one questions developer asks us a lot is for a road map to success now my guest this time gives us his insight to how you can get there and it may not be the answer you expect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host chuck demasi hello servicenow admins builders developers and of course all you curious individuals that i always say with the utmost love and respect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career and i get the feeling that this one may run a little bit long because my guest today and i are both passionate about developer careers i am super stoked to be talking with the one and only robert the duke fedoric wait what what exactly is your title well that's the great thing about being in this game as an independent for so long is that um i don't really need one and uh and i'm i'm super happy with that except when i have to put my occupation on any kind of like application right because because i'm like what is my title um but i i like just i like just doing whatever interests me at the time you're sitting next to somebody on the airplane and they say what is it you do yeah and then you're like how much time do you have [Laughter] that's my new response i'm sick of trying to make something up like i am a digital content creator if their eyes glaze over you lost them already i was telling my wife she's like oh what are you doing this afternoon i'm like i'm just jumping on the podcast with with chuck tomasi she's like which one is chuck again and i'm like he's the face he's the face of services the face and the tie the other one i like is so what do you do i learn i share i change people's lives want to know more well if i may just self-remote just a little bit here i absolutely do i do three types of work really um i um i do the traditional independent servicenow consulting um i also do recruiting now and you can connect with me on that via the links chuck will have in the description um and then i also do a little bit of i guess you can call it a combination of digital marketing and sales enablement for small technology partners or maybe not necessarily small but companies that really have no exposure or persona in the servicenow space and want to make sure that they're reaching the right people and speaking the right language in their marketing efforts let's let's go through the traditional intro though because some listeners may know you from your youtube channel we've got various videos and whatnot some from your podcast cj and the duke you do that with our 2022 dev mvp corey cj wesley or perhaps they may know you from somewhere else so in your words tell us a little bit about yourself man um you see the paradox is i'm really not that interesting a person liar i joke around and tell people that i'm like 14 years old because that's kind of when i when i found servicenow and i discovered servicenow at kind of a weird spot in my life like i had ambitions and drive but it was a lazy man's ambition and drive right just i was clocking in at eight o'clock and out at five coming home drinking my six-pack and doing it again ever like day after day and i was just a clock puncher and um if i'd gone on much longer than that i would have been really worried about myself but then i found servicenow and kind of just i'd been dealing with itsm tools prior to that but i could do so much more with it um and i kind of like it woke me up out of my like oh holy cow i can do a whole bunch of really cool stuff and people are depending on me to do that and people like all of a sudden listen to me as if i have something of great important to say when i'm talking about the different things we can do with servicenow am i answering the right question here close enough okay but then i i did that for 14 years i i did it in a passionate way but not necessarily like a mindful directed way right and so it's like all these years later and i've just had this reputation of of just saying what i feel about the service now sometimes it gets me in trouble and sometimes it gets me a big audience so if you know me in the space because we've worked together or it's because you've heard me go on one of my rants about something probably documentation um but yeah i just i like to say that um you know i mean it would sound like i'm patting myself on the back by saying this but i like to be like a mouthpiece for the industry and when you're not at work what do you enjoy doing in your off time i used to do a ton of mentorship and coaching but i guess if we just like uh st like step away from the service now a little bit i just i just love making beautiful things and i spent most of my professional life just kind of feeling very obsessed about service now and like it was do service now until i had to eat take care of my family in the evening and then stay up late doing service now and yep well that basically cut my teeth and got me the leverage and spotlight that i needed for the rest of my career um when i i just kind of woke up one day and realized like that's kind of like i love servicenow but that's not there's no way to live a life right um i'm not going to be on my deathbed wishing i had spent five more hours on servicenow and so you don't want javascript on your tombstone that's right um and so i just i started thinking about like what do i really enjoy doing i just it it dovetails with my service now experience i love building beautiful things and i hadn't grown up handy or toolsy um and i'm just kind of discovering what i can do with my hands and so i've been making soap for about five years now and i've gotten really really good at that making making all kinds of different soaps that's cool and lately i've gotten into leather working um and uh i just built myself a cool leather wristband recently i'm just doing simple stuff right now keychains and just to get the practice and the feel for all the tools um and the and the that muscle movement that you gotta you gotta learn about yeah um and beyond that it's just you know i got two young kids and i you know i love spending time with them and helping them grow and preparing them for you know a world that i don't even understand now let alone what it's going to be like 10 or 20 years for them here kids let me prepare you for something i know nothing about that's right well i mean you just got to like make them strong in mind strong and body strong in spirit right so it's just keeping them physically active mentally active and and somehow foster them with a sense of like nobody's gonna come and save me like how do i contend with the world which is a great tie-in for our topic today because we entitled this one blaze your own path for a reason there's there's tell me about this mythical road map we keep hearing about on how to be a top developer yeah shoot man i wish somebody would tell me you got 14 years in and i still haven't found it um yeah but i mean i don't know how it is for you i know for me like it's a daily um you know daily inquiries and like i understand the spirit of people's ask right they want to be better right that's a noble aspiration um but there's this there's this preconceived notion about how one does get better and like overwhelmingly it's weighted towards like show me the path that has been blazed before me right like point me down the the trail that's easiest to to to get to the destination on show me the documents right what what thing what things can i read or um give me give me the tips so that i can learn more efficiently so i've breaking down into like uh three fallacies and a necessity okay um because you can't like there is no like instruction booklet for how to get good in service now right at least from the duke's perspective right so number one is the fallacy of the golden path there is no like the path you took to your servicenow dominance chuck looks completely different from mine looks completely different from travis tolson's looks completely different from chris pope's you know yeah like just go down the who's who of who in service now and every one of them's gonna have a very different story to tell and a lot of it is predicated on what did you do before yeah right you know travis tolson was was was a mechanic in the marines right right and and that had like incredible path forming influence over what he did in the servicenow space i was a boring 30 year old schlub and like the only but and that had consequence for how i learned right and so there's there isn't this thing where somebody else can say oh look all you got to do is like read these documents and you know what i mean right it doesn't work that way right did i hit your thing that's half of it the other half is we don't even have the same target in mind i mean chris pope did something completely different from what i'm doing is completely different from from what you're doing it's it's a different target some people may be more into the product side some people may be more into the marketing side some people may be more into the developer side and saying you're a developer to me is like saying you're a doctor great you're going to work on my foot or you're going to work on my ear yeah or we're going to do some construction yeah exactly like paper airplanes out of construction paper or like high rises you know so there's a there's a huge target to hit that's why there is no golden path to being a servicenow developer it's like yeah it'd be like me signing up and going how do i become a doctor and the path from where to where because all the wares have changed too like yes like we only had two pad like it was itsm or developer right that was it when you and i were coming up yeah now somebody could come in and not even touch itsm not even touch like hardcore developer and and they'll be just fine you know they could they could hit two or three different specializations and still not even touch the things exactly we're our only options right so that's number one the fallacy that there is a golden path for you to follow fallacy number two is the is the fallacy of the efficient learner right so like a lot of people are like show me the like show me the document so that i can be a good service now developer to like give me your special tips so i can learn more efficiently right and that's like the worst virtue to pursue like to learn efficiently learn profoundly not efficiently but and everybody learns in a different way there's that's true there's the people who want hands-on there's the people who will watch a video there's the people who read it there's the people who will listen to it everybody's got a different intake and comprehension method right but like efficiency is such a false god you know what i mean it's like it's efficiency is something that you're at the margins right i got a million transactions to do and i'd rather do them in 1.8 seconds than two seconds that like that's efficiency right is just like getting 20 at the margins of a million transaction that's got nothing to learn with how you learn the fundamentals of a of a tool that's meant to be built you don't efficiently learn how to use a hammer you use a hammer and you use and use and use and use and use and use the hammer and you hit your thumb a few times that's right and it's only after 20 years of swinging a hammer where you like just line up the nail and just boop one shot and it goes in yeah you know what i hear what i hear efficient learner i hear i want a shortcut yeah i'm trying not to like morally judge the people who are asking right i don't know who asked you but that's what i hear they did have the parts to come up and ask is what i'm saying there's no doubt it can get frustrating at times but i'm just not here to judge people's motivations i'm here to to like give them the real answers right we mentioned hitting your thumb a few times with the hammer which i think is your third point the necessity of failure yes the necessity of failure because just you can learn a lot by doing it the right way but you don't know what you didn't you know what i mean like if you just walked if you just walk across a farm field right like and and you got to one into the other you wouldn't even think that you you know you didn't step on a landmine that's been active since world war ii just nobody stepped on it yet you know you didn't step on this huge pool of snakes that you didn't even know you were walking through that's pretty dark stuff man but you like you don't know what could have happened right right and then so it's in some places failing is is the way you learn the important lessons like oh heck yeah half the stuff i rant about where people's like oh let's just rob's going again you know somebody's got him on it and i'm just like ranting it's because i was like i was in the position where i was burned by it so badly beforehand yep that's right people i always respond to people they say wow chuck you're a genius you sure know a lot i say well we learn by our mistakes i've made a few it's so true i mean i get asked all the time like oh how come you never like started like how come you're not the head of some servicenow partner somewhere i'm like i was you know i started i started a consultancy called wolf pack back in the day oh okay it nearly killed me like i made so many so many catastrophic mistakes that you know i had one night where i woke up in the middle i was so stressed about everything that was going on and we won't make a show about that okay but i was so stressed about everything that was going on and the the certain financial and legal doom that was that was facing me and i was walking back to my bedroom and my my whole skin just felt like it was like literally burning like not just oh it feels hot like i felt like this is what it feels when your skin's on fire oh wow and my heart pumped like just five like real good ones just boom boom and i'm like this is what it feels like to have a heart attack i passed out and i thought i thought for certain i was i was dying i thought for certain i was dying and i called out my wife's name and she woke me up like five minutes later i just all i did was pass out but you ever have a moment where i'm like i'm having a heart attack i'm falling down like this is it i'm gonna die i have not but i don't want one and so but that's that's that's what i mean about like yeah people say what path did you take you want that path no you don't want to learn the lessons i've learned that way but you do you will have things that you will learn the hard way another thing like cmdb like robert can you help us do the cmb thing nope i'm not good at cmdb and i can tell you a horror story about what happens when i try and be good at cmbd like you're just not even gonna find out the stuff that you want to do long term until you failed a couple times if you want to find out some good stories about failure just eat it almost a minimalist approach go on the slack server and go to the til channel it stands for things i learned and you will get some great stories out of there it is a lot of fun til about the til channel you didn't know about that one i thought you were in there man we're gonna make this whole show about this one question anyway the fourth one and we'll i'll try to get through this one quickly is the fallacy of future maximization explain like the like a lot of times i get the question of what's the best servicenow assert for five years from now oh dear i know what i mean you know what but it's always like well of course they're gonna learn it now but they want it so that they're they're free and clear for the next five years and i'm like i've never felt free and clear yeah you know what i mean i've never felt like just think about 10 years ago the five years ago before that was like oh learn hp service desk that's a cool tool learn remedy and then it was like instant man service now crushed those comp competitors in in like a one to two year interval crush them and you know there's there's new cool stuff coming out and you're like oh that just could be so awesome every reason they adopt it and they don't you know or some other tool comes out from behind and you know everybody starts using that but later so you just can't you just can't time the market this way so it's way better to maximize for what you're good at yes you know for what you're good at which is a great which is a great segue into our next question we've told about what you know these fallacies and what you shouldn't do or what you can't do what can we do to be prepared or to set ourselves up for success okay so there's this idea of like niches or riches uh-huh like so if you can find the thing that nobody else does and you do that there's more upside for you right you become that person right that you know when virtual agent first came out you know mark rothoff basically like deconstructed the heck out of it he spent every day he was writing a blog but then it was like you know we're three months into virtual agent being live and and who is the person on earth who is the person for virtual agent yeah mark yep you know what i mean and so there's lots there's so many niches in service now right today oh yes yeah i mean you could easily be that person you know like i have a youtube channel i'm not the biggest servicenow youtube channel on earth but i do pretty decently and i'm just like you know where is the hr content like nobody's talking about hr best practices maybe they are i just don't have bumped into them but that's a that's a powerful niche to be in you want a new one rpa hub that's a whole new skill set to be exploited i am waiting to see who the new rock star is that's going to grab the horns on that thing and just you know start putting out blogs and videos and like that's that's what i'm waiting for is is who's the next uh you know nathan firth for rpa hub or the next yeah you know travis tolson of rpa hub that's gonna be interesting let's see even if you even if you're not aspiring to be like a persona in the space right you just want to be highly lucrative bill rate consultant yeah get yourself a niche but also but also make sure that you can get your message to the market about that niche ding ding yup i want to make sure that you know persona doesn't necessarily you have to be able to say you've got to have some way to say i've done this here's what my product looks like here's what my service looks like whatever if you want me to do this for you they're not just going to like google i need an rpa hub so that's right especially if you're an indie right because there's no connection between yeah like customers every day are looking for the talent right and i just like i love mothership right but mothership will only will only direct you towards certain levels of partner right yep so if you're an independent out there you've got to find an alternate way to get your message to the market because mothership isn't going to do it for you no this is not negative against service now right it's like of course they're not going to keep track of all the independence bajillion exactly but nobody's coming to save you you have to do it yourself and and not to discourage people who have started in itsm and are going that way because there's always room for credible right and itsm is a great learning block that's where i learned all my servicenow stuff you know a lot of the scripting and data modeling and a lot of that came out of itsm and that i could apply it elsewhere so it just became sort of a testing or approving or training ground for for learning what the platform can do and then you'll start discovering all kinds of opportunities which is is my next question uh is you know what's what's a way that somebody can do they go well i don't i don't have anything to build i i don't have anything that i really want to implement because i do this all day and i'm waiting for the customer to give me requirements okay so first of all let's let's talk about the this the the volume of space that that is to be covered right so you think about there's processes that people need to put on the tool right that's one dimension and then you have technologies that they need to put on the tool second dimension and then the third dimension is verticals like industries yeah markets that need those things put in so if you think volume is like length times width times height think about all the processes times all the technologies times all the different verticals those and and the sum of all that is what you can do in the space that's a big box a huge box and i don't think i don't think a lot of people think about this either or because they think itsm as itsm is itsm itbms itbm is itbm nope like you go into healthcare and they're gonna have a whole different like perspective on like itbm itsm itom like they're gonna have huge differentials in what they were asset management like just think about you're doing asset management for a median advertising company there's like computers like our creatives bring in their own stuff they rent their own software like we don't care i was talking to a colleague today about um just getting his powerpoint approved for the knowledge conference and he said really all you have to do is look at it and say it's good i i come from the finance world for the last 25 years where everything had to be triple and quadruple checked and approved like well yeah that that shed light on that industry for me so like you said every industry is going to be different so not every implementation is going to be the same and there's there's all kinds of these opportunities and one thing that i you know we're both passionate about the platform let's face it there's always something you can build always yes even if it's for your family for your for your your club you know you're doing boy scouts or whatever there's always something that you're going to spot it's an occupational hazard let's face it that needs to be digitized it walk into the doctor's office and they hand you a clipboard and i said what's wrong with this picture what sentry did i just walk into why am i filling out a clipboard i should be able to pre-register on my mobile device before i even get here gosh there's no way to say it that doesn't understate it you know what i mean like if you were the one person on earth that actually got to see god like how would you explain that experience to somebody who didn't you know what i mean wow that's pretty profound well you just think of like in the bible if you or or whatever holy book you decide to read if they describe what the angels look like they're like and all these eyes and wings and there's 12 of them and they had a lion's head and a horse's head and you're like what i went a little off topic there but the thing is like you just can't describe to somebody the vastness of stuff that you can build and it's super super important to realize that your pdi experience is only like one infinitesimally small difference between that and a quote-unquote real life experience if you can build a fully composed app and talk about the value proposition of it what problems it solves and how that's measured if you build that in your pdi like what difference does it make this on your pdi and not on some customer system yeah it shows the same level of um expertise with the component pieces and as long as you can articulate the value propositions how those value propositions are measured right in your app yep like you could just as easily do something like that at the client site and let's i mean let's just let's just kibbits a bit and talk about the different things you've seen out there where people built on their pdi like i'm teaching there's this um a friend of mine in the servicenow ecosystem he's been in the game forever his daughter's 18 now and he's trying to land her an internship um and so i'm teaching this like she's just out of high school right and trying to teach this person about how to build on service now and and the the context i'm teaching her in is she works at panera bread so like free shout out to panera bread in your podcast but um we're we're talking about everything in the context of what if your point of sale system goes down what if they want to measure the efficiencies of their oven what if there's a problem with the oven models that they've placed it like on the west coast like how would you find these things out nobody walks into a service now and say how would i manage like global operations for panera bread on this thing but you can sure absolutely it's it's work assigned to somebody it's a task you know those of us that have done it before just go yep i can whip something together for you i got a i got a buddy who does an annual barbecue chicken outing something or other and he wrote an app to manage all that like it's it's very specific i've got an app that i wrote as part of our podcast process that uh i am the only user yeah i use it once a week maybe once every other week to put together a specific segment of the show that segment used to take me about 30 minutes to do now it takes me 10. if it continued to take me 30 minutes i would have killed that thing a long time ago but because i've got this app and it only takes me 10 minutes we continue to do the segment and it put the fun back into it i can go focus on other things because just that manual tedium of doing the same thing manually over and over like this is getting really old so yeah you know i figured a way to codify it and put it together so there's there's always opportunities you start at your own desk and work out and not to borrow a phrase from another sporting goods maker just build it yeah i don't want john donahoe to come after me go you will learn if you've got an idea go out there and build it and you will learn you're going to run into challenges and then you reach out to the community and they tell you an answer and you go thank you travis tolson or thank you chuck tamasi or thank you whomever because you've learned something in that challenge it doesn't matter like if it's some profound business app it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be it shouldn't be in my opinion it doesn't even matter if you finish it right you'll learn stuff yeah just trying it like i don't know how many times it takes to swing it like like i said earlier i do soaping and i have it's a very like um ingredient based system but i don't use all ingredients equally right so i'll have 35 pounds of olive oil and 10 pounds of palm oil and 7 pounds of castor oil and i use different quantities of each of my recipes so i need something that stores recipes and when i execute a recipe it's got to take the calculations for remaining inventory out of all my different inventories right when i buy new inventory i've got to be easily like re calculate my totals and i need thresholds so that when it dips below right like i want i want to be able to crank out 10 more recipes before i have to buy another piece of another like 35 pound jug of olive oil right that's a great use case i love that because you you can picture all these moving parts and the problems that were there at the onset like i can fix this i can make this process better so that i don't run out of olive oil and i know what i've got and i can you know maybe do this recipe instead of that recipe talk a little bit more about that recognizing the problem i heard you mentioned on on your podcast that you were you were talking with a customer who was talking about what was it inaccurate assignments and yeah yeah i need i need this and you're like okay what's the problem that really is the case because let me tell you how bad this sucks okay i'll start i'll start with my soaping example and then i'll transition to this customer example right because like have you ever tried to eyeball a 35 pound like tin drum like how much olive oil is left in this 35 like full it's 35 some of that is the weight of the drum yep right but i don't know how much weight so i'm like sloshing this around and i don't know if there's like a half a third like how many batches do i still have and it and when it gets really low it's like i might have five batches or one so if i'm not rigorously like mapping out how much is left i i might not know so i might get to like soap day and not have the confidence that i have enough olive oil to pump out of this thing and so it's like okay order more olive oil okay now i'm waiting like in the best days i was waiting two weeks to get my 35 drum of olive oil but now with like logistics crisis is everywhere like am i five six weeks seven weeks away from right doing my next soap match which if i was doing this for a living would be a real like blankety-blank problem wouldn't it yeah and you know it's easy to say well this is this is robert and he's doing soap and the the impact isn't so this is a microcosm of you know take something like boeing with jet fuel or you know mechanical supplies or something that keeps planes in the air you don't want to run out and you want to know if it's going to take six weeks to get this stuff so every everything is raw material consumption it's the bread and butter of logistics which is the oldest the second oldest profession in the universe we're not going with the first old um so anyways like let's put this into like a real life example that you're more likely to see right so i had this customer and all of a sudden it was like stop what you're doing come into this meeting and oh we have this real disastrous problem with me with inaccurate assignments inaccurate assignments what does that mean well that means the tickets aren't getting worked fast enough and they're bouncing around and causing everybody a headache and our customers are getting pissed off and and then it was like okay everybody like let's strategize what to do all right go and it's like we should redo our category tree so it's more obvious what group it goes to please go yeah let's let's audit our groups like maybe we just have too many groups and we should like normalize it and have like more uh rational group names and maybe that's what's causing the problem and then everybody else is like oh yeah does the service now have this ai thing like maybe we just train an ai up and it doesn't matter that we have like crazy categories or groups right so we're sitting at like three four five different solutions that have been proposed and the powers of b are like go like launch all the mess do it all and we'll crush this problem and so i walk in there and i'm like let's just like let's run a quick performance analytics and see how bad the problem is first because if i'm going to like stop everything i'm doing so i could do these four new things then i had better have a handle as to how much the situation improves because we're literally like throwing value out the window and spending more money to get something else that's quote unquote valuable so you got to recognize the problem and then understand what done looks like or yeah how much you've improved and we found that the problem was basically non-existent like the person that was that was complaining was basically the victim of the x number of cases that it actually happened wow and it and and even for the amount of amount of uh political like heat that was generated it really wasn't like an absurd number either it's like sub 1 yeah it was something with some around there right and so it's like i came back to the table with that like okay just before we stop all these other priority one initiatives why don't we talk a little bit about how bad this problem actually is and this does two things for you not one okay number one it justifies is it bad enough to do development attention to right and number two if you can measure how bad it is you can measure how good it improves and then you can take your solutions on bite size right you're more agile if you prefer let's first reorganize our category tree oh that did nothing right give it three weeks that did nothing okay let's reorganize let's rationalize our group names all right give that three weeks now that helped a little bit but it's still too painful okay now train the ai you see what i mean like yeah how how how really how worth it is it to build stuff that you can't even measure the pain around if you can't measure the pain around he shouldn't be doing it yeah i mean it's just it takes it takes a real discipline and it takes a will to contend with the political forces to do that but when you do it earns you significant street cred even off the backs of people who you think aren't necessarily your friend and that you know right there that's another way you can blaze your own trail that's true success isn't building like necessarily right success is just reaching the best outcomes recognizing you know what's the problem what does better look like having those those deeper discussions rather than hey i cranked out 600 lines of code today great effort was it in the right direction i don't know that's right it's just it's layers of an onion right yeah at the start it's just they told me to build this did i build it well right that's the outer layer of the onion but the heart the core of the onion right that last layer that you gotta peel back is can i guide this organization to the outcome that they want and that doesn't necessarily mean building as per requirements don't ever put that on your resume just don't do that yeah i think i've heard you rant about that one already it's like nobody cares as per requirement could be the wrong court requirement it could have been a dumb thing to ask for in the first place right but do you have the the eyes to see right and and and the ears to hear in the mouth to speak that gets people out of their like out of the just zoomed in oh i want i want you to build me a business rule and more like god it sucks that we have so many bad reassignments oh well actually you don't have that many bad reassignments all right let's go on to the next thing my the hair stands up on the back of my neck when anybody tries proposing a solution before i understand the problem yeah that's just wrong i feel like walking into the doctor and say hey doc i need this specific medication no they're not going to just give you a prescription for that they're going to go well sit down let's talk about what what hurts how long has it lasted what what other medications are you taking to have that discussion i just had an aha moment there too like you talk about blazing your own trail to success right like there's a certain success that comes with i built the thing they asked for well maybe they'll ask me to build two more things right right and that is a certain level of success but another level of success is when you get to the point where you can get to that heart of the onion like peel back all the layers it's like what's the outcome that i need to get to and how do i get you there is infinitely transferable yeah right if a comment hits every servicenow data center on earth and we've gotten like oh it sucks but it's gone you know um like you could still do something else with that skill i don't want to be in front of that comet no we all hope it doesn't happen but you see what i mean or if it's just like i like i'm not going to do this anymore i'm going to do something else or even even within even if you're going to stay in the servicenow ecosystem perpetually right like i've had gigs that i won not off of the power of my credentials in that domain but off of the power of my eyes to see and mouth to speak like no like the first itbm job no i don't i i haven't done an itbm job before but here's what my eyes see and my ears hear and i'm speaking to you what i think your outcomes are like are we in agreement yes we are did any other partner tell you that no see so like being able to to to to do that even if you don't have like the itpm cert you could you could potentially get yourself into ways of working um that are not just like this the purely physical delivery ah kind of like it's not coming out right does that sound right it's the critical thinking aspect of doing your job you need to be able to analyze this information and distill it and evaluate it and all that thinking piece rather than just being a robotic automaton i i have heard that they're training ai to do programming so watch out it's not that good yet but who knows maybe someday developers will be obsolete so you better bone up on your critical thinking skills yeah and i mean i'd say there's not a lot of it either like there's you don't have a ton of competition and and customers love it so much when they find somebody that they think understands them yeah and sees the bigger picture focus on the outcomes yeah so that they don't have to be the ones to tell you to make a business rule that blah blah blah right yeah that just becomes a tool in your toolbox that you go okay this is one way to solve that problem or it's a means to an end but you better know where you're headed so yeah that's um that's a fun discussion around blazing your own trail i hope there's something valuable in there yeah we we covered a lot we covered a lot oh the legend of anatom boolean she doesn't work in the servicenow space anymore she's got this uh ai applied to dentistry startup but there's this this girl anna tom boolean and she went she showed up the hackathon they picked something really hard to do her team like totally bailed on her halfway and she had like basically learned servicenow that day what and she just like no i'm gonna finish this thing and she was so frustrated and everybody else just watched her like pull her hair out and just be frustrated to the nth degree on getting this thing done but she refused to give up even though she knew like a day's worth of service now knowledge and she finished it and she was a finalist wow yes and it was one of the most inspirational things i think i've ever seen in a hackathon so yeah if you think you're a beginner you got zero excuses now no kidding i mean she went up that wasn't a learning curve that was a learning wall i mean to her credit she's like she's like a coding genius level right so but but still she did it herself her whole team that also knew servicenow gave up kudos for the persistence on that one okay last question what words of advice do you have for our developers out there including the new ones uh man just just build like just go back rewind a little bit where chuck and i said everybody's got something that they can build in service now just do that on your pdi especially like when you start looking for work and you don't have a big laundry list of experiences in the market revert to your pdi tell people what problems it solved how it solved them and the way it's measured um and that counts so just just build and then also talk about what you're building yes if it's if it feels hard go to like the many many many places where you can get answers sn dev slack channel and community are my favorite right and say i'm having trouble with this and then just get buried in insights for for a night and also when you're successful talk about that absolutely i i this super high performing video on youtube it was just me trying to figure out flow designer like years late let's build a simple catalog item flow when you chuck you've got like 100 hours of flow designer stuff on the servicenow channel it's got to be right i don't know if it's that much yeah i mean but it's just like a prodigious amount of stuff at your level of of the game right and i'm still coming in here saying let's do just do it like a catalog item with one approval and i get a thousand views off of that you know what i mean like so after you build talk about what you've built and you know what you're going to find opportunities headed your way somebody's going to see that and say hey you should submit that as a creator con breakout session or something you go for sure yeah and that leads to other things and that leads to other it's like there's this growth thing when you get out there and explore and then share it so that's that's good stuff thank you for joining us today robert i told you this was going to go a little long but not too bad before we leave go nuts with your shameless plugs or content let the listener know the many ways they can get in touch with you the links are going to be in the description right yes yeah i mean you can reach me out on linkedin or twitter or my website my website is theduke duke.digital my email is rob theduke.digital i'd love to hear from you all good stuff again we will have the links for that in the show notes in the description uh give a plug for the recruiting thing you've got going yeah so it's something i kind of fell into accidentally um but if you're kind of person that's looking for servicenow talent i want you to imagine for a moment how much faster and easier it's going to go when the person looking for and vetting that talent has been there and done that like i understand what all these positions do day to day i've done the work so if you're looking for service now uh think about how much faster and easier you're not gonna have to go through like the minimum five resumes that some other course uh recruiting company has sent you you're just gonna get the people who fit if i ha if i have them and at a decent price and if you're the kind of person who's looking for to step up uh in the servicenow world like i i can offer you resume reviews i can offer you coaching on the way to finding you know that position you need thank you for all your help in the ecosystem and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today do not forget you can check out the other servicenow podcast at community.servicenow.com underneath the resources menu or go to servicenow.com podcast and subscribe to any or all of them there's some great stuff out there i just heard a really good episode of the accelerate podcast a lot of good stuff you can subscribe to one feet and get them all if you wish again thank you so much robert you had a lot to share today i hope we get to talk again more soon all right thanks chuck please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.com thanks for listening there we go we'll insert the bell there awesome can't wait it's a big topic it is and and i think we hit it with a big sledgehammer like there is no magic bullet [Laughter] what was i smoking