We're very excited to announce our Community member of the month for September: @Tobias Arnold
Tobias joined the Blue Prism Community back in 2019 and since then he's been a constant contributor to our Community, with over 40 started conversations and replies. He has also participated in Ideation and helped his German peers in the German speaking Community. Just in case this wasn't impressive enough, a few weeks back our Product Team was dealing with an issue related to building automations in one language and shipping them to a country with another. Tobias posted a workaround which has just been validated by our QA team in advance of the official fix being introduced in a later release.
This is just an example on how our Community members like Tobias save the day by sharing their knowledge. He has kindly replied to some questions below, so keep reading to get to know him a bit better!
Tell us a bit about yourself and how did you start in RPA / Blue Prism?
"I started in 1994 as a developer in a German insurance company. I worked as a full-stack-developer and later as a technical architect in several projects. In 2018, I joined the new RPA team in our company as a RPA developer. At first, we redesigned a few processes handed over by an external developer team. A few months later, I was appointed to a “technical lead” in our company."
Most interesting automation using Blue Prism? / Best tip you have learnt for Blue Prism?
"The most interesting automation is our mainframe automation. There is a strict guide for implementing a mainframe dialog in our company. The dialog surface is defined in a structured protocol. We hook onto this protocol and don't have to rely on screen positions or length properties. We are able to access the values as key value pairs based on verbose key names. All is wrapped in a VBO and is “faster than light” 😉
Best tip: If you use a “activate” action in use Blue Prism, use a “wait activated” afterwards or you will be punished with random occurring errors."
Why do you come to the Community everyday?
"There are several reasons
- We like so share our experience
- Because we use Blue Prim for about 3 years, so we are not so experienced and we find useful tips every day in the community
- If we are facing a problem, the community is the first place to get tips very fast."
Tell us a fun fact about yourself
"I have a small collection of old ATARI computers in my basement. If I find some spare time I repair them by myself. Therefore, I know on which end a solder iron gets hot. Fun fact: Because I’ve always a solder iron in my drawer, I repaired various broken ear rings or amulets of my colleagues."
What automation have you been involved with that you’re most proud of?
"This year wrapped the .NET Linq functionality in a VBO. Now we are able to query and transform Blue Prism collections by using Linq as a fourth-generation language in our Blue Prim processes."
What's your favourite use case?
"We’ve built a digital worker for our employee onboarding process. We use this process by ourselves to demand new digital workers, because all digital workers are treated as “normal” employees."
If you could change one thing about Blue Prism, what would it be?
"The scheduler needs more triggers not only time-based. E.g. Mail, a configurable queue depth, file system watcher etc."
Do you have names for your digital workers?
"Yes, we have “normal” names for our digital workers, because they act as “normal” employees. But to distinguish the digital works due to maintenances reasons we assign different background pictures, too. E.g. we have a digital worker dealing with contracts for young car drivers (younger than 18 years). The background is a picture of a young person with a dental brace driving a car."
