CreatorCon C3: The Complete Developer's Guide Content Archive

[Travis Toulson]

What started as inspiration from a hackathon idea and a community member's creative vision became one of the most innovative and fun conference experiences ServiceNow has ever seen. The CreatorCon Collectible Community Card app (C3) transformed ordinary conference networking into an adventure where attendees became superheroes, collected trading cards, and competed in real-time team challenges.

Behind the scenes of those 44,000+ card scans and countless "wow" moments was a sophisticated technical ecosystem built entirely on the ServiceNow platform. From AI-powered avatar generation and secure webhook integrations to real-time mobile gaming and physical printing infrastructure, C3 pushed the boundaries of what's possible with platform development. The project required innovative solutions for image processing, external API integration, gamification at scale, and seamless mobile experiences.

This comprehensive guide takes you through every technical aspect of building C3. Whether you're a ServiceNow developer looking to integrate AI services, build mobile experiences, or create innovative conference applications, this series provides practical code examples, architectural insights, and hard-won lessons from a project that exceeded all expectations. From the initial concept to handling the operational realities of thousands of concurrent users, we'll show you how we built a system that brought an entire community together - one superhero card at a time.

Foundation Articles

The foundation articles will help get a big picture view of the CreatorCon C3 app. These articles are great for architects or people who just want a high level understanding.

• Building Community One Card at a Time: The C3 Origin Story
• CreatorCon C3 Architecture Overview: How All the Pieces Fit Together
• The Role of AI in CreatorCon C3
• Scripted REST API Webhooks and the Replicate AI Integration

 

Technical Solution Articles

The technical solution articles focus on problems we encountered, how we solved them, and lessons we learned through the development process. These articles are great for developers who want those nitty gritty details and long winded expositions extoling the virtues of one API call over another.

• State Pattern in Service Portal Widgets: Lessons from the C3 Photo Intake Process
• Working with Image Fields and Attachments: Lessons from Processing 130,000 Images
• Implementing Camera Controls in Service Portal
• HMAC Validation and the CertificateEncryption API in Scripted REST APIs
• Beyond JSON: Working with Binary Files and Alternative Content Types in REST APIs

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

These articles are just because I like to tease. It's also a convenient way to remind myself about what articles I want to publish next.

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Community Acknowledgements

So many people contributed to making the C3 app possible but I want to take this opportunity to give some special shout outs to members of the ServiceNow Community who helped make this possible.

Thank you so much to Kevin Clark, Sarah Toulson, Ebony Akkebala, Jesalyn Smith, and Paige Garland. So much of what we built was inspired by the work of these amazing people.

The trading card aspect of the C3 App was directly inspired by Kevin's work on his own SN-App card game. I still have The Toulsons Portal Explorers card he gave me at Knowledge 24 and I can't tell you how excited I was to get it. His work on the SN-App card game has been so much fun to watch.

The mobile game aspect of C3 was inspired by the Knowledge 24 Hackathon overall winning entry by The Tortured Developers Department: Sarah, Ebony, Jesalyn, and Paige. They created a Service Portal based mobile app that used QR scanning to capture points of interest around the conference combining elements of Pokemon Go and World of Warcraft. One of the highlights of their Hackathon category was that their app might get incorporated into future CreatorCons and the CreatorCon C3 app is that vision brought to life.