Dave Slusher
3 minute read
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.
If you want to work on Points Thing then begin with a fork of the new official GitHub repo in our ServiceNowDevProgram organization. Once you have that, all the other directions here work the same. The tools we use to do reconcile the pull requests on the back end are not simple and not end-user friendly so at this time, we’re the only ones who can do this. With any luck (and a bit of development time), we’ll have this usable by the whole world for 2019.
If you want to work on any other project or publicize your own efforts, you can do that. In the next few days we will try to cobble together a system where pull requests can be generated in a manner that will be recognized by Digital Ocean and also contribute back to the source repository. The pull requests may just be a signaling mechanism that triggers something else. Methodology TBD so keep watching this space. Bear in mind that even if you are the only person in the repository, making five pull requests against your own open repository for a ServiceNow application does qualify for the prize!
Important: Necessary to Receive Credit
One weakness in the ServiceNow implementation of the git integration is that commits are registered not to the username whose credentials are used to push and pull, but by the username of the local account that did the commit. This means that by default, most of the commits on GitHub for ServiceNow development are credited to “admin”.
There is a simple workaround for this. Before you begin any work for Hacktoberfest, make sure you create a local account with a username that matches exactly your GitHub username. In my case, I create a “daveslusher-sn” local account on every instance I hook to GitHub. Give it the admin role and make sure that you log in to this account before committing. This simple action will assure you get credit and qualify for that sweet sweet t-shirt. At the end of the month, we strongly encourage posting your work to Share. Think of it like NaNoWriMo but for ServiceNow applications!
For now, register for the challenge, fork Points Thing if that is your thing or create your own repository. It must be public, and begin committing your work. If you need any help or have a project you want to publicize, send me an email. Happy building!
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