretty i think it's specific to the orlando release so it's fairly new um but i will uh i'll find the link and post that on the community on the community forum um so one of the questions so agree with uh agree with mike we will if mike foreman asked me to do something we will we'll get some more pa material out there uh but uh but yeah that's a really good pa is kind of a blind spot for me so that's a really good suggestion and then one last question i think is do we see a lot of development areas within the workspaces are you limited to out of the box widgets and functionality so up to the orlando release you've been pretty limited to whatever we supply through workspace but with orlando came a ui builder which is our drag and drop tool where you can take a workspace component which is kind of the building blocks of workspace and you can drag it into a workspace landing page and then there's a couple other places you can add components but one of the nice things in orlando is that you can build custom components and you can call you can pull in our existing components into your custom components you can do all of that locally on your machine through our vs code plugin with a cli so there we have all of that's documented on the developer site if you go to reference it is it's there and i will anything that i have mentioned on here we will try to put the put a link to the documentation um and on the on the community link that lisa pasted in there so yeah i mean uh so workspace is going so now experian now experience ui framework is the name of our new ui framework and workspace is a piece of that and that's definitely where the user interface is headed so it's a component-based framework that is not tied to a specific technology like angularjs in service portal where we were you know they moved on from angularjs and we were kind of stuck with it with service portal so we have we are not going to do the same thing with workspace or with uh now experience all right okay that wraps it up if anyone else has any other questions you can always post them on the community probably on that link that i provided in the chat and it's gonna be there for us so brad we'll make sure you follow um so other than that enjoy the rest of knowledge we'll see you virtually yeah thanks everybody i appreciate it thanks everyone thanks thanks brad thanks lisa thank you