[Music] the oldest podcast is brought to you by all this International supplying your expert Ai and digital transformation staffing needs across the U.S and Europe today you are listening to our servicenow Series where we interview the best and brightest of the industry to share their story advice and views on the exciting world of servicenow and digital transformation [Music] hello everybody it's Mark Kelly here Chief customer officer and co-founder all this part of our servicenow series I'm very very happy to welcome Tim Woodruff to the show Tim delighted to have you on the podcast today howdy thank you good to be here Tim what did the servicenow community majority of people know you or know of you would you mind giving our audience a little bit of an overview about your journey into the world of servicenow well when I got started um it was just kind of uh I think like most service now developers just kind of a happenstance sort of a thing the company I was working for at the time um was choosing between several service or several itsm platforms and servicenow is one of them I was the trainer that was going to be teaching people about sort of how to use it and uh also teaching the developer the team of developers that they were going to build uh how to build on it I had no experience with any of those platforms but they asked me for input and I did some research and I was like servicenow seems like the one to do and um so they went with it and I trained their team on how to use it I did a bunch of learning of my own and and then trained the small team of developers that they had on it and then they said hey do you want to be our developer and architect I was a software development before and had already worked in information security for a long time and information security development had worked for that company for uh several years by that point and I loved writing code so I said yeah sure um and that that was just kind of how it happened and then I've just been doing it ever since really being uh your kind of most recent role and what kind of work are you currently doing so right now I'm working for a company called titanium who makes like endpoint Management Solutions and um they just do a lot of really cool stuff with your uh your whole kind of um endpoint environment so so I'm building for them uh Integrations between the titanium platform and servicenow uh the main one that I've been working on recently is uh an SDK a software development kit that is in service now that allows you to um basically build your own Integrations and allows me to build other Integrations on top of it really easily so instead of kind of Reinventing the wheel and and figuring out you know how do I do authentication and how do I do this API call and how do I parse the response and all that kind of stuff every time you want to build something new that integrates with tanium um you just call you know one method of my apis um and I mean like JavaScript apis in servicenow and it figures all that out for you and returns something meaningful or take some action and tells you how it did and stuff like that so [Music] um it's allowed us to build some really cool stuff um and I've been adding more and more features to the SDK over time and it's been a lot of fun turns out I really like building sdks um so I've started spinning up a bunch of side projects to build sdks for other stuff like open Ai and some other things that just make any other kind of custom Integrations you might have really easy for um any other servicenow developer out there most of my tools if people are familiar with my site or my books SN Pro tips or the development handbook or any of that kind of stuff they'll probably have seen I read a lot of tools that are Developer Centric I write fewer tools for companies that are you know here's how to do some process in the platform with my application it's more like hey developers I wrote a thing that makes development easier and better like update set based tools or all kinds of stuff like that yeah so let's tell us talk a little bit about the servicenow development handbook for people that actually don't know about it what was the purpose about it and how did it actually come about yeah so um originally it started as [Music] um I was working for a client of mine and they wanted me to uh they had an internal service now development team but they were pretty green um so they brought me on to do a bunch of work and to do their technical architecture and code reviews and stuff and I noticed that I was kind of giving the same feedback over and over again because you know you had this problem of tribal knowledge especially in larger teams you help one person with one thing and that's great they've leveled up now but the rest of the team doesn't know that one thing so how do you share that knowledge um so I had this process of I would do code reviews I would give feedback and then I would write down all the feedback that I gave and I would see what nuggets I could extract from that and share with the rest of the team in a newsletter I started taking that newsletter and turning it into a big document of like kind of the bullet points of all the big important stuff that I'd shared before that people could reference so if we had some new hire they could reference the previous tips and I wouldn't have to keep repeating things um and then at a certain point they said can you just write one big giant thing that is our entire um like uh development standards and best practices all the pitfalls and caveats that you've ever seen in the platform anything you've seen from your code reviews with our people or just with any other client just everything just write everything down Tim uh and I I was like yeah that sounds like fun because I'm a masochist apparently uh and I but I told him uh I won't charge you for it if you uh let me have the rights to it because I might be able I might be able to turn this into a Blog for SN Pro tips or something like that and I they agreed so I didn't charge them to write um those docs um and I did turn it into a bunch of little articles at first and then I realized the size I mean it it had got up to about a hundred pages of documentation by the end um before I left that company and I was like you know this is like the beginnings of a book so I kept working on it worked on the structure I kind of re-engineered it into a waterfall model which is how I write most of my books I'll write like I'll write the chapter headings and then I'll write the chapter subheadings and then in under every chapter subheading I'll start like a bulleted list and then I'll just go in and expand on whatever section I feel like expanding on that day and turn the list into content um and I ended up just accidentally writing the service now development handbook but the handbook is really geared more toward people who have at least a little bit of experience or have gone through a lot of training and um are really ready to kind of level up their knowledge it's not gonna like eat you JavaScript but it's going to teach you how to take your JavaScript knowledge and specifically in the context of servicenow how to understand the sort of underlying engine um both like the chord JavaScript engine and servicenow specific implementation of it which is based on Mozilla Rhino which is a Java based implementation of JavaScript which leads to a lot of weirdness especially since it's an old version um so it's specific it's servicenow specific it's JavaScript like Focus so it's like code focused but there's also a lot in there and the reason I mention that is because you if you're just an administrator and not a developer it's probably not the book for you it's if you're if you're a developer I would I wouldn't want people to like spend money on it and then feel um like they weren't getting what they thought they were um but it's also got a lot of stuff in there that is helpful for administrators and especially Architects or people who want to be technical architects um because that's the kind of the audience that it was geared toward was developers and Technical Architects and it's kind of what I was when I was writing it um it is now in its Third Edition and um I'm working on the fourth edition very slowly it's probably far away um but the Third Edition I'm I'm very proud of uh it's it's got like 40 percent new content so the additions are not just little incremental changes because again I don't want people to buy the book and feel cheated if they especially if they have the previous Edition but um that's just kind of how it came about I've just been iterating on that documentation that I originally wrote for that one customer uh for the last like couple years and tell me Tim when you're creating the books and you're getting feedback and you're working on it as as well how do you juggle all the different insights and feedback loops and how do you just kind of keep that kind of mind to be able to work through all these different challenges um I just kind of hyper focus a lot um I am autistic and um have um ADHD and my brain is weird but one of the cool things that it does is hyper Focus um and uh I just I don't tend to get distracted I when I'm doing that you know you you find ways to put yourself into a flow State and you just live there for a while um and then you come out of it when you have to pee or something and you come back and you go wow I did a lot of stuff there um and I I kind of split my focus between multiple things because I like to keep my brain sort of taxed at maximum capacity and um but I've got you know a four by four or a two by two monitor array so it's four monitors they're all curved and like surrounding me and I'll have like whenever I'm working on a book I'll have that book open on one monitor I'll have some documentation I know there's some code on another and then some client platform in another and then I'm just kind of like moving around doing whatever thing is most interesting to my brain and that way I never get distracted from work because the only things there to distract me are other work yeah I was going to say Tim you've got your beautiful dog esri potentially my distract you but um I'm joking is she still there yeah um she is currently curled up by myself it's already one of the nicest looking dogs I've ever seen in my life and such a nice uh Placid she's such a sweet dog she's always just like hanging out by me while I'm working my constant buddy Tim thank you very much for your time today and my final question before we kind of close off is where do you see the platform evolving to in the future My Hope Is that in the future we'll have um sort of two ways of interacting with the platform as developers one is the junior to low mid level developer experience or the citizen developer experience and that is um you know flow designer and these Spokes and like a lot of drag and drop stuff but also with the ability to write code it's just not always necessary and the other is the high code you know really senior developer uh nerd experience which has more capabilities more functionality and more um customizability the difference between Android and Apple is the customizability and I think that instead of servicenow being one or the other I think they could present this experience for one and that experience for the other um and it's very recently I have become a little bit hopeful that they will move in that direction rather than just the Walled Garden model so that's what I'm excited for uh in the in the mid future uh regarding the platform and I'm I'm also very hopeful about it and I hope that they continue what they've done with the Utah release which has been very developer friendly um and I'm I'm looking forward to seeing what they actually end up doing Tim thank you very much for your time today thank you I appreciate you uh having me on I hope you have a great one [Music] enjoyed today's episode don't forget to subscribe rate and review we are available on Apple podcast Spotify and any Android podcast of choice you can also head over to our website www.aldis.com to listen to more podcasts view our open roles and stay up to date with industry news thanks for listening and stay tuned for more great episodes coming very soon foreign [Music]