i love our developers stories about the different journeys they've taken in their careers and today's is no exception welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host chuck hello servicenow admins builders developers and of course all of you curious individuals that i say with the utmost love and respect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where of course we bring you all the latest tools and some tips and a bunch of tradecraft to accelerate your career in this episode i've got the pleasure of talking to ishaan shore he is a senior technical consultant for third era and one of our servicenow developer mvps how are you today ashan i'm doing good check how about you off to a good start thanks for asking now before we begin i like to always get to know our guests a little bit you and i met in sydney so we didn't have a whole lot of time to talk tell me a little bit about yourself all right so first of all thanks for having me chuck uh it's a pleasure to be here i've always been a listener of this podcast and it feels great to be here today no thank you uh so myself uh i'm ishaan shur uh senior technical consultant working with third era so i've been with it for around seven years now and with servicenow it's around four years and it's been quite a journey uh my favorite part of servicenow i would say is integration up and flow designer and i'm also a developer mvp and also organized meetups for servicenow melbourne meetups and yeah just loving what's going on excellent excellent and uh when you're not at work what do you like doing okay so this this is a very good like you know good question i've been asked this many times by a lot of people so people think that i'm i'm always up doing service now you know midnight mornings afternoons anytime but so yep like outside work i do catch up with friends go out for coffee drinks i love traveling i'm almost every weekend i'm out on a road trip you know just take my car anywhere nearby go out for a small hike or you know just have some good food after a long road trip so that's that's how my weekends are and you know that's how that's what i do outside work you know what i forget to ask my guests all the time is where are you located yep so i'm located in melbourne australia all right and it's the middle of winter yes exactly it's very cold today i think two or three decrease today morning oh sure keep the hoodie on we'll have to get you a service now jacket or something i'm waiting for that okay well that's a good lead into the next question what superpower would you like to have maybe i can i can sleep and everything can be completed by its own that is that is one superpower i'd like to have it would make for a very interesting comic book so all my user stories are you know marked to complete and done somehow you mentioned you were doing was it it for seven years and servicenow for four yeah what were you doing before you worked with servicenow so before i worked with servicenow i've also been uh so it's about one and a half years of testing so it was manual testing automation testing using selenium and other tools and the other one and a half here was i worked with another itsm tool and they it was basically an integration of one itsm tool and it was not servicenow and another monitoring monitoring tool that we have so events were generated and you know incidents were created in the itsm tool for the team to look at so but yeah that that tool is now out of the market and so i've worked with that tool and it was very slow so when i when i started office service now you know that's that's where i was like oh this is very quick everything is just getting you know done very quickly and it's very smooth as well so yeah that's that's what i've done how did you get your service now start service now okay so i was in australia and like i came here to complete my master's and you know every i think every international student if they if there are many and doing service now overseas so i was also struggling for a job and i was looking out for a proper job in my field something that in interest like is matches my interest and i can take on as a career so that's when i got into in touch with the company service line solutions which is now third era so i got into it it was a small uh growing company and a servicenow partner and at that time and that they heard me as you know okay let's let's try you out how you go so and even i was not sure what i'm going to do here but service i i didn't know what service now is i have worked with an itsm platform before i know how things work there so came into servicenow through that and the first pass a couple of weeks i was assigned to do testing of some catalog items so that's how that's how the journey started and i've got a bit of story behind these this testing as well so i think it was first or second day and i was testing a catalog item and uh you know how uh we are auto overplayed variables on the form so something uh was coming up as a society in a string field and you know so so that that developer mindset uh like i was i raised a bug there like there's there's a garbage value coming up in there you know so because i didn't know what the ssid is you know that was our time as well right it looks like something's broken when you when you see a society in a reference field like this can't be right something's broken yeah and i i reached out to the developer as well and you know something is going wrong there and he's like oh that's just the society is coming i i'll fix that okay like okay he's like what is his idea he charged about it okay that's a unique idea of you know every entity in service now oh that's great so that's that's how it started and how has service now changed your career changed my career that's how really good point so until now up like the three years that i've spent doing stuff and post that after that my master's as well and until the time i came into service now you know every everyone i think it not me everyone thinks that we'll probably get a job we'll having we'll be having some pay we'll you know make a living maybe have some savings and all so it wasn't it was same for me until then but when i when i came into servicenow and started working with the platform i don't know what happened but simply just became very passionate about the platform started loving working with it so and went deeper and deeper and deeper so and yeah just just enjoy working with it today and that's how it's changed my life so it's it's not that just work work thing for me in in terms of service now it's that if i'm doing something i enjoy it and every day is a new challenge every day so some people might think ishaan is you know he's a he's a you know a legend or something but the work that i do you know i have to struggle with that as well i have to research okay how we do this how we do that so yeah that's that's how it goes every day it's a new thing there's there's always something to learn every day yeah and that that's how it goes so yeah it's it's going and it's it's you know it's the platform is very vast it's not stopping so that's a good thing as well you never get bored every day some something or the other comes up new module comes up a new item comes up so yeah enjoying the journey how it's going uh sean who has influenced you in your career okay so when i started again uh i was also having a lot of questions in my mind how this goes and how i'll open a particular module how i'll write a workflow how i'll write a adf test case but you know it there were a number of questions to me as well and so at the first go it was the internal uh colleagues that i had they they were really helpful to me and most that the environment that i saw inside the company was great and even when when i looked at you know outside the community was also having a lot of information a lot of stuff going on there and it was just amazing so you know everyone is there putting out content helping each other so the ecosystem that i've seen here is really welcoming and i don't i i don't see anyone saying okay hey you you're just doing no you're not doing the right thing you know so everyone is really welcoming okay welcome even if you are new even if you are 10 years experience so that's that's how you know i've been open as well like i started doing stuff myself but i you know started creating youtube videos so it people really appreciated it and i really liked it so and yeah slowly slowly youtube videos meetups and you know i went to the public keeps speaking and you know i will also do internal sessions in the company at times and just love it now so now i saw that you did a presentation at this past creatorcon automating provisioning and entitling users in three minutes tell me what that was like to do your presentation it was great so i'll be i'll be very frank here on podcast so i was really nervous before the presentation and even after the presentation on how it went but while i was delivering the session i felt that it it just went like amazing i totally enjoyed it and i cannot you know think of you know not going back there again so i'm just waiting for the next one to happen he's ready he's ready for the call for content and yeah it was an amazing experience you know you feel that you might not be doing it right or maybe doing something wrong all the other but when i went in there it just went with the flow you know that okay i i know what i'm gonna present and just need to speak to audience you know yeah it was an amazing experience i just cannot wait to relive that again tell us about the preparation you did for that preparation yeah so okay so i created a presentation the first of all a basic uh you know like we have got around 10 minutes of presentations and the rest for the demo so yeah it was a i think 10 minutes of presentation i think i had around uh 13 14 slides in there and some of them were just but i think then slide with the actual content over there and this so it was it was the easy part you know putting it uh in the slides right and then the other part was also easy because i was using flow design so no code was involved there so it was i set up a i had a azure environment and set up integration between my davinci and azure it to talk to each other and yeah just had a action flow whenever a catalog item is submitted it used to create a user in azure and also i had a indication of those users coming back to servicenow so whenever a user is created in sdr so i think it put at max a day it used to take a day maybe eight hours and you you you automated it and it turned it into went from eight hours down to three minutes yeah looks uh yeah i think i will take eight hours or even actually more that i'm quoting here but i think it took me around somewhere i would say four hours to build that piece of you know actual demo that that i had to do so your roi was less than one implementation i mean one one user provision that's incredible and just so i'm clear your presentation was built on a real world use case that you had already built correct yes so i have uh worked on i think three to four uh user provisioning projects and that that that's why you know i just i'm just a big fan of i'm a big fan of flow designer integration now as i mentioned earlier and yeah so just love i think a lot of companies are going towards automating all these requests because it takes a lot of time manual effort and there are at times a lot of errors also that they have to encounter so if we are using integration up in flow designer it just goes away so all that manual intervention and errors are not required did you start an integration hub or did you have experience with the legacy workflow i did have a bit of experience with legacy workflow but i was pretty new i think two more three months and started came to know about flow designer through a colleague of mine and he told me just have a look at this one it seems pretty it's a new technology that came in and i looked at it so i so it was it was not a requirement though but what i did was i integrated our internal slack to our servicenow instance so i had admin access back back then on that instance so i integrated our service now instance with the slack so what what you should happen is uh in a particular slack channel so we had slag channels for every every project and so we were using ppm as well so whenever a user story is created updated and under circum certain conditions it used to you know post an update on the channel so that the business analyst is if he's updating stories the developer doesn't have to go into the instance to see what he's been assigned he can just open slack which usually is open already so they can just open and look at what okay what's going on so i've got a new story in the click on it opens up a new window and you know it so that's that's that was my first flow designer and integration of i use so using slack spoke and it was back in 2018 like near to my start somewhere in the december 2018. okay sean what do you like best about your job the best about my job is i get to work with servicenow every day is a new day new challenge a new thing comes up and also helping people interacting with people interacting with clients so you know working on user stories and they are all a part of my job but you know interacting with people getting the requirements getting to know what what they actually want and putting it into uh you know into a optimized solution or best solution that we said so it feels really great you know i can automate stuff that they want okay they have got a paper form and now they don't have even have to look at the request that they will fulfilling manually so it feels really great how you know everything can be just automated and also completed in minutes using the servicenow platform it's a lot of fun yeah all right what words of advice do you have for any new developers who might be listening to this don't be afraid to ask any question like someone might be really new in his career and someone might be very experienced but a question is a question and it's always welcome so there is no like you know no critique that i have seen or going on anywhere in the ecosystem so which is great everyone will be helping you uh it can be anywhere on the community ascendable slack channel or on a personal dm to anyone so always stay stay up to date uh follow the right people on linkedin twitter attend the developer meetups and join the snf stack so also go through the questions that you know are posted in in the community if someone has asked a question how to create an incident i'm just a very very question i'm talking about here but just go through that what what other people have answered and you know have given solutions uh so that that also helps you in learning how a incident is created there might be 10 ways that question has been answered it's a wonderful community you you iterated that a number of times with meetups and reaching out to the community and i want to thank you again for helping out being a meetup organizer that's very very helpful to us and to the community as well thank you very much for joining us today sean before we leave can you let the listener know how they can get in touch with you so yeah i am on linkedin i'm on twitter i'm on sn dev slack i'm also on community so you can reach out to me anywhere i would reply uh linkedin twitter i'm very active on linkedin and twitter as well and ascender slack channel as well all right i will have links to those in the show notes as always thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget check out the other service now podcast you can find them on the community at community.servicenow.com under the resources menu subscribe to this or any of them and get them automatically delivered for free breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producer chuck tomasi video and captions by earl duque and to find out more about the servicenow developer program i invite you to head on over to developer.servicenow.com once again thank you so much ashan for joining today thank you chuck thank you for having me it's a pleasure 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 give me a hello chuck hello chuck how did you get your start at let me try that again i ran my ship aground yeah yes that's also correct there's something that gets you out of bed in the morning what is it yeah coffee coffee i don't think anybody would disagree with you on that point oh man you made me laugh so hard i'm getting a cramp