[Music] can you believe that we are already up to the zanadoo release wait when well early availability for xanadoo is August 1st 2024 and I suppose everyone's going to expect us to do another tech now webinar right that's right but only this time we are changing things up a bit ooh what do you mean we heard the feedback from our viewers and instead of going through 90 some slides in 40 minutes we are going to spend more time on fewer topics allowing us to actually do some demos demos demos demos all right all right take it easy I see what you did there and yes it's going to be a lot more similar to our style of Keynotes ooh uh so is there anything else people can look forward to well for zanado do we'll be covering things like the newly built-in IDE and SDK along with several new generative AI features and ways developers can use them so how does one sign up for this easy as always go to Dev link. sntn n98 regge and again that is Dev link. sn/ t98 reeg to register for the event on August 1st we look forward to seeing you [Music] there I've said it before and I'll say it again we have some really cool people in the service now developer ecosystem this time we talk with someone who's been using the platform for 14 years is a three times MVP is a CTA and she leads a very full personal life Welcome to breakpoint the service now developer [Music] podcast hello service now admins Builders developers and of course all of you curious individuals that I always say with the utmost love and respect welcome to or welcome back to breakpoint the service now developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career my name is Chuck tomasi senior developer Advocate and I am joined by the one and only the Posh programmer senior developer Advocate Lauren McManaman how are you Lauren I'm doing great my poor little dog is not doing too well after getting scared by the smoke alarm but you know we're hanging in there we're hanging in there poor puppy I'm sure some of our listeners also have animals that have uh foibles like that as well our ours is anytime the doorbell rings cat goes running for the under the cushions we are joined by today I am very pleased we have a new name on the podcast National practice leader for employee service management and service now Community MVP Susan Britt how are you today Susan doing fantastic very excited to be here with y'all today we're excited to have you well before we begin let's find out what is susen do in real life in real life I I live in Charlotte um if you can't tell I'm from the south originally I'm from Mississippi um lived in just south of Nashville for 12 years um I have two growns son uh two four-legged boys as well um my oldest son um is married and has a three-year-old daughter so I'm also a Loli and my oldest son is also a service now consultant so I I had to brag on him a little bit here considering the audience he's getting into the development side of it um yes I love that but yeah other than that um I don't know what to tell you I love that's awesome did you guide him towards that career choice or was that his own I did not he called me out of the blue one day he was in construction okay so he called me out of the blue like I'm Gonna Learn service now I'm like no you're not all technology and he's like no I really want to he is like recently married like I want to provide better I want to get out of construction I like consistent like a a salary job and I'm like all right you know he knew the owner of the company or CEO and I'm like you call him I don't want to be involved like you put forth the effort you learn service now on your own go for it and he he did he started studying a CSA he's got implementation specialist um certifications now very cool he loves it yeah we're hearing that more and more of like it becoming a family business which is so so funny because I don't think ironically if you ask my family I don't think they could tell you what I do living yeah 10 years ago that wasn't much of a case great no and as for leaving now asille was all the bachelorette parties that eventually Chase y'all out or it's become like bachelorette party Mecca according to all my friends 100% yes yes now you're gonna have to read the grandchildren tonight's bedtime story Glide aggregate major school now they'll fall asleep quickly don't worry yeah yes now the same in the same fun vein uh one question we like to ask our uh our co-host here today is also to tell us a story about you know a time that you maybe thought you did something that would warrant a firing not necessarily anything HR related but maybe a humble mistake that you stressed out a little bit too much in the beginning of your career or something funny like that yeah so I accidentally deleted every incident in our instance and I work for man service provider so we're talking thousands of incident records um to all be work in progress um in PR in production yes in production oh yes yep never they've never had a shorter queue though like how nice to come into work and be like our que is empty we made it to zero we got our our okr is done for the year yes it was terrifying and what did you learn I I learned um one that update multiple operations should never be used with like a direct update like State equals three because it will indeed update every record in the table and then I humbly was reminded of what our already but didn't practice at that time test all code no matter how simple the background script is in a sub BR instance before you do it in production yeah the other one that I do from those kinds of examples is before I even put in the update multiple or delete multiple or whatever it is I throw in just a get row count and go how many do I think it should be affecting and how many is it really going to do and if if I think it's going to get six and I come back with a number like 10,430 I'm like o I need to refine that query a little bit it's it's not doing what I think yes I learn that too I do that for sure now in my early days developing a service now yes that's why we ask these questions so the people who haven't hit those potholes can learn from the people who have and you know what's funny too is that I think like 90% of them are regards to like Mass data edits by mistake like everyone's is like I should have done that on devb but I just I roll the dice did up we kind of get like oh it's really easy it's just like yeah almost set the three lines yeah so you're in good company is what I'm trying to say like all these amazingly talented smart amazing service now people and all of them come from the same little humble you know Beginnings nothing like a good attack to make you learn a lesson right you won forget it go no no somebody once said there's two types of people in this world those who have lost data and those who will true well when you're not at work what do you enjoy doing you mentioned your Furry Friends yes so obviously playing with those dogs I've recently started training for a marathon um I wouldn't say I enjoy that so may have just lied I'm learning to I'm getting there to the enjoyment part hoping yes I'm hoping I'll learn to love it are wait are you going straight from no running to Marathon or are you scaling up from something else no I mean like I've done 5Ks in the I'm not a runner by no means I've done 5Ks historically and I did like 181k three years ago um yeah but I don't know call it Madness and you know at this age but my son came to me like hey do you want to run a marathon I'm like no are you crazy and then I'm like but why not like and I started thinking I'm like it would force me to do the things I say I need to start doing again like eating right and working out so like let's do this sure what's the worst thing yes yeah I do like taking naps I'm hiking I enjoy that like refinishing old furniture and remodeling are um some of my favorite things to do yeah oh that's very cool how did you get into that like refinishing and Things by necessity you know my younger years um like didn't have money but like I I had these at furniture and I wanted to redo it and like oh I want to remodel I'm very into Aesthetics and like the way things look um so it just started like I can't afford somebody to do the tile so I'm going to do it myself you know that kind of and then I just fell in love with the process now also tell us how did you you know you talked about how your son kind of found service how did you discover service now so I worked for that manag service provider I was talking about um and we were getting ready to replace deles force and so I was brought in as in 2010 um as a stakeholder because I knew how we communicate with our customers the incident change management process and like the or data what you call or data you know companies we had locations all over the world so I was brought in as a stakeholder and back then service now came on site and they gave us that admin training so I got to do some the light configuration like add and custom Fields change the for layout creating templates you know on site when they were there for that implementation um and then I just became a stakeholder an enduser until 2014 when I took over the platform can I tell you a funny story how that happened um how I became the platformer yeah sure perfect hey you you ear in the right to say whatever you wanted when you said that you were replacing Salesforce that was fun so so I was a cobal developer I probably aged Myself by saying that and I was a wallison consultant and I did all the ancillary products and then the hardware you know like DB Administration you know working on the windows and unit servers and my boss came to me he's like do you want to take over service now the platform owner you know resigning I'm like no like I knew enough to know when we implemented it that there was some a lot of customization of some code I did not know and I said him I was like I don't know Java he said it's not Java it's javascripting like I don't know that either and so he said think about it I think you'd be good at it and so I went home and literally bought a JavaScript for dummy's book that's just kind kind of how my brain works and I went through it I'm like I can do this um and so 2014 when my love affair was service now really started when I took over our instances yeah I love that I also love your attitude of like I can just do this you did that with the marathon you did that with surus now it's very it's a good attitude to have like why not I have no I have no evidence to show I would fail so why not succeed that's very cool there's no physical limitation that would prevent you from doing these so it's all mental at this point you can get through that good job thank you you mentioned you were trained in 2010 this is before we had a formal training department do you remember who your instructor was I have no idea okay just see if it was an old friend yeah I am not sure who it is Susan I understand that you are a CTA a certified technical architect can you share with us your experience on how that's been getting to that and what's happened since yeah so I am a CTA um I got that certification in the fall of 2023 found out the week before for Thanksgiving that I did pass the Capstone um it it's been great um I as bad as it may sound it was just a checkbox at that point for me to get it initially like I need to do this I've been an architect doing it so let me get certified um but once I got in there with the cohort it was just a great learning experience everyone comes to the table with different knowledge and backgrounds and ways of thinking and to have all that you know collaborating I love that experience um that's why I didn't get a job promotion to career change with it but I learned so much that I thought I knew about service now but then also things you're not expecting like presentation skills how to create a PowerPoint presentation better you know and make it easier you know those kind of skills like ah this is so great I I love it yeah now one blessing that you and Chuck both have is this element of perspective on the service now platform you've been using service now to some way shape or form for the last 14 years if I recall so tell me which version did you start on were you prename were you like was it actually towards the city names uh funny story I always told people with Aspen because that's the first release them I remember hearing like oh we're going to upgrade from Aspen to Berlin um but just two days ago someone I won't name names Chuck um said Aspen wasn't out in 2010 and I'm like oh my gosh have I been lying to people like I had to go back I'm like was it 20110 maybe I have my dates you know off and I went look like sure enough it was 2010 I don't know so I'm assuming there's a season in 2010 release yeah yeah was probably like June 2010 or something silly yeah so I that's what it was just service now back then to me you know it's a stakeholder coming in so I I didn't know yeah when I took over in 2014 though we were still in Berlin and we were upgrading to Dublin um at that point so very nice very cool sticking in minus one I like it did you have a certain part of the platform that you spent the most time on is there a specific like area of expertise that you kind of held back then it was probably itum um we had all of itm and cmdb and then we had itom GRC which I despise GRC back the Legacy GRC then we had the Legacy HR and project management but the Legacy HR in itm was where most of my time was spent yeah and then in that time have you noticed like what what's gotten the most Improvement like what's gotten easier in that period of time to do oh everything that's good that's good to hear we'll clip that we'll clip that part I yeah I would think everything yes I would think like definitely like service portal employee Center going from CMS so much easier you know everything that we had had to customize an incident and change you know like how to do cab you know meetings and major incident manag I think we had to customize back then it's all Baseline functionality now and then Discovery we had so many custom probes and sensors like before everything came out so yeah it was a nightmare on the flip of that anything gotten harder I I always wonder about that too like has anything gotten like too niched down or like too over o like over manufactured like I always think of uh my dad's my dad was obsessed with mercedes-benzes like all my life and he just hard quit them because he's like the cup holder got so over like manufactured it was going to be like a $400 replacement for a cup holder so I always wonder I'm like what is like that on service now I I don't know if anything like that I always think of what's gotten harder just keeping up with it like it's growing and there so many applications and store apps now it's like you can't keep up with all the releases like oh when did that come out I haven't seen that feature before and then you go look like oh that was two releases ago I'm kind of behind or when did that move to the store I I I just updated workflow Studio on my PDI didn't know it was a store app right and then had to go get the spoke generator from the store I knew that was the direction we were moving and I should retrain my brain to go look there first but you know when it when it starts out on the platform and then migrates to the store I can get a little confused so keeping up with all these nuances is tricky it's it's the people and their skills that now have to Niche down like this is our mobile implementation person we didn't have that 14 years ago correct and that's that's like luckily I'm like I'm isolated to a practice now where I have to focus on employee workflow stuff you know it's like EC but it's still like everything's a store out for us so when you go to implement it's like well that's a store out that's a store out that's a it does complicate implementations when you're doing it but in a way it's nice you don't have to wait for that family release to get the updates that are coming it's like oh that's available in store release too I get that you know halfway between sadoo and Yokohama for example Susan is there an area that you can see needs more love what can we what can we make better on the platform I am going to go with a niche area that I work in with HRC and say that pre-built workday HCM integration needs a lot more love i' love to talk to to the developers who did that um yes do you want to talk through use case examples or sure okay so any these bar error handling so there's multiple you know flows and subf flows that runs of one job and that subflow fails the main job will still say it's completed you know and there's no retry functionality built in um and it's the way work day works converting employees to contractors or vice versa you wind up with duplicate records coming in future yes it's it's painful the way it's written is of a job profile which a lot of clients are like I don't want to bring in the job history that's in work day leave it alone but that updates a lot of important stuff on the user record and HR profile so you're kind of have to redo things and override the pre-built integration every time you work on it all right we'll make sure we send a link to our hrsd people on this one now kind of pivoting away from the history of service now you had talked about like making a move and things like that so always like to talk to people about their local service now experience how involved were you with the developer Meetup chapters so when I was in Tennessee I I was not involved with developer Meetup chat which is more The Snug um the local snug groups which I love doing that um Co kind of put a damper on all of those and then when I move to Charlotte um still doing the snugs but then also got involved with the Charlotte developer Meetup and try partner with Dante who manages those and co-host some of the upcoming ones um the next one will be hosting in our our office building as well oh very nice very excited Chuck's bragged a lot about that chapter so I'm happy to hear such nice things about it from you as well Susan what do you consider your passion of helping people for sure whether that's you know devel for meetup you know the service now community and then my clients my customers my peers and then my physical Community as well I love volunteering um and doing like local and Statewide kind of charity work as well do you have a specific charity that you like to spend the most time with or we have a few homeless shelters around here I like to volunteer at those mostly and that's something I've always done since I was a kid when I went to Washington DC for the first time being from small town in Mississippi we didn't have homeless people so the first time I seen some when I went to DC like I could just see the hurt in their eyes and it just kind of like it's always touched me it's always had a place in my heart so that's just always where I've like to spend my time I always really like to hear about people giving back um especially in such a meaningful way that's that's a really beautiful thing um also thinking of kind of how you maybe give back or how you've treated your career as well do you have a specific highlight of your career thus far I have a couple one of the ones that come to mind though is the service now um MVP being recognized as that and one because we all want to be recognized for our contributions but more important like I didn't know it was a thing like I knew there's gamification in the community but I never paid attention to it I just went out there and did what I enjoyed doing reading questions and answering them and try to be consult like but why do you want to do that have you thought about it this way and like that's not really a best practice and like trying to get people to re change the way they think um instead of just giving answers of how to customize and make things work so I just enjoyed doing it um and then one day I got a letter like hey we'd like you to join the MVPs like what what a nice surprise like what all do this s what all have is this your first year as an MVP no this is my third year actually um third year congratulations thank you keeping up that bar it's really awesome and speaking of you know you've given a lot back in the way of like answering questions and helping all the customers you have over your career now I kind of flip that to someone that may be starting off their career you know looking at yours as a source of information or uh inspiration do you have any advice for new developers in general or service now yes so I would say for service now just new service now get on the community read the questions and then challenge yourself to try to answer them you'll learn so much doing the research playing your and just trying to figure it out yourself um for new developers get some conventions and follow best practices you know naming conventions be standardized add comments to your code format in tes and sub instances learn from our mistakes that we talked about and then I would they like join that developer site and then the developer slack channel that there is out there also the SN devs um slack Channel great way to communicate and collaborate with other people do you have a resource that you find uh best for best prce practices so if someone is like oh I don't even know service now best practices are you know where they could find them the service now Doc site's really good at having in the developer site if it's like coding best practices for coding you know and best practice for business rules I would go to the developer site that sern now has for that for sure love it well thank you for joining us today Susan it has been a treat talking to you before we let you go can you let the listeners know where they can get in touch with you yes you can find me on LinkedIn Susan Brit there's a couple of us out there on LinkedIn so you can always Search Susan Brit Charlotte or Susan Brit info center and you'll find me well thank you again and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget there are many other service now podcasts you can find them all at service now.com commmunity under the events menu again events for podcasts scratch his head wildly you can subscribe to any of those or this one if you wish for absolutely free and look for them in your favorite podcast directory to get them automatically delivered to you and never miss another episode breakpoint is brought to you by service now executive producers would be me and Lauren you can find out more about the service now developer program as Susan has mentioned where would they find that Susan developer. Serv now.com ding ding ding ding ding ding tester didn't know there was a test at the end right right again thank you so much Susan for playing along thank you thank you all for having me please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more great information on service now development check out the service now developer portal at developer. servicenow.com thanks for listening then let's begin here we go go for it you you ready for that it indeed yes sorry I couldn't figure out how to unic or unmute my mic oh my question next oh that came out totally wrong I'm not sure what how we wrote this both you and Chuck have been on the platform for such a long period of time which has this like entire wait I think I'm gonna sneeze no I'm not Dev link. snbp 109 very cool Ah that's where that slide deck went no I'm just trying to remember what we were thinking two days ago which seems like a week ago we have a platform that can help us automate these things it's not for the public it's for us all right where were we on this uh and that's how it goes got it down y'all are good at this I'd be sticking pins in it yes it's been very tempting to do that yeah yeah