the developer advocacy team continues to change this time we've got a new team member and we're eager to get to know her better so have a listen welcome to breakpoint the service now developer [Music] podcast hello service now Edmonds Builders developers and of course all of the Curious individuals that we 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 tamasi senior developer Advocate and I am joined here by the lovely Lauren McManaman also senior developer Advocate how are you today Lauren I am doing even better because I'm also not the only senior developer Advocate on this call besides you and I Yeehaw we have another team member and that would be Christy Mariam how are you Christie I am excellent thank you for asking well we're so excited to have you on breakpoint here today even more excited to have you on the team quick fun fact Christy and I go a little bit back on service now as former teammates on the Creator workflow side but I just wanted to kick off this call and kind of talk about you know what give us a little bit more info on your background with your career and with regards to service now yeah yeah so um I joined service now in about 2017 uh so I just celebrated my 7ye anniversary in April um but before I came to service now I was actually a customer of service now now for a couple years I was a platform owner at had a company shuon in Nashville um and then in 2021 when I made the switch from field solution Consulting so I started as a solution consultant covering a group of accounts in the Southeast um I moved into creat a workflows in 2021 because I was ready to specialize and there wasn't really even a close second um to me for like what uh workflow that I wanted to focus on because I was already so ingrained and involved in the Creator con space with all the demos that we've come up with with iot Garden the brick sorter um contributing to the liquor bot everybody knows the make farm so uh I specialized in creater workflows for a few years and just made the switch over here to the dev AA team that I'm super excited about very very exciting and when you're not at work uh aside from service now is there any other fun hobbies you have or fun interests that you have yes yes so I like to call myself a serial hobbyist because I enjoy a multitude of different Hobbies but I uh am not a pro at any of them I'm pretty good at knitting and crochet um I love 3D printing um I have two kids that are eight and six that are big Lego fans which kind of Drew me into the adult fan of Lego world um and bowling is our sport of choice right now so we're at the bowling alley pretty much every Saturday in the afternoon hey very nice yeah yeah my oldest son is just obsessed with bowling we watched on TV and he's getting pretty good at he broke a 100 this past weekend which was pretty amazing oh that's awesome what a great family activity and great memories to be made too yeah yeah we have a great time we love it and they have a robot at the bowling alley so that's a plus is it bringing you your drinks what's this robot do oh yes her name is bellot and um she delivers pizza and drinks and fries and chicken whatever you buy um she delivers all your food to your lane and the kids absolutely love it and I've actually talked to Jason mck like how can we integrate this robot into the space you can't go bowling without thinking about service now oh no I can't I can't that's what I'm saying like all my hobbies you'll see reflected in all of the different exhibits that I've contributed to over the time in keron so yes I can't I can't do anything without trying to find a way to work in a little service now magic in there you are well qualified if you're thinking about this same same mindset I have it's like go on vacation and go what can we bring to next year's conference yes yes absolutely absolutely all right I get to crack the eggshell with you christe because I want you to tell me a story about a time when you did something you know not Finance related or or HR related hopefully but when did you do something you thought you would get fired for and additionally what did you learn from that experience yeah so I thought about this question and I actually have two things one is service now related I was fairly a new um SC at the time and I supported one of our I think it was the biggest client um on record at the time I think it's 2018 2019 so I was still fairly new and we were doing a um S pro POC they had 24 million records to import took several days to get everything in we had the demo already ready to go and I decided it would be a great idea to get rid of all the demo data that was imported into the platform and that resulted in totally hosing our POC that we had worked very hard on on building out and I was I'm like did I just do something that I could get fired for like did is this that bad because we could have lost you know a pretty large deal with these guys and fortunately for me we had a um a Sam Pro uh SC that came in and kind of saved the day for us kind of redid everything and pulled it together and we ended up getting the deal which was awesome what yeah it was awesome but what I learned from that particular experience uh lean on your Specialists don't forget that you're you have people that are helping you it's not just a Onan show uh in this space so that was a really hard lesson to learn um but I learned it and you know tried to remember that when I came up to uh challenges like poc's and challenging demos and things so you said you had a second one you care to share oh yeah so this was a long time ago I was probably 20 21 years old and I was working in a bank and this was an uh a um experience where I actually did get fired but for something that I felt was really silly U what I actually did so uh I was a teller at a bank and one of my jobs at the bank was to balance our ATM and this was back early 2000s so everything was very paper-driven every you had to fill out all the paperwork and all of that in the bank and I had all my stuff laid out in the back U behind the teller line and one of the tellers came back and she was just messing with me and she like rustled my papers and they fell onto the floor and I called her a name and it wasn't even a bad name it wasn't even like one that would get bleeped on TV nothing and she tattled on me and I got fired for that dang that's cck thrat a cro EnV the lesson I learned is that I'm not going to bank with this institution anymore because they're a bunch of like people that I don't like much so I didn't Bank there anymore after I got fired so you gota wonder if there was something else involved that that just doesn't seem right I think so I I didn't really fit in with them anyway like I was I was uh there was a lot of um I don't know it's kind of class sort of because it was where I worked it was a little little stuffy so I'm not the stuffy type so he moved on and moved up that's right that's right all right introductions out of the way I want to know more about your service now knowledge uh what part of the platform are you passionate about well if it's not obvious from my previous experience on the platform I um I am a big fan of all things integration and automation so anything on the platform that allow ows me to easily integrate or automate a process uh I love it like I back to the robot example I'm always looking for new things that I can plug into the platform to figure out what I can do with them um the fact that it makes it the platform makes it that easy for me to do it because I am not a professionally trained developer uh I I love it like it's it's great it's my favorite part for sure well one thing that I really liked you know about when you came in to interview Christie is that you you talked a lot about the projects that you coll elaborated on with us in the past you talked about like oh like you know here's where I've contributed X Y and Z but one of the things that really helped you stand out as well was all the ideas that you had about developer advocacy and moving forward so I'd love to kind of give you the platform to kind of showcase some of your ideas and kind of like dig deeper into them as well yeah sure sure so having been a customer before I came to service now I've had the opportunity to attend multiple developer meetups and I've been to some really really good developer meetups they have a good venue they've got good cont content it's really engaging and then I've been to some that are a little less engaging probably could have had better content um so I I have some ideas around how we might be able to bring maybe a little structure to those Dev meetups bring some additional content uh I had the idea of making like a maker series for the content it's a little self-serving for me because we have this iot garden and we have these Big Dreams of turn turning it into a community garden so one of the ideas I had was you know bringing some of these Garden sensors nobody body has to know how to write firmware anything like that we do all that for you but everything else is bringing the data into the platform and how do we how can we build that Community Garden or even doing like really simple smart devices that um you can connect the platform that you know make a noise or show a graphic when you get a new deployment request assigned or a new incident or you get a new helpful in the community so doing projects like that bringing content like that to the developer Community uh or developer meetups and then also um the other idea that I had was um you know I said I was pretty involved in the creater conon space and all the hack Zone exhibits that we do um I would love to be able to kind of break those down and create those in like a web series to kind of talk about how we built them um where they are relevant in different Industries um because not everybody gets to go to knowledge and not everybody gets to go to Crater con or even see what we do in the hack Zone because there's just so much going on I would love to make that more accessible um for people in the community I think that would be fantastic in fact that was the piece that really stood to me the most was like creating uh because we get so many questions about those hacks on exhibits from liquor bot to to everything really and so like turning them into like maybe a projectized uh tutorial or even just kind of guid post right doesn't have to be exactly like do X Y and Z but like guiding people in the right direction and showing maybe how you learned to create those things because like you said you're very self-educated um which means the resources are out are out there to for anyone to create these types of things so I think that's a really inspirational idea I Lov I loved that aspect well you can also take aspects if you do this after the event you could take aspects of the event to the content for example some of the FAQs you get as people were walking up or something you hadn't thought of like that was a really insightful question if you think about it ahead of time go that should be in my video that's coming up so I think there's a a really interesting tie in to the event you could even use footage from the event in in a video later that that's pretty cool I like that it's a great idea Chuck that was also a good piece of feedback we got on our community survey was that people loved live streams but there was a huge desire for our team to create more long form videos so like keep an eye out for that we have heard the feedback and we're trying to put it into action as soon as possible so I appreciated Christy already having some ideas on what that could that could look like now given that we've talked a little bit about content we talked a little about Community what challenges do you see for Christie fitting into this role my goodness uh I I will say that you know I posted this job update on the 1 and I woke up the next morning to just a massive number of connection and follow requests on LinkedIn I think no it's fine it was great like I welcome it I think one of the challenges that I have is um seeing my face plastered on social media just the extra attention that this role just kind of naturally brings that will take some adjustment for me um but I'm excited about that and thank you all in the community for such a warm welcome um it's been uh it's been great it's made me feel really good about being in this role uh and then you know I I I thought about this too I I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to like publishing content I think I have to uh kind of let go of that perfectionism a little bit and because I've always want to like nitpick and get things just right how I want them before I push them out so need to be able to kind of just roll with it and and you know put myself out there and be V not vulnerable but you know realize that not everything has to be just absolutely perfect before I hit that publish button so yeah don't let great be the enemy of good that's right that's right I mean I'll agree with you like I thought I was a very recognizable person when I was in sales because I thought oh like I run into my customers all the time uh I was not prepared for the recognizability if that's even a word of like when you do publicly facing content of how much more exposure that really is because people don't always interact right but a lot of people see it or a lot of people have shared it even if they haven't watched it they've seen the thumbnail or something like that so that was something you know fun fact Christy's like first month on the job we're doing this like whizbang World Tour to creedon India which is very very exciting so that'll help I think set the precedent early on like what that type of exposure means most definitely most I mean I've been tagged in um so many posts of people that I haven't had the opportunity to meet yet it's been it's been pretty incredible so I'm very excited about it I'm waiting for the day Christie when somebody makes a cartoon for you oh yes I saw the very cool cards I think it was Kevin Clark who made all the cards for people this year at knowledge yeah g yeah those and the yes those are very cool yeah the the game and then um I want to I want a pixelated icon you guys all have your little pixel cartoon people like when do I get one of those and how do I make one I think we can do that I think that's an internal thing well stay tuned on that one we'll get you one of those as well I think tanv helps create those right we gotta get the the Christy brand engine going yeah I I have a project that I was telling you Chuck earlier that I my little table back here I have a um a project that I need to work on which is making some uh I'm re I have some mint colored um Chucks MH of Converse low top uh Converse that are obviously old service now brand that I am rebranding to the new bright green and black but they're also going to be very sparkly very glittery so that's my project that I need to work on back here but you gonna bedazzle the heck out of it yeah it's gonna be my bow tie are those very very fancy sparkly shoes I'm going to make so we'll see what happens that's fun we each have like an identifiable piece of clothing now I kind of like that I I didn't intend it to be this way but I got these pink glasses right before knowledge 23 and that became Mine by mistake so I'm like I'm glad I like these glasses because like if I had that would have been a big problem my whole bow tie thing was a mistake yeah it was a happy accident yeah totally totally Earl something Earl and PR we gotta get them on some some wacky you know identifiable piece as well can can we get them to wear like a top hat can we get them to do that or one of them to do that you think that could be fun Top Hat Earl is Earl yeah b a beret a beret well Earl has a has wigs all the time he's always like he's got the videos where he's put on his like that's true what's that that Japanese cartoon that's who reminds me of kuit I can't remember I'll have to think about it an ascot crazyc oh cape cape perhaps oh that's awesome ninja mask I don't know a luchadora mask no like some sort of like Luchador outfit in service sty colors that could be amazing oh that's awesome we leave that one to the community honestly with the amount of color that they use in Luchador wrestling like that probably already exists that live green probably probably probably so oh I'm in tears over here you just got to search for like Seattle Seahawks because that's like the spoton colors for us I think that blue and that green well Chuck already kind of touched on it as far as like challenges of fitting into the but one thing that we're also going to be exploring is like the whole concept of like video production and video editing which is like it also gives us time to because uh like like we said we're trying to evolve our content as well and so like revisiting all that production side is also it gives us a reason to also internally revise how we do it so looking at the new Creator con bring stuff and looking at all the Premiere Pro editing stuff so shall be some cool stuff on the horizon guys stay tuned yeah I absolutely love the New Perspective that new team members bring it it it it shakes up the snow globe a little bit you still the buildings are still there but the snow is going to land in a different spot so it's it's really refreshing don't don't ever think that because this is the way we've done it before this is the way it's going to be done forever so uh for the list ERS expect some changes that are coming up obviously there's going to be a staff change I'm stepping out christe stepping in who knows what it's going to look like 12 months from now I think one of my former teammates said uh this is a different company that we had 18 months ago and it's going to be a different company in 18 months so it's always under change and we're always aware of that and want to listen to the community and respond and React to what those requests are as appropriately as possible mean think about it this way 18 months ago we certainly weren't an AI platform and now that's that's how we're coined our you know technology so that's how fast not only this team has been changing and growing but the industry overall so we've got to got to keep on Pace to reflect that the AI platform for business transformation and then we we were just the platform for digital business I know is that wild it is wild and some people think still think of us as an IT ticketing system well are they woefully behind I mean so many people so many people don't get me started that's my goal that's like one of my missions as developer Advocate is to change that mindset and I've got some ideas about how to do that too so I love that attitude well also on Christy's first day our very first day on this team was our Tech now webinar so what a what a first day that was so I guess one of my my final questions to you is in the last I mean you've only been on the team officially for about four days most of that was a weekend maybe are there any surprises so far like that you've realized in those four days that you're hoping to change or keep going or or anything like that I don't I mean I can't think of any surprises because I feel like I've been a bit of an honorary member of the team for a bit Yeah so I I've known some of the struggles that we've had and challenges that we've had but um no surprises yet no surprises yet stay tuned though who knows who knows what tomorrow brings she she she'll be writing a list for the next couple of months and here's here's a challenge and here's a surprise and what's up with that yeah oh chrisy I would like to know you said you're an honorary member of this team for quite a while we've we've been to many world Forum conferences together and Creator cons Etc what work did you do that sort of set that up that prepared you for this role yeah um so I I started in 2017 like I said before and almost immediately uh zone or zoomed into getting involved in Creator con because every time I go to knowledge it was my favorite part of the whole thing getting to the hack zone is my favorite and I realized I've been to all 10 I had to do the math I'm like have I been to all 10 and I have been to all 10 oh you a wristband I yeah oh I didn't know there's a wristband excellent yeah um but I I wanted to get involved in creater con so I uh I don't know how many people I asked I'm like who do I talk to if I want to get involved in the hack Zone and finally landed on Jason mcke and Jason mcke uh I think my first foray into the creater con was hey Jason I think I could build a better UI for the CNC engraver because I think it was not so great before I have a better idea for the engraver and I showed it to him he's like this is great and it all just kind of snowballed and got me to where I am today well I guess previous to joining The Advocate team but the other thing that I did too because I knew the advocacy required um you know being on stage being in front of people my role in the Creator uh workflow space kind of prepared me for that because I've done number of workshops in Labs at snugs and different events was on stage at our sales kickoff in front of a very large crowd of people doing a demo uh that I was very nervous about but uh kind of got me addicted to actually being on stage and doing it um so there's some of the things that I did to kind of get myself prepared and position myself to move into this role because it was always on my road mapap of where I wanted to land and where I wanted to go and our final question of the day is when we usually ask all of our people is for any new developers kind of you know sitting in and listening to this podcast do you have any words of advice for them and how they're starting their careers yeah take advantage of this amazing community of people that are here in the service now Community uh there are no shortage of people who want to help or willing to help uh anybody to get started um if you know I'm happy to help if you reach out to me if you have a question or you know need to know somewhere to go or you know ask me a question about technology I'm happy to help just don't forget you're not alone in this whole journey um so that's that's my advice I think that's the biggest piece of advice that I would take because I learned that lesson uh like I talked about before fairly early on that there are people here willing to help so don't forget that nice call back don't get many of those that was well done if intentional or not well Christy thank you so much for joining us today before we let you go can you let the listener know how to get in touch with you yes you can find me on LinkedIn um just Christy Mary on LinkedIn I also am on X formally known as Twitter as the now iot lady uh I don't have a ton of content out there right now but that's going to be changing here in a bit as I kind of get ramped up into the rle so keep an eye out for uh new content we have to get you on Instagram too yeah yeah that's my that's my plant my plant Instagram but I can I can have another one that's fine well thank you once again I'll have a link for that in the show notes as usual of course and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget you can check out the other service now podcasts you can find them on our community at servicenow.com commmunity under the events menu you can subscribe to this or any of them for totally free and get them all automatically delivered to you as they become available no more going and checking if there's a new one it'll that's kind of what podcasting became in 2004 so here we are 20 years later we got it nailed down we hope breakpoint is brought to you by service now executive producers would be me and Lauren McManaman and to find out more about the service now developer program head over to developer. servicenow.com once again thank you so much Christie it has been fun and welcome to the team thank you it's the pleasure of being here thanks 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 Electronics fund continues that's much more fun that's true let's start that one over again oh yeah off to a good start belt suspenders and duct tape to hold up these pants yeah wow this feels like a copypaste job I posted my job update on LinkedIn and misfill advocate well qualified for the job if you make typos you're part of the team oh why you you well you take that one and then all no I'll I'll ask that one make friends with Jason mcke yeah yeah make friends with Jason that's a dangerous thing but be prepared be prepared to be drugged through to the rat hole and have lots of disposable income he's good at spending your money you barked on the podcast that's not nice thanks for inviting me I hope I get to do more um no that is the last breakpoint I will record damn how do you feel about that Chuck it's starting to hit home it really is thank you sober former Chuck that's what you say