hey everyone welcome to another qa session with the duke in this session we are going to answer the question how do i become a better servicenow developer this answer's going to have four parts to it we're going to cover definitions mindsets mentorship and resources now there's a wide variety of things that people mean when they say servicenow developer on the one hand you have people who will say any building blocks that you use to make an application on servicenow is a servicenow developer on the other hand you have people who would say a servicenow developer is a professional developer who develops on top of servicenow for my money i lean closer to the latter if you talk about being a servicenow developer you should be pursuing the certified servicenow application developer certification and working most of your time in code that should mean that you're working mostly on custom apps the rest of this video is going to assume that definition okay let's talk about mindsets the first mindset you should develop is unless you're working exclusively with custom apps on servicenow you should be taking a development last approach that is to say only use code when you absolutely need it use other components of servicenow before that the reason for this is that code-based solutions on servicenow incur the most tech debt that's a term you should get very used to hearing as a servicenow developer second mindset can does not equal should third mindset document your code not only for other people that come after you but for yourself because nothing burns quite so badly as not understanding the code you wrote a month ago mindset number four it's not a solo venture you need both community and private mentorship if you want to learn to become an effective servicenow developer quickly which brings us to our next section mentorship unless you're a professional developer before you got into service now learning this on your own is dangerous you'll learn much faster and have much more effective results if you have people who can review and correct your code and teach you new concepts also it's important to note that servicenow has a ton of custom objects that you wouldn't find just doing raw javascript development and you need people to teach you what those are and where to find the documentation for them next i'm going to be talking about resources everything i talk about is going to have hyperlinks in the description below so please make sure you check that out before you hit like and subscribe the reason i'm talking about these resources is a new trend seems to be people asking strangers on linkedin for very technical questions be sure to exhaust these resources before going to strangers over direct message so the first thing you're going to want to do is join the servicenow community and the servicenow dev slack channel people always ask me how did you go so wide on service now look i'm not even that smart a dude i just spent 30 to 60 minutes on each of those resources for the last 13 years you do the math on that and it's just a stupid amount of learning by osmosis resource number two get yourself a private developer instance at developer.servicenow.com this is going to be your laboratory here you're going to want to build something build anything rely on your past experiences before service now or the stuff that you do in your spare time the things that you're interested in go on to this instance take everything that you learn and build something that the instance is not intended to do a great example of this is somebody i was mentoring as she was a homemaker for her life prior to coming to servicenow but she wanted to get into the ecosystem and she didn't know what she could develop for practice so we talked a lot about what it would be like to develop a home management application and it was awesome probably the biggest resource that you'll need especially if you're at the start of your servicenow development career is to watch chuck tomasi's learning javascript on servicenow playlist that's going to be in the description below this is by far the best resource in his class it's possibly the best learning content for servicenow that anybody has put out in servicenow ever take all the exercises available to you on developer.servicenow.com this is the same place you got the pdi not many people realize that there's this learn link in the top of the navigator bar and it has just a plethora of useful exercises and things to study another thing to keep your eyes on is now learning now learning has a page that shows you the pathways to get to many of the certified job types within the servicenow ecosystem now certifications don't stand for what i wish they stood for but there's the reality that we hope for and the reality that is be very shrewd and pursue the certifications that align to the job you want in the ecosystem for you that's the certified application developer now once you got a little bit of experience you may want to pick up tim woodruff's book the servicenow developer handbook links in the description below and lastly follow everything to do with the servicenow dev channel on youtube this includes the live coding happy hour and creator toolbox playlists very important resources for continued progression if you adopt those mindsets embed yourself in the servicenow community and to make use of the resources i've described here you're well on your way to learning servicenow development as quickly as anybody can i wish you all the best in your ventures and if there's anything i can do to help in the meantime please get in contact with me do you want your message in front of the best service now admins developers architects and product owners in the business want a conversation about your servicenow strategy and architecture you can reach me via my website at www.theduke.digital if you want to contribute to high frequency high quality servicenow content all you need to do is feed the 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