On ServiceNow and Hacktoberfest '22
I'd like to talk to you about Hacktoberfest '22 - what it is and why I got involved, as well as some of the learnings and advice I've taken away from the event.
Background!
Before I proceed though, some context, both of the event and of myself.
If you're reading these blog posts, you're likely aware of ServiceNow - otherwise, welcome to the fold - come on in, take a seat, and enjoy the complimentary refreshments! On the other hand, not everyone is familiar with Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest, named partly as an homage to a certain other October event, is DigitalOcean's annual event that runs for the month of October. This event, the 9th to run, is about celebrating and encouraging people to contribute to Open Source projects both in October and ongoing, in part by incentivizing them to contribute with prizes and recognition of various kinds.
Open Source projects are hugely important to both the development of technology to date, as well as into the future - ServiceNow itself heavily utilizes open source software! If you're interested, you can navigate to /stats.do on your PDI or organizational instance and click “Open Source software” to download the attachment with the full list of Open Source licensed works they may leverage. They also publish some open source works!
As for myself, the background I wanted to give here is that this was my first time doing Hacktoberfest. I'd known about it since 2017 and had wanted to involve myself, but always felt overwhelmed and somewhat intimidated by the idea of trying to get involved.
Getting Involved!
As mentioned above, I'd previously wanted to get involved - however, I never managed to convince myself to cross the proverbial line and get started. Initially, I felt similar about this year. So, what got me to change my mind?
tl;dr
In short, the SNDevs Slack Community (particularly some fellow members of WomenNow with some very supportive words and suggestions) and the effort orchestrated by Earl Duque, from the Developer Advocate team from ServiceNow, and their wonderful support team of maintainers and volunteers who facilitated ServiceNow developer/community involvement with a collection of repositories.
--verbose
I felt challenged in participating by a mixture of self-doubt, de-valuing of my work/output, and also in spending the month on medical leave.
My self-doubt and de-valuing was largely based around a faulty belief that I either needed to implement a huge, feature-complete pro-dev solution, or that there was no point and that my submissions would not be accepted. I know other people who've experienced these kinds of negative thought patterns, and so to be perfectly clear, it isn't like that at all! DigitalOcean and Hacktoberfest this year had a particular focus on Low or Non-Code Contributions - and this is something they will continue to support. You don't have to be able to think in Javascript to get involved - in fact, my first contribution was updating documentation!
I spent the month of October on leave as I was having major Gender Affirming Surgery (GAS). Initially I thought this would be all-consuming and in a lot of ways it was - it was also a difficult time for me mentally, as spending nearly a month on bed rest without much social interaction was difficult. However, being able to engage with the ServiceNow community through SNDevs’ Slack server helped a lot with grounding me, and being able to contribute made me feel like I was making good use of my time. None of my commits took me longer than 90 minutes to put together, and I factor some of that time to brain fog from the medication.
In all, my self-doubt and de-valuing was my major blocker to getting started, and it was with the advice of folks such as @Paige and @MGOPW from the SNDevs community that I was able to get into a groove and give it a shot!
Doing the things!
So for the fun part - what did I do, and what did I learn? I'll answer those in reverse order.
What did I learn?
A lot! I had a rudimentary understanding of working with Git in the past, and had linked my PD Instance with Source Control for scoped applications but as the only developer - however, working within a group of developers on an application was a different playing field altogether. I learnt about rebasing, merging, and pull requests with the assistance of Prof. Google. Thankfully, this learning curve wasn't as steep as I feared it would be. The ServiceNow repositories included details on how to contribute, and guides on GitHub helped plenty as well.
I learnt how to write a good pull request, and a good issue. I learnt how to use Slack's APIs and how to format block messages. I got to practice my regex, and to stretch out my ability to read code and identify it's intent and the structures behind it. And I learnt about how satisfying it can be to see your work, particularly when it is actively in use in a community environment. While I've been developing awesome solutions for years at work, this had a different feeling.
This isn't all there was to learn, and likely isn't all that I learnt. But that's what comes to mind.
What did I do?
As I mentioned above, I started out with updating documentation - in previous years, Hacktoberfest has been plagued by people making 'low effort' updates to documentation, such as adding punctuation or splitting a contraction. This was at the front of my mind, but I decided to tackle one of the issues I found on the SlackerBot repository anyway, to update the CONTRIBUTING.md documentation to explain a new way to call a method for use in Slacker's parsers. While this amounted to 13 lines of writing, this launched an appetite for working with this application. Further, I noted an issue in how the function was being used, and based off that opted to raise an issue.
I won't regale you with tales of all of my submissions, but it was the first submission that made me confident to continue on. I made 6 pull requests in October, which I was happy with. I also raised 3 issues, of which 2 were resolved.
Most of all, I had fun!
Takeaways and Advice/Suggestions
The biggest takeaways and tidbits of advice for me were:
There is no rush. There is no sense of "start early or don't bother". Get involved whenever you want
Your work doesn't need to happen all at once. Some PRs I split over multiple days
Mistakes are ok! I committed and pushed a PR that had an issue, but was able to add another commit to address it. No stress at all!
Be kind to yourself, and be open and receptive to genuine input
You don't have to build Rome, let alone in a day - some repositories wanted you to share a recipe, or your plant(s)!
Talk with your community!
Have fun with it. Don't push yourself to do something that won't "spark joy"
If this got you interested or helped reassure you about contributing, the next Hacktoberfest will be there for you. Keep those above takeaways in mind. Hacktoberfest is about more than just October, and more than ServiceNow - Open Source is out there year round, including these repositories. Feel free to get amongst it, or just look at how other folks do - if you ever want someone to talk to about this, or want to learn more, feel free to reach out to me on the SNDevs Slack, @Astrid.
