The CreateNow Hackathon is one of the side events here at Knowledge13. Over 20 teams of developers, representing both customers and partners, race the clock to create innovative and transformational uses of the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. They have 11 hours to produce their best work and make it to the top-4 of top contenders entering the finals. Tomorrow morning, these four teams will present their solutions in the exhibition hall. By casting their votes, the audience will decide which team comes out as the ultimate winner of the first ever CreateNow Hackathon — truly illustrating the power of the ServiceNow platform.
One of the groups competing consists of four individuals who arrived at the Hackathon separately and formed themselves into a multinational team, called The Leftovers. They are Tami Martin of Argonne National Laboratory, Brian Scott of NCR Corporation, Katherine Lewis of Australian partner Kinetic IT, and Markus Schaer, who is an ITSM consultant at our partner DevoTeam in Switzerland. I sat down with them for a quick chat.
So why did you want to participate in the Hackathon, guys? "I just love developing in ServiceNow," Brian said. "It's such an open, flexible platform. I take every chance I get to learn new things." "And this is a great format," Tami added, "we're challenged to really push the envelope on app development on the ServiceNow platform — it turns into a true melting of the minds."
OK, and are you learning things you can take back to your teams? "Yes of course, that's the whole point," Katherine said. "In this Hackathon, we have time to discuss and play around with functionality much more than we can do as part of our day jobs. It's a huge learning experience!"
That's great. So what are you guys creating? "Well, we had a big idea, which was to build a Multi-User Dungeon - a MUD - on the platform, so a text-based, multi player game, with multiple characters interacting, fighting in the same room. In fact, it would be pushing the envelope on the chat functionality within the platform, which could then be applied to things like automated chat response using canned messages, and eventually even be turned into chatbot-like features. But we were advised by the organisers to tune it down a bit, because that would have taken us too much time to create. We'd need multiple new systems, new tables and business rules." "Yeah, so now," Markus added, "we are creating an app that will enable authentication against multiple SAML environments. This is about expanding existing functionality for identity management and single sign—on with the platform."
Well, that sounds like a pretty challenging assignment you took on, guys. Good luck, I hope to see you as one of the four finalists during tomorrow's public voting!
