i've always been a firm believer in the idea that those side projects you do for fun are extremely valuable in your career trajectory whether it's setting up a service to automate your home collecting registrations for a family event or tracking animal behaviors on the family farm you are going to learn skills that can take you places and show potential employers that you've got the interest and drive to learn and discover on your own in today's episode we'll talk with someone about his projects and what value he's gotten out of them welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host chuck tamasi hello servicenow admins builders developers and curious individuals and of course i always say that 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 in this episode i've got the pleasure of talking to servicenow developer at agility and 2022 servicenow developer mvp an all-around great guy jace benson how are you today jace i'm great thanks for having me glad to be here thanks for being a great guy first time break point first time at breakpoint and we've been doing this for almost two years boy i really gotta look at my agenda closer this is way overdue and i'm glad you're able to join me welcome to breakpoint and of course we'll follow the traditional path before we begin let's get to know who jace is tell us a little bit about yourself people find me online my name is quite uncommon and more common now though uh i've been posting on servicenow stuff since 2007 asking questions so that's where i came up from oh my goodness 2007 you're one of the few people that outrank like me and brad just barely i'm sure we have to have some old-timer stories at some point okay you've been doing servicenow stuff for a long time which gives you some credibility and authority on on what we're going to talk about today sure what roles have you had in servicenow in the last 15 years sure so i've been on i feel like i've been on every side of the equation except for working at servicenow proper i've been a consultant i've worked at customers i really like working on the customer side of servicenow because the experience is great right you don't have to deal with the infrastructure you just gotta write the code and solve those problems when you're a consultant it's uh it's still pretty good but the pressures the pressure is higher you gotta track your time you gotta track your time nobody likes tracking the time well i don't but there's also you know the support equation of it it's like two three four years down the road you're still supporting projects you did a long time ago as a consultant you move on and you're always getting fresh projects so yeah there's pluses and minuses that people need to consider if they're looking at their career paths that's definitely true if you're gonna consult though where you're not building in a support structure you're not gonna make a lot of friends at that place you laugh that's true that's true when you're not at work what do you like doing well i play minecraft minecraft with my kids that's always great they like to blow up my my houses that's fun other than that i've been building a a remote control semi truck i'm almost done with it i'm really excited to drive around and get some pictures of it like wait wait a semi truck you're talking about full-size truck or no no it's like it's like a miniature 1 16 or 130 32nd size rc car okay so this is this is a small model you build the you build all the innards so all the working gears and you build the drive shaft and connect it all up and fine yeah it's very interesting i just finished finished painting it yesterday so what color it's blue on top and white on the bottom with a black base in the back end of it very cool but i gotta cut about 130 stickers out and put them on it servicenow stickers all over this thing i'm picturing some of the stuff you picked up in new york oh man i should totally use a service now sticker for it i have some but it would have to be kind of small otherwise it's going to be the size of the door the only semi tractor trailer with a with code on the side there you go get an lcd display just have it rotate the code all right i'm going to borrow a question from one of our other podcasts that i heard and i really want to hear your answer what superpower would you like to have oh that's a really good one to learn something very quickly like instead of having to read it like i could just like learn through osmosis you want the matrix jack in the back of your head that's what i mean that would be perfect but like i mean i'd be all right with go to sleep on a book and then know it in the morning that would be a good power to have you could you imagine you need to write a powershell script to make a rest call from a server because whatever limitation and now you need to learn powershell have fun or communicating with other humans in their language or yeah that would yeah that would be fantastic when i was a kid once somebody once told me one of my good friends eric he's like i said it'd be awesome to be able to speak like all the languages yeah and he's like yeah you could probably still sound like an idiot in every one of them oh oh oh i mean it wasn't a happy conversation at the time but i'm just thinking like yeah just because you can speak it doesn't mean you're going to add value to those conversations so all right let's rewind the clock how did you get started with servicenow way back in 2007. in 2007 i was working on a help desk like so many other people who work on servicenow and they were transitioning from a system called touch paper to servicenow for change management i had said i'd done some php work before in my past like playing around with things and they said oh you can do the catalog stuff and so i took a stab at the catalog and i loved it that's how it started back then there wasn't workflows just execution plans so you did come in prior to summer of 2008. yep and uh i was like what are these newfangled workflows i can't work with this this is bizarre i haven't heard many people say that anymore well no yes they do say that about the workflows today what are these old workflows these are bizarre it's true i haven't thought about that in retrospect but that's that's actually true um but yeah then i worked at a hospital system until about 2011 got got head hunted by a consulting company which is now part of another consulting company and uh i left them after i had my first kid and been on the customer track ever since was there something in that initial introduction to servicenow that you just went oh wow that's that's it for me i'm sold well at the time i really wanted to work like as a developer doing something doing anything i didn't care right like i felt like i fell into the it job at the help desk and um okay once i got the job at the help desk then i just kept getting better and better and it was solving problems like it just made it really easy to solve those problems even way back then when you didn't have ui policies and other things like that the good old days i mean back then there wasn't rest frost there wasn't a rest api there wasn't a json api you had like processors and i think you had the soap wizzles and that was it but it did it did solve a lot of problems that they had back then get off my instance you kids said the old man oh i feel like that all the time it's fine it's fine did you get to tell stories that a lot a lot of the new developers appreciate okay you've got a number of side projects so let's start with the one i was first introduced to news.js.pro tell us how did that get started a couple years ago andrew albedore which you may or may not know he's another mvp he had noticed that i'd shared this opml file i don't know it stands for but it's a it's a grouping of rss feeds of things that i follow in the servicenow space and he said it would be really awesome jace if i didn't have to install an rss feeder or plug this into an rss feeder to read this stuff can you just post this online somewhere like the feeds like make them aggregate i was like oh sure and i did that like two years ago with an 11t site which is um a static city generator that i just had to rebuild every day but now news that jsepro is a little more fancy it uses a database in the back end it's uh it's fancy i've learned so much building it because i'm like how does servicenow do this thing that i would do and then i look at how i would have to do it in this new system and i'm comparing notes as i go and it's like wow cashiness card yes or whatever the problem is you're talking about caching it's like oh there are seven ways from sunday to screw that up yeah news that js.pro has pagination that i had the build news.js pro has authentication which i didn't build from scratch but it could use some improving because it's all running on lambda functions they're like 10 second servers that come up and shut down but those are the kind of things that that i wanted to talk about in this episode you built a paginator you learned what it takes to do that what happens when you hit the back arrow and you're at the beginning does it go back or is it disabled how do you disable it what happens when you go to the end but it's not an increment of the page number you're on and then you start going backwards and you're going okay i'm on record eight can i still go backwards if i have displaying 10 on this page i'm display it's like there's all kinds of wacky rules you got to put in here but you think through that and you get a whole new well an appreciation for anyone else who's built a paginator but you've also gone through a thought process that you wouldn't have had to and the crazy part is you did it for the love of just doing it for the fun of it well for learning so what i do things to learn stuff generally and so making that news at js.pro site i was using a system that uses graphql and react and prisma and i was doing graphql because servicenow and servicenow now uses graphql and i've been able to use that once at work like to debug stuff which is fantastic i can't wait till we're using graphql everywhere in the system because it is so much better than like the rest stuff but there is a bad stressed api so you can make all those calls together which i didn't know about until about two weeks ago thanks to kalaya when you start a project like this are you setting out to learn a specific technology or are you setting out to solve a problem and look at technologies that can help you get there and then you go okay now i learned graphql is it a byproduct of the adventure or is that the sole thing about your adventure is you said you you do these to learn are you trying to learn something specific and then find a problem to apply it to or is it the other way around well generally i'll have a idea of what i want right so like in like in the beginning sure andrew i'll make an aggregator for that stuff that sounds like fun and i was building on a tool called 11t and it was great so a byproduct of making this thing that i wanted so i didn't have to look up stuff was learning these static site generators and figuring how to make them more efficient and run them in a way that didn't fail okay have you ever learned something and never used it again well that was a skill i i'd never seen again before i mean yeah but sometimes you'll learn like how they solve like a type of problem like a pattern and those are always super useful yes regardless of what stack it's in or how it's set up i i look at that from an example of one that i did years ago i built my own ticketing system it was in perl and he used my sequel behind the scenes and in doing that i i stole a few concepts from another platform like i had a data dictionary it wasn't anything on scale with what servicenow did but then when i got to service now it was just sort of a natural transition like oh yeah yeah that's that's that's a pattern that's a concept that's a construct an abstraction that i could do again so when you see these other packages when you see these other platforms you can apply that and go well how would i build that in this right like that news.js pro site i have a thing in there that's kind of like rules like business rules right but everywhere else in the world they call those things middleware i had no idea that that was a thing so after i found that out it was like oh man everything has middleware it just means different things in different places but a lot of it means pretty much what business rules do are there is anything for news.js.pro that's on your wish list that you would like to get to someday oh i've got so many updates i want to do to it i i want to redo the layout of it so i don't have to load that sidebar i want to change it so that the unauthenticated users have a different display that authenticated users because right now if you look at the network tab it's making like five calls to check if you're authenticated and it doesn't need to because why it doesn't need to know you're authenticated so i've got like five things to make it faster improve it i just haven't gotten time to do it with uh with my other projects that i start i notice that you're also messing around with something called jam stack you've posted that on social media a couple of times what is it and what are you doing with it uh jam stack is building like we built back in the 90s everything is separated you have like your html stuff like on a cdn somewhere or on a specific server you have your backend stuff on another server and everything is just apart there's no more monoliths and when you separate those concerns everything can be a lot faster you can really optimize those different components and so um a lot of the jam tech stuff is like netlify is a company that is really um on the front of this stuff in versailles but uh they have like you up you can drag and drop a folder under their site and it'll make an html site for you and that's fantastic and quick and easy it's like geo cities again right but then additionally you can connect it to like an identity service and they can have a graphql service you can connect it to but then you can also just have your services make other calls other places and like using those uh serverless functions so then you can have like actual authentication without a server really lowers the cost of having a website news.jspro i think cost me like five dollars a month and that's with like 30 000 records in the database and hundreds of views a month it's fantastic the price of hosting has come way down and you get more capabilities than what you got just a few years ago i know when i was looking around for podcast hosting in 2005 2006 i did it out of my house and i went well this isn't going to keep up it's not scalable and then we went to the cloud it was like oh man i don't know if we can afford that and now it's just a few bucks a month for a server that's got way more horsepower than anything in my house and if you need another 10 gig you give them 10 bucks and you know they're no it's a dollar it's a dollar for another 10 gig of storage i can't even like i don't want a host in my house anymore i've got to get to that with uh all the assets i've been making for um for my video project sleep recently let's talk about your latest endeavor and i truly appreciate the effort that goes into this news with jace tell the listener a little bit about that uh so news with jay started um about two months ago um i'm not sure exactly why i wanted to do it i found this application called which made making videos really easy um and i thought well i have this news aggregator maybe i should aggregate the aggregated data into like a clip that's shorter that people can like just watch and then they'll know what i shared and that's kind of where that started and it's been evolving i had some mic problems in the beginning but then the folks like you and rob fedor were like hey you need to change those settings and get a better mic because you sound not the best everybody starts at some entry level to every new skill set this is a new new place for you it is whether you're starting in software development where you're starting in broadcasting and live streaming or we all have a baseline don't let that be the barrier to you getting in and trying this you again we the reason we're doing this episode is you will learn new skills right all over the place that will benefit you later trust me this this fun project will pay dividends at some point so yeah you you did have some quality issues early on and you know frankly you'll look back at these and go those are wholly embarrassing i'm going to take them offline like i did with some of my first dozen or so podcasts back in 2004. and but that's fine you learn and you grow from them and you are interested in improvement and the nice thing is there's such this wonderful community out there that's willing to step up and help you and not trying to be critical i know sometimes it's hard to take constructive feedback but the if you're willing to accept that and go thank you for helping me make this better that's that's when you really put your foot on the accelerator and go fast that is so crucial i've always been an advocate at least of myself to like hear people's complaints about whatever it is you're doing because if you don't hear those complaints how do you know what's wrong and if you get defensive about those complaints you're not hearing the like the gold nugget of like truth to whatever they're saying that they're upset about and frustrated about that would make it better for everyone well otherwise they vote with their feet or in this case their keyboard and they go somewhere else or or right or they do what i did back in podcasting well i think i could do better than that well today's currency is attention yeah right so though to spend their attention somewhere else it feels like a race to the bottom with how much attention people spend on every little thing is viewership going up it has been actually it's not like significant but it's still growing i've got a 130 subscribers i think right now and that's cool so i was able to get jace now as a channel name on youtube i'm still not sure if i should keep it on youtube or go somewhere else but um but it's been really great some words of advice don't compare yourself with anybody else's viewership yeah it's a you want to compete with your previous self that's yeah i know that much yeah and and somebody told me one time they said imagine you're sitting in a room of 137 people delivering this that's a substantial audience right and you've got that on a weekly basis and you don't have to travel to make that audience happen it's true that's pretty cool uh now tell me about we talked about audio tell me about any other skills you've learned from doing this project um well definitely um getting a better setup like it doesn't cost a lot to make your video set up really nice you can spend 10 bucks on a light and really make your face pop without that light though it it's really noticeable um but yeah you don't need much to start a video um thing on youtube however going in with intent is really really important in my opinion if you're just going to record yourself to record yourself i don't think anybody's going to want to watch that you know it but it's a slippery slope my friend the the the spending and the wish list of of this mic and that mixer and that i mean the most expensive part of all of these things is the time it takes to do it you've been you've been doing this for a while let's talk about episode 10 that's coming up how long do you take on the pre-show prep the recording and then the post show before it's on youtube i mean these are what five five minutes that people are watching five minutes right i try to keep them down the five minutes okay if it's more than five minutes i couldn't cut enough and if it's under five minutes i i don't add stuff for filler if i don't have it so how much of your life are you investing in this precious five minutes that 137 people are watching so generally i'll prep it on either friday saturday or sunday when i have an hour or so and i'll go through the save posts on linkedin because linkedin has a silly api and my news aggregator and um then i'll generate those assets and it takes me about about one hour to like get those things together okay in a folder and um once i have those assets together i try to put them in like a grouping of like upcoming events new people fun content and then i have to spend about another half an hour to 45 minutes now recording takes on those clips okay so that's the pre-show and then the recording is i guess the the recording part after it's prepped i don't do any post editing yet i just upload it oh okay because i i see cuts in the video where you're talking about story and then obviously the background changes and i thought like the the camera switches that's the whole like i do it all in one like i don't do one like recording but um that application that mm-hmm the way that they do it is it's like a video presentation software where you can go from slide to slide and you record the clip for the slide and you can change the takes out and replace them or throw in a live like a another video or whatever you've eliminated a lot of the post-production hassles i mean if i eliminated i haven't felt it yes i i don't i don't know the post-production hassles i do want to add some post-reduction stuff to it though okay and i'm i haven't figured out where to get that started or how to learn that without it being really difficult and it's it's another skill set so i'm figuring you got two two and a half hours invested in each episode is about what i approximated yeah that's about right i did some quick math 137 people times five minutes means they're if they watch the whole thing that's like 11 hours of viewership you're coming out ahead a little bit that's great so jason what what other benefits or lessons learned have you got out of doing news with jace well my my family sees it they think it's pretty cool so so 37 of these viewers are your family my wife she came in the other day she took a picture of my office i have one of those green screens you can attach to your chair because i thought oh my office is really small like this will work and she's like look at my husband in his silly office it's you're learning like to be public with stuff i think it's really important to be able to be true to yourself and to be yourself around everybody else and learning in public is one way to really ensure that you are your own person did you present that knowledge i didn't this year okay i was going to try and connect that because presenting on the camera helps you present better in public because you are watching yourself and trust me i'm my own worst critic when it comes to replay and playing and performing and doing that and then when you get out in public again there's there's like a return benefit because not only do you feel better about presenting but there's also that that energizing i i i tell you i'm i'm really happy i'm looking forward to doing more podcasts and more videos because of knowledge like yes i now i now know who these people are that are out there watching and it's it's just all that much more energy so there's kind of this wonderful building cycle of how that goes like a circular effect of like energy that just keeps growing and as you make stuff people more people notice it like people approach me at knowledge and i'm i think it's fantastic that people find value in the things that i create initially when i started creating most of my content it was for me but other people finding content in it and then approaching me and thanking me for the content that i made is so fantastic to hear that is the winning recipe i am glad that what i make and make for maker online is helpful for some people and that's that's just an added benefit of the initial goal of like my blog yeah if there's two takeaways in here that's that's one of them is if you do something and people find value in it you won i mean that's what i'm calling is you want right the other takeaway is when you invest in these side projects that pays dividends to your work product and your work product pays dividend to your side projects and that just keeps making you better and better because you're putting in that extra time and and those skills even though they may not be directly related to your role today they can lead to opportunities later i exactly i don't want to hold myself up as an example too much but that's exactly what happened to me and i am the happiest i've ever been in my career because i took this chance and started doing a podcast back in 2004 it's now the dna of what i do and i can bring that passion not only to talk about servicenow which we're all very passionate about but also to the delivery of that whether it's in a video or whether it's on stage or whether it's in a podcast that comes through people seeing you isn't just like a yeah it was helpful for somebody some of those people become managers they become bosses they become ceos yes i mean i'm telling you this year i've talked to more vice presidents and ceos and i've ever talked to in my life and i was like holy buckets it's so cool to be reached out to by these higher ups and um i mean everybody is a person at the end of the day and if you keep that in mind that's gonna that's gonna really help you out but like still it's like a little oh my gosh this ceo reached out to me today like what can i do for you or what would wha what do you want from me like you know it's a little i feel a little awestruck when like folks who are founders of their own companies like reach out that's the the relationships are invaluable and you you could have say one of our partners call up and say we're starting a media production thing we want to do a news segment we saw jace doing this nobody else seems to be doing this around servicenow would you be interested in coming to our company to produce something like that like yes and yes you know that's the kind of stuff that comes out of these projects that's how you write your own ticket people is you get out there put yourself out not not necessarily doing a video about news but do what you love and follow that whimsical idea see where it leads you if it doesn't work out hey you move on to the next one you go i'm going to be the first servicenow songwriter i don't know yeah there's plenty of people to take note from at least in this space i mean you've got like drew with his podcast you've got a whole bunch of other people with podcasts right robert is a shining example you've got justin meadows had cross fuse doing his videos which are fantastic and he's been mixing in like these shorts and other stuff which i that's a whole nother deal i mean yeah cross views bring that back cross views was it was born out of servicenow guru which was something you put in blog tips together and say hey look what i learned and i still go to servicenow guru sometimes that's awesome any words of advice you would give our developers today jace just make stuff keep creating you don't have to share it if you don't want to but make things even if you're not going to put it online for other people to consume make it and save it in your google drive or make it and save it in your whatever backup system you use you will thank yourself later when you're at another project and you're like how did i make this ridiculous thing if you're making projects and you're saving them for yourself or even saving them online to share with other people you're gonna save everybody time great stuff and i've heard so many developers say i've got an evernote folder for this or i've got a google drive doc for that it's going to be some obscure property or table name or something that delivers you from the head punishment that you did the first time around and go i learned that i'm going to save it and some people like you said choose to share that and that's how they get a blog started that's how they get some of that content out there i put people in the three categories when it comes to these like sharing stuff right you got like travis tolson who has like full on book chapters he writes you've got me who writes like between one and three one in five paragraphs on the topic and then you got folks like uh i am kalai and this other guy named ruin who is this cloud minus 89 site and they're like one sentencers so like you don't need to have a lot of content to share it and i've found value in all those sites and all of those people i don't know that anybody's broken open the tick tock recipe like there could be servicenow tick tock content i mean earl made something this week did you see it i did i haven't looked at it yet i was traveling when he made that but yeah i'm really curious to see where it goes but there's all kinds of green space out there and i love it all right chase it's been wonderful talking to you lots of great insight and advice now is the part of the program where you get to promote yourself how can people get in touch with you you can reach out to me on twitter at jspensen or you can reach out to me on anywhere you find my name and i will try to respond all right i have a i have a blog jstot pro and um on there i link all of my other projects that i'm currently messing with can do i assume linkedin is also an option or do you know linkedin is definitely an option that's where everybody goes uh oh yeah yeah that's just in slash json personal cell phone number probably not uh i mean i do have a number i can give out but i'm not going to read that out here um if you look on things you'll find my email so there's also that but i'm not going to also share that here excellent excellent all right thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget we have other servicenow podcasts you can find them at the community on community.servicenow.com under the resources menu or go to servicenow.com podcast subscribe to any or all of them there may be some that are suitable for your co-workers that you may want to recommend real quickly breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producer chuck tomasi video and captions are by earl duque and to find out more about the servicenow developer program i invite you to go to developer.servicenow.com again thank you so much chase for joining us today glad to be here bye 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.servicenow.com thanks for listening i've always been a firm believer in the idea that those side projects you do for fun are extremely valuable to your courage your georgia and our first outtake is made how about i just start this out and if it doesn't work we'll cut it i don't know about that now i lost track of what my next question was because i don't really have a next question oh my god that's fantastic i don't know that any buddy i don't know that anybody try that again for the third time yeah now you're now you're talking my lingo i hope people can understand me