Hacktoberfest 2025: Building with ServiceNow, Giving with Hack4Good

[Earl Duque]

It’s here! The air is crisp, and our keyboards are ready. Hacktoberfest is back, and this year is special. 

CALLING THE ENTIRE SERVICENOW BUILDER COMMUNITY! 

This marks the 9th year that the ServiceNow community has participated in DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest. Almost a decade of open-sourced, collaborative, ServiceNow-specific projects! 

Every year, you set new records. Last year in 2024, you blew us away with 1,375 Pull Requests by 453 Participants! You can see the full results from last year's amazing event here. The bar is high, but we know you can raise it. 

This year, our theme is intentionality. We're thinking about where you are in your builder journey and challenging you to go one step up. Did you participate last year? Take yourself one level up and challenge yourself to do something a little bit harder. We want your participation to be about growth, not just getting contributions in. 

Need some motivation? Watch this 2 minute video from Sr. Developer Advocate, Laszlo Balla, and one of last year's top 3 volunteers:

What’s New in 2025: A Guided Journey 

We heard you. In the past, the sheer number of projects could be overwhelming. This year, we’re taking a more focused approach with a guided journey split into three clear levels. Find the path that’s right for you, or challenge yourself to complete contributions to all three! 

Level 1: "Start your open-source, collaborative journey here." 

New to open source or Git? This is your starting line. We're bringing back our most popular project, Code Snippets, which allows you to contribute to our open repository without needing to spin up a ServiceNow instance. It’s the perfect way to get used to the idea of contributing to a Git project and make your first mark. 

Level 2: "Understand open source in ServiceNow." 

Ready for the next step? This level is about taking a Git repository and connecting it to a ServiceNow instance. You'll see how Git/source control works inside ServiceNow and start contributing records accordingly. It's a little more complex than Level 1, but we've created an incredibly guided and straightforward project to help you learn this crucial skill. And this year, this project has a special purpose... 

A Special Partnership: Hack4Good 

We are thrilled to announce that we are partnering with our friends at Hack4Good this year! 

Typically, ServiceNow Hack4Good is a hackathon where developers, partners, and customers create real-world solutions for nonprofit organizations. After two successful years at the Knowledge conference, Hack4Good is spreading its wings into more year-round events, and our Hacktoberfest is one of its first stops! 

Our Level 2 project will be to contribute to a new Hack4Good Ideation Portal. The records you contribute will be ideas and app suggestions that will fuel future Hack4Good initiatives. You’ll learn how to contribute records to a ServiceNow repo, and your contributions will directly support future social impact projects. 

Level 3: "Contribute to our cornerstone project." 

For our more advanced builders, this is your challenge. We are building a new utility that the entire ServiceNow community can benefit from. The more people that contribute to this cornerstone project, the more the wider community will benefit. We envision this as an ongoing project that will be constantly enhanced, making everyone’s jobs easier. Check out our action-packed project in the main repository! 

What is Hacktoberfest? (And a Git Refresher) 

Hacktoberfest is an annual, month-long celebration of open-source software run by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and others. We, the ServiceNow community, participate by providing ServiceNow-focused projects for you to contribute to. 

Feeling rusty on the terminology? Here's how it connects to our guided journey: 

Imagine you're adding to a community cookbook. 

• Fork (Making Your Own Copy): You photocopy the main cookbook. This is your personal copy of a project to work on. 
• Branch (Starting a New Recipe): You grab a new piece of paper to draft your recipe. This keeps your work separate from the main book while you perfect it. 
• Commit (Saving Your Drafts): You write down the ingredients and save that version. A commit is a snapshot of your work. Your first commit might be a simple snippet for our Level 1 project! 
• Pull Request (Sharing Your Recipe): Your recipe is ready! You ask the head chefs to review it and add it to the main cookbook. This is a pull request (PR)—the core of Hacktoberfest. 
• Push (Adding it to the Main Cookbook): The chefs love it, and your recipe is officially added! For our Level 2 and 3 projects, this is how you'll get your work into a shared ServiceNow application. 

Prefer to learn more about Hacktoberfest in an audio/video format? Check out the episode we recorded for the Break Point Podcast:

And here are more live streams from this year's Hacktoberfest!

• Kickoff stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXfgmnqm270
• Office hours #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iezYXb2KmLE 

Your Rewards for the Journey 

We’ve got some fantastic prizes to celebrate your contributions this year! 

• From DigitalOcean:
  • Evolve your customizable digital badge from Holopin with every pull/merge request you make. 
  • The first 10,000 participants will receive a shirt from DigitalOcean.
• From the ServiceNow Community: 
  • An exclusive Community Badge on your profile for completing Hacktoberfest. 
  • Codes to the ServiceNow store to redeem awesome ServiceNow Merch. Pick from:
    • Official CreatorCon T-shirts (available on a first-come, first-served basis, so contribute early!). 
    • Other miscellaneous ServiceNow merch

IMPORTANT: How to Qualify for ServiceNow Prizes 

To be eligible for the Community Badge, Merch, and T-shirt, you must meet both of these conditions: 

1. Have SIX (6) of your Pull Requests accepted in eligible Hacktoberfest repositories. (Notice it's 6 now, not 4!)
2. Post a comment on this blog post detailing your contributions and sharing your experience! 

How to Get Started 

Everything you need to know is in our main Hacktoberfest repository. This is your central hub for project links, detailed instructions, and leaderboards. 

https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/Hacktoberfest 

The projects for this year are now live in that repository. Start contributing today! 

Each project repository has detailed instructions that you can follow, but here is a crash-course 3-minute video:

Your Guides on the Journey 

This event is only possible thanks to a massive effort from our community volunteers. They’re reviewing your pull requests and helping you along the way. Meet the full Hacktoberfest 2025 Crew in the main repository! 

Need help? The entire crew and fellow participants hang out on the SNDevs workspace chat. 

Join us via this link (https://invite.sndevs.com/) and then find us in the #hacktoberfest channel. 

Get Started! 

The journey has begun! Here’s how you can participate: 

• Bookmark this blog post! It will be updated with the latest information. 
• Go "Star" the main GitHub repository to get notifications. 
• Join the SNDevs Slack and say hello in the #hacktoberfest channel. 

HACKTOBERFEST IS BACK BABY WOOOOOOOOO 

[Animesh Das2]

Hello!

I’m super excited to share that I’ve completed 6 accepted pull requests during this Hacktoberfest 2025.😊

Here are my 6 accepted pull requests to the 'Hack4Good idea submission' repository.

PR#1: Financial Goal Planner: For individuals to plan long term/short term goals and investments/savings.

PR#2: Employee Health Buddy: For an organization to help coordination among project management, emergency leave management and employee health management making the seamless/automated for both employees and organizations.

PR#3: Corporate Social Responsibility Management: For an organization to plan/manage/track the CSR activities easily along with clear visibility from top level management and to can plan for the CSR budgets accordingly

PR#4: Integrated Corporate Travel Management: For an organization to manage/track corporate domestic/international travels for its employees easily without the need of multiple separate applications for various phases of the travel requests raised by the employees.

PR#5: Digital Teams Connect Management: The digital communicator, will help teams to meet/communicate with just having one more store app or plugins installed in ServiceNow platform itself, minimizing more licensing costs  for having any separate communicator from another vendor.

PR#6: Cultural Event Management: To help event management companies to plan, coordinate, and execute events efficiently. It offers real time collaboration to ensure smooth event delivery.

It’s been a great experience participating 2nd time in the Hacktoberfest and contributing to the open source. It brings an amazing learning experience too.

Here is my linkedin post for Hacktoberfest contribution: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381394801017020416/

Thanks to ServiceNow and Hacktoberfest organizers for organizing this amazing event and motivating us to learn and grow together.

Special thanks to @Earl Duque, @laszloballa, @Willem, @Ravi Chandra_K, @Shakeel Shaik for approving my PRs so quick.

[debendudas]

Excited to share that I’ve successfully completed 6 Pull Requests during my third year participating in Hacktoberfest! 🙌

This year, I contributed across all three levels of the guided journey:

Level 1 – 1 PR in code-snippets

Level 2 – 3 PRs in Hack4Good-Idea-Submission

Level 3 – 2 PRs in ActionPack

GitHub ID: debendu-das (Debendu Das)
LinkedIn Post: Link 

Thanks to ServiceNow and Hacktoberfest for organizing this amazing event! 

[Juhi Poddar]

New to Hacktoberfest or GitHub?
I’ve written a step-by-step guide to help you understand GitHub basics and contribute to Level 1 (Code Snippets) with confidence.

👉 Check out the full article here: Step-by-Step Guide to Contributing to Hacktoberfest Level 1 Code Snippets

[juipatil]

first

[AnveshKumar M]

🎉 Hacktoberfest 2025 – My Third Year! 🎉

This year marks my third consecutive Hacktoberfest, and it’s been the most rewarding yet! I made 6 contributions, all of which have been accepted:

1. SetPrice Field to Accept a Single Currency – A client script submitted to the Code Snippets repo that restricts currency options on price and currency fields in a form. GitHub Link: https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets/pull/1643
2. Attachment Base64 – A Flow Designer action in ActionPack that converts an attachment (via sys_id) to a Base64 string, along with metadata like filename, size, and content type. Useful for integrations! GitHub Link: https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/ActionPack/pull/15
3. Set User Preferences - A Flow Designer action to set preferences for one or multiple users. GitHub Link: https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/ActionPack/pull/23
4. Duration Calculator - Calculates duration between two dates within a specified schedule. GitHub Link: https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/ActionPack/pull/25
5. Generate MAC - Generates a Message Authentication Code (MAC) using HMAC algorithms. GitHub Link: https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/ActionPack/pull/110
6. String Message Digest - Creates a digest of a string using MD5, SHA1, or SHA256, with output in Base64 or Hex. Git Hub Link: https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/ActionPack/pull/112

💡 Through these contributions, I deepened my understanding of ServiceNow Studio, especially working with Git repositories directly from the platform. It’s always a pleasure to learn while giving back to the community!

Thanks to the ServiceNow Developer Program for organizing this and encouraging open-source collaboration. Special thanks to @Earl Duque & @Laszlo_balla and all other repository maintainers for working hard to review the pull requests.

Looking forward to many more!

You can find my post on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anveshkumarmupparaju_action-attachment-base64-created-to-get-activity...

Happy Contributing 😀

Best Regards,

AnveshKumar Mupparaju

[SN_Learn]

Excited to share that I have successfully completed 6 Pull Requests in #ServiceNowHacktoberfest 2025!

6 PRs in ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets

 
1. Retrieve MRVS Name and Value -  https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets/pull/1652

2. Filter records with attachments -  https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets/pull/1662
3. Extract Key and Value from JSON Object -  https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets/pull/1705
4. Utilizing spModal functionalities for SweetAlerts -  https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets/pull/1740

5. Detect oldValue, newValue and Operation type in Glide List -  https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets/pull/1763

6. Get User Impersonation Insights -  https://github.com/ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets/pull/1773

Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.

@Earl Duque @laszloballa

#Hacktoberfest2025 #Hack4Good

[anuragyadav]

This Hacktoberfest has been an amazing journey! I had the opportunity to contribute to multiple open-source projects, and each one helped me grow as a developer and collaborator.

I started with Anony-Mata (https://github.com/whilstsomebody/Anony-Mata/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+author%3Aanurag2787), where I created PR and issue templates and set up an auto-review system. Then in LambdaTest Gradle Plugin (https://github.com/LambdaTest/lambdatest-gradle-plugin/pulls/anurag2787), I worked on adding file validation and fixing input validation issues. I also contributed to LambdaTest Buildkite Plugin (https://github.com/LambdaTest/lambdatest-buildkite-plugin/pull/13), where I migrated and renamed files from “script” to “ci” for better organization.

One of the most interesting contributions was to OWASP Nest (https://github.com/OWASP/Nest/pull/2345), where I implemented a feature to fetch OWASP board member data by scraping another OWASP repository. I’ve also made several earlier contributions to OWASP Nest (https://github.com/OWASP/Nest/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+author%3Aanurag2787), where I worked on improving the frontend UI, enhancing component testing, linking OWASP entities to Slack channels, and fixing multiple issues.

Apart from that, I opened PRs in Next Cloudinary (https://github.com/cloudinary-community/next-cloudinary/pull/607), another one in Next Cloudinary (https://github.com/cloudinary-community/next-cloudinary/pull/604), and in Ballerina Library (https://github.com/ballerina-platform/ballerina-library/pull/8319), all of which are currently under maintainer review.

Through these contributions, I’ve realized that open source isn’t just about getting PRs merged  it’s about the journey of truly understanding problems, exploring different solutions, and figuring out what fits best with the project’s goals and code structure. It taught me to slow down, think carefully, and be patient during maintainer reviews while enjoying the collaborative process. I just enjoyed Contributing throughout this journey

[soumyadeep10]

Hello all!

I’m extremely delighted to share that I’ve completed all 6 accepted pull requests during the ServiceNow Hacktoberfest 2025.

Given below are my 6 accepted pull requests belonging to all 3 repositories:

1) Level - 1: Code-Snippets:

#PR1: Fetch Field Value passed as query parameter to URL and auto-populate the value on form: 1918 
This code snippet is designed for an usecase where you might want to populate a field value that you're passing as a query in the URL which redirects to a catalog item.

#PR2: Return Date Validation for a catalog item using onChange script: 1926 

This code snippet runs in an OnChange catalog client script for a Return Date field and validates the field in a ServiceNow Catalog item form to ensure:

1. A start date is entered before setting a return date.
2. The return date is within 6 months after the start date.
3. Return date is not the start date or before that.
   
   

2) Level - 2: Hack4Good-Idea-Submission:

PR#3: HelpScape Foundation:  83 

The intent of Helpscape Foundation is to help people globally and to support them as much as possible. Every day, we see people struggling through poverty, sleeping on roads, in urgent need of help/medical aid/food. The solution is to build an organized platform where we can have all the details related to them which can be filled by anyone, and adequate help can be provided in very less time through people and NGOs collaborating together.

PR#4: Education for All:  86 

We all know that millions of people struggle with skill development opportunities, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds. Without proper training, they struggle to find jobs and improve their living conditions. The goal is to have a centralized platform that connects skilled volunteers, trainers, learning resources and learners in need.

3) Level - 3: Action-Packs:

PR#5: Calculate Business Days Duration:  119 

This flow action takes Start date, End date and the chosen Business Schedule as input and calculates the true elapsed time between a start date/time and end date/time.

PR#6: User Birthday Verification:  130 

This is a reusable Flow Action that checks whether today is a given user’s birthday and returns true/false as well birthday message.

ServiceNow has brought amazing repositories this time and it's been an absolute pleasure to contribute to them. This is the 2nd year of my participation in ServiceNow Hacktoberfest and contributing to the open source, and the experience has yet again been amazing. There are several things to learn throughout the path.

Here is my LinkedIn post for Hacktoberfest 2025 contribution: 
View LinkedIn Post by Soumyadeep 

Thanks to ServiceNow and Hacktoberfest organizers for organizing this amazing event and motivating us to learn and grow together.

Special thanks to @Willem, @Ravi Chandra_K, @Voona Rohila , @Shreya Wani and Atul LNG for approving my PRs so quick. Thanks to @Earl Duque for providing me th

[ahmadibitoye]

Great to be part of this year's #Hacktoberfest

[Shankha Bhattac]

Hi all,

This was my first time contributing to ServiceNow during Hacktoberfest, and the experience was incredibly smooth . Thanks to the detailed step-by-step guide provided by the community. I got to explore meaningful contributions — from sharing useful code snippets to proposing impactful ideas under Hack4Good.
This time, my contributions include:
💡2 PRs in the Level 1 - Code Snippet repository
🌍4 PRs in the Level 2 - Hack4Good Idea Submission repository.
It was a great learning journey filled with collaboration, discovery, and the joy of giving back to the open-source community!

Here is the link of my LinkedIn post : Click here