This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Maintainer Experience

I just completed the #ServiceNowHacktoberfest by having 4 contributions accepted!

• Service Portal is a single place for everyone to access information, services and different applications. For my first contribution I shared a use case to validate a Service Portal data field so that the information can't be in the past.

• For my second pull request, I talked about best practices explaining how to safely update a record. If we're not cautious with this kind of programming we can accidentally insert records instead of updating them.

• For my third contribution I explained how to hide a related list within the ServiceNow platform.

• The last one was about fixing a direct reference to the Choice table. This is an internal table and it is not best practice to reference that table directly when you are creating your choice field. Besides explaining the use case, I propose a solution to fix the problem and I recorded a YouTube Video explaining how to use the script I wrote to accomplish the results.

After that I jumped to the other side and I'm volunteering as a maintainer.

As an Open Source Maintainer we have to deal with tasks such as:

• Reviewing code;
• Approve (Merge) or Reject Pull Requests;
• Manage Issues;
• Keep the project on track, ensuring the overall health of the repository.

The coolest part is that I can offer feedback to help contributors improve. In this endeavor I put myself on their shoes, and with this I grow a lot in many different aspects.

They think I'm helping them but in fact, they're helping me much more than they can imagine.

Each hacktoberfest edition is more inclusive so that you can study about git, learn about a programming language like JavaScript, and you don't need to be a professional programmer to participate.

I invite you to contribute to open source projects.

Give it a try and you can make friends along the way!

Thank you Hacktoberfest!

Carlos Camacho Junior.