A year later not looking forward to my 66th birthday, still do not know what to do with my life, especially the professional part of it. Last year I decided to be an independent IT consultant and learning new skills primarily JavaScript and front end of web development. I became a consultant, that is a huge step when you are sixty-five and that I’m very happy for it. Unfortunately very little JavaScripting almost nil, on the other hand I did some C# and Python, at least Python came as a big surprise for me. A new client only do Python code so I had to learn, can’t say I’m a master but proficient enough. I also have taken som baby-steps or rather an old man slow stumbling into AWS, cloud is certainly one way into the future actually it’s already here and I expect some Azure too this year.
The big thing for me 2019 is Blue Prism, the so called robots are really the new hype in the corporate world, not by IT professional, but by ‘business people’ especially the finance guys seem to think robots are the next thing in IT. Some very clever marketing have disguised screen emulation as robots. The so called robots emulates a screen and replace keyboard and mouse with scripts. For me this is the last resort when you have no other means to connect IT systems and there is no APIs or other integration tools that work and the need for automation is great then ‘robots’ is a viable system integrator. Robot scripts are more complicated than interfacing between APIs and they are brittle. The screen is a very complex ‘interface’, actually the screen needs HI, AI is not really there yet, so complex scripting is needed to bridge the gap between HI and AI.
During the 1980ties I did a lot of screen scripting (IBM mainframe 3270 scripting), mainly for stress testing online manufacturing systems. I learned how hard screen scripting is, you need to take everything into account, error messages, pop ups, timeouts, not to mention screen resolution etc. The mainframe TTY screen environment was a lot simpler than present GUI screens.
3270 screen
The Blue Prism robots are much more advanced than the 3270 screen emulator I used in the past.
I really hope Blue Prism robots also are fun to work with. Here I come stepping into the future, I will have a good start 2019, I sincerely hope your 2019 will be a good year.
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