Projects
For the past several years, we have piggy-backed on the Digital Ocean event of Hacktoberfest. It started in 2017 when Josh Nerius and Dave Slusher (Former Developer Advocates) put together a system to allow ServiceNow developers to accept GitHub pull requests.
Last year, the focus was around creating Spokes for IntegrationHub. You can check out the summary blog post about that lovely event! My favorite part was traveling to Minneapolis and visiting with Developer MVP and Meetup Organizer Jace Benson for his chapters Hacktoberfest event!
Our Spoketoberfest celebration has come and gone. It was a spontaneous event prompted by a conversation in a hotel lounge in Bengaluru India. We hoped for the best but had no real expectations what the participation would be like.
In the final analysis, we had six projects that attracted contributions from six developers (including myself). Although the numbers match, we had a developer commit to two repos and one repo with multiple committers so it wasn’t just one developer per repo.
For the past several years, we have piggy-backed on the Digital Ocean event of Hacktoberfest. It started in 2017 when Josh Nerius and I put together a system to allow ServiceNow developers to accept GitHub pull requests.
This year, again we are attempting to parasitically attach ourselves to the event but with a twist. Because it is a ServiceNow goal to increase the number of IntegrationHub Spokes in the world, that is what we want to focus on this month.
Last year we spotlighted a way that ServiceNow developers can be part of Digital Ocean’s Hacktoberfest challenge. About a dozen people participated and earned themselves a sweet t-shirt. I personally love mine!
Points Thing The official project of the Developer Program for Hacktoberfest is Points Thing. This is a bot that lives on an instance and is responsible for managing the points assigned on the sn-devs Slack channel whenever you execute the @user++ syntax.
After Your Pull Request is Accepted
Last week we posted information on how you can use ServiceNow projects to participate in Hacktoberfest. This involves some work server-side for the maintainer to be able to emulate the merging of GitHub pull requests. Let’s say you participated, submitted a pull request and it was accepted and merged into the main repository. Now what?
To reiterate slightly, you will have your own fork of the repository, and your ServiceNow instance is connected to your copy of the repository.
Source control integration was added as a feature to ServiceNow in the Geneva release. That increased by a wide margin the quality of development tools available to the ServiceNow developer. One could save code, easily move from instance to instance, backup personal developer instances, etc. One of the details of the implementation is that under the hood it is committing update sets. This complicates standard collaboration tools. GitHub pull requests and normal patch files assume that they are working on the text of code so when that text is really an XML payload, that presents a big challenge for diffing and merging.
Andrew Barnes
