Transcript

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody, and welcome to hack your environment to work for you. My name is Maria Gabriela Ochoa Perez Waechter. Some of you may know me as MGOPW, and my pronouns are she/her. I am a 2022, 2021 ServiceNow Developer MVP. And I've got ADHD combined, PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depression recurrent with stress. I'm a Venezuelan-American immigrant, and I'm part of the LGBTQIA+ community. We're getting a little bit personal in this session today. So I wanted to get all of that out of the way. And I wanted to first share with you a quote that really helped me realize some things about myself. This is from the Disability Science Review, but developmental disabilities are not a disease. They are a mismatch between a person's capabilities and the requirements of their life situation and culture. It helped me realize that my ADHD is really only a problem because I live in a society where I'm expected to sit for eight hours straight and work, and I just can't do that. So it's story time. When I was young, I really struggled in school, and I had no idea why. I got perfect grades, but I could never focus on any one thing. And I could never make my mind up about what major I wanted to be in. I switched majors because I love doing everything, and I couldn't stick to one or the other. I went between advertising, psychology. My dad always tried to get me to do art, but I wanted to make money, so I want computer science in the end. When I was part of the computer science program at my school, I looked around me and I saw just a bunch of men, who could sit there and stare into the matrix and pull out lines of code and somehow just be able to work for hours on end, when I couldn't even focus for 30 minutes at a time. It took me a while to get everything figured out. I went to a couple of doctors and a whole bunch of therapy. And I was finally able to accept myself for who I am and really keep working on my own mental health. Somewhere through that, I ended up getting into a car accident, and I'm still going to school. One day, I'll finish it. And then I ended up getting to ServiceNow. I finally found a place where I could do all the things I wanted to do, and I could do them all at once. I could get to interact with people. I was getting to be creative to the Service Portal, and I got to write code like I had always thought I couldn't do. But how did I get there? A lot of coping mechanisms or alternatively, how the Job Accommodations Network calls them accommodations. Now there's a lot of things that you need to consider, and you should work with your boss or your manager when you do this. But you have to figure out what parts you're struggling in your career with. And I've been very lucky to have had some amazing mentors and role models in my career that have been willing to help me out. One of the hardest things that I just cannot do is prioritize tasks. I'm really great at taking notes, so I'm really great at paying attention and retaining information. But I don't know where to put it. I don't know how to organize it, and I don't know what needs to come first. So I've always asked my managers for help, figuring out which of these 37 tasks need to be done first. Other stuff that has worked for me in the past is being provided a structured breaks, being provided private workspace time, minimizing random things that I have to do as part of my job. To focus on specific things and specific blocks of time has really helped me out. An uninterrupted work time with no meetings has been just one of the biggest and best things ever. You can also do to-do lists or have meetings at the start of the week in order to prioritize the rest of your week and other assistive technology, like pomodoro timers are a lifesaver. They're little cubes or you can even have digital timers that you do pomodoro sprints with. So it could be 30 minutes of work and then a 5-minute break, and then 30 minutes of work and then a 5-minute break. And this has really helped me out because I've been able to just really hard focus on just working, and then I've been able to disconnect for a little bit and then be able to reconnect. And I found that I have been incredibly productive during those pomodoro times. Now there's something else that I ended up figuring out, and that takes me to this code. It's a lot of code, isn't it? It's too much for me sometimes, and this is only a third or a fourth of the final length of the script. And while I was working on this, it was awful because I just have to kept-- I just kept coming back and then leaving, and then coming back and leaving. And every time that I had to get my mind back in the coding mindset and back into the code, it took me at least 30 minutes to really figure out what the heck was going on. Because there's so many words on the screen, all of it makes sense individually to me, but it all doesn't make sense at the same time. So I started looking around because there had to be some way to figure this out. Somebody had had to figured something out with this by now. So that made me turn to Visual Studio Code. It's a great text editor. I highly recommend you use it. There's a bunch of awesome plug-ins, and one of them is called Highlight. Highlight lets you use regex to highlight different things in your code. The suite's called Highlight. So I used it and the help of some of my really good friends, thank you guys so much, to highlight previous, current, and my log statements and change their colors. You can make them be really obvious. You can use background colors. You can change the color, the font way. You can change the color looks on the sidebar, a whole bunch of stuff, and it will just do it automatically for you when you load your script. And it basically turns this giant block of text into something a lot more legible for me. To you, this might not make sense and in my look, even worse. But to me, it's really helped me out because I'm now able to-- well, first, I can look at the entire line of code. And that log line in line 4, it doesn't register in my brain because it's so close to the background color. But I know it's there when I need to reference it. So suddenly, the size of it looks a bit smaller. I also discovered that I could use emoji inside of ServiceNow scripts. So I now use emojis to figure out logic. With this script, I was working on a lot of previous and current objects inside of a business rule, and I kept getting confused about the if and else-if statements because they had to be compared to each other. One had to be empty. One had to be non-empty, and there was a whole bunch of different cases where I needed to do something specific according to the state of previous and current. So I created these little comments at outlines, where it tells me if it's two X's, I know they both don't exist. And if it's an X and a check mark, I know that previous exists, it doesn't exist, and then current exists, and so on and so forth. Because I don't know why, in my mind, I just cannot read if nil or dot nil and remember the meaning of it right away. It always takes me a second to read logic that out in my brain, and I've realized that that was just wasting a whole bunch of time. So when we compare the two, one of them might look better to you. One of them looks way better to me, and that's what this whole session's been about. It's been about you working to find what works for you, and what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. So I highly encourage you all to take a look at the Job Accommodations Network. A lot of us don't put a term to the struggles that we face day in and day out. Some of us choose to go with mental health therapy, and others choose to find other methods of treatment. But we all end up having our own individual struggles. Even if it looks like nobody else around you is struggling, trust me, they are. Look up imposter syndrome. And then look up the Job Accommodations Network to really figure out how you can help yourself succeed because there's only going to be one person invested in you, and that's going to be yourself. And you need to take that time for yourself. One last thing that I wanted to mention is something that a lot of people come up to me and say is that they can't find any jobs that are looking for people with their experience. They don't know how to get into the field. And they don't want to apply to this job because they feel like they'll be rejected. But what I want you to know is that I have never applied for a job that I was fully perfect for. I have never met the job requirements. They always asked for a degree, which I don't have. They always ask for 20 some years of experience for an entry level job, which nobody has. And what you really just need to do is just apply. You just need to do it. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Just do it. Yesterday, you said today, do it, and just join us over at SNDevs, where we all love to hang out and help each other. We're the largest independent ServiceNow community. You can find the link on the slide right behind me. And finally, make sure you go check out WomenNow.Dev. I'm going to be posting a blog post going further into my experiences, the specific accommodations that have really helped me out throughout my career. And I'm going to be posting a lot more resources that you can tap into and other blog posts to really help you in your journey in getting started or wherever you might be on helping yourself succeed. So thank you so much for watching. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. [MUSIC PLAYING]