GitHub
Hacktoberfest 2020 is all wrapped up and finished. What a fun event it was this year. Our awesome developer MVPs did a great job setting up and coordinating the Now Components GitHub org for the dozen of repositories that were collaborated on there. It resulted in my first podcast recording ever with the Author of Podcasting for Dummies Chuck Tomasi. Brad and I acted as maintainers on both the component and spoke orgs, which was a ton of fun.
What is Hacktoberfest Hacktoberfest is an event run by stewards of open source to encourage contributing to projects that are also open source.
Why participate in Hacktoberfest The more able you have your community, the more that community can contribute.
When you have that, you can help any number of open source projects. There’s a free t-shirt. We’re all very well paid, but this shirt will convince most of you.
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!
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.
I have been working on a skunkworks project with ctomasi, josh.nerius and a few other people for months now as a low level background task. One of the downsides in working in an evangelism role is that sometimes you do lots of things to communicate about developing without actually doing any development yourself. In order to change that, we carved out a problem space that all of us were interested in, had an opportunity to improve toolsets and would be something that we ourselves would want to use every day.
Update: An up to date version of this article has been published here
One of the ongoing issues that we deal with in the Developer Program is the continuity of the free developer instances. No matter how well intentioned you are, it is always possible to have a time period where you are out of the office and miss the email about your Developer Instance expiring. I don’t like the idea of anyone losing their work but there is only so much we can do to prevent it.
Andrew Barnes
