Please join us in celebrating our Member of the Month for April, Daniel! We're thrilled to shine the spotlight on him. Daniel's journey in the realms of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Automation (IA) is filled with unique experiences, which he graciously shared with us in this interview. Through our conversation with him, we've gained fascinating insights into his professional journey, as well as some hilarious anecdotes from his work.
So, let's extend our thanks to Daniel for his contributions and for taking the time to share his experiences with us. Join us as we celebrate Daniel and the wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm he brings to our community!
What led you to embark on a career in automation, and how has your understanding of the field evolved over time?
Initially I didn't know that my career would be focused on automation.
I was just a kid from a small town looking for my first job. I remember going to my first interview and I couldn't stop looking at the buildings in the area where the company was located. It was all new to me, I even didn't know how to use elevators!
But that's when without knowing my career in automation started, when I got the job the very first task assigned to me was to learn Blue Prism, the version that time was 5.8 I believe.
Since then, many updates have occurred and not only in Blue Prism but also with new technologies that kept emerging in our industry. So, my perception of the of this field is that it's constantly moving and Blue Prism and moves with it. So you have to stay up to date in every release.
What advice would you give your younger self about pursuing a career in automation, considering your journey and experiences?
I start this journey in 2018, but by the middle of the following year I started to get busy due to the number of projects that we assigned to our team. So, I stopped being active in the community.
Three years later, I began to use to Community again to keep up with new trends, and with Blue Prism and for me, it was like suddenly there was new tools like Capture, Chorus, BPM, decipher and now Next Gen and they were constantly updating objects, and it was all brand new to me. I realized I shouldn't have been away from the Community for so long.
So, my advice to my younger self would be to not the slack off. Make time for study and keep up to date with new tends and developments.
What skills or areas of expertise would you recommend aspiring automation professionals focus on developing, based on your experience?
While it’s not necessary to have any coding skill to learn RPA, it's definitely a bonus to have.
This will mean you already have an idea to how to modify objects, for example if you don't understand SQL queries and you learn it, you'll expand your knowledge and how automation could make things easier. Having the widder understanding is useful because many times it's not necessary to automate that platform and instead you can make direct queries into our device and save a lot of time in performance.
And of course, don't overlook the community if you don't post anything you learn from others. It's an advice that that I not only give you to other professionals, but also to myself.
What are your thoughts on our new community platform?
I'm still getting used to it, but I found that it's a cool.
I did miss the unanswered threads, but I saw the latest changes on the Community implemented this feature has been added back.
So the cool thing about this is you are continuously making Community improvements and listening to members.
What unique names or nicknames do you use for the digital workers in your automation projects, if any?
I call every RPA flow that I build my babies. I always stand up for them whenever they clients complain about failures in some processes. I always tell them my babies behave well.
What are some of your favourite TV shows or movies outside of work?
I like Game of Thrones and I also read the books and the new TV series is called House of the Dragons.
If you had the opportunity to automate any mundane task in your personal life, which one would you choose and why?
I think I think cooking would be a task that I would automate. I like to cook but it can relieve a lot of stress to automate this task it would save a lot of time by giving recipes and ingredients to a process to make all the steps needed to get a nice meal. Plus, it would also save a lot of money because I wouldn't order delivery food anymore. So I could cut cost and time spent.
Have you experienced any unexpected or amusing outcomes while testing or deploying automation solutions?
So this is a story about a team member of mine. One time this college automated a process and forgot to change a response for an email.
The message was like a joke put in when we created the automation but it wasn’t updated at some point that rule was triggered with the joke message. ‘The Excel file does not exist as my will to work.’
Fortunately the client saw the funny side, but my colleague was very embarrassed and he learned, learned the lesson, but that could have ended very, very bad with the client if they have not found it funny.
If you were to choose a mascot for your automation team, what would it be like?
I like pets.
If I had to choose a mascot for the automation team, it would be a cat, but simply because I love
them, I have cats.
Pelusa – In English this is ‘Fluff’ or ‘Fluffy Fur’!
Chesterfield who is normally called “Chester” or “Cheetos” and once buried himself (with a little help) and was so comfy he didn’t want to get out!
Pelusa is a mother of 2…
…Pato (meaning Duck)
and Risi who is know to snuggle into bed when it’s cold outside.
Thanks again to Daniel for sharing with us this month, and if you have any work anecdotes like Daniel's, let us know in the comments. We would love to hear them!
