NO GOD PLEASE NO

9 months ago my boss promised I would not be working on RPA anymore.

Monday, at 12:00, my boss assigned to me the maintenance of 13 robots.
Monday, at 15:00, I was talking to a recruiter and discussing my next job.

I
HAD
ENOUGH
OF
THIS
SHIT.

PROCEDURAL PROGRAMMING
You write a list of instructions. The machine reads this list and runs your commands.

OOP PROGRAMMING
Quite similar to procedural programming but you group your functions via objects.

RANDOM PROGRAMMING
Learned of this new paradigm quite recently working with Blue Prism, which is essentially the program doing whatever it wants from crashing, freezing, returning wrong results, sometimes working properly, with no reason whatsoever other than the sheer malice of those beasts of burden who designed it in the first place. Mark my words, BP devs, you will be held accountable for your crimes against God and humanity.

Want to hear another joke?

Blue Prism allows you to export stuff from version 6.7 to 6.3.

However they changed 𝘷𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘺 slightly the way they store the position of the nodes. No new features -or at least nothing that you would care about- but the structure of the node itself want went from
```
<positionx>1</positionx>
<positiony>2</positiony>
<width>3</width>
<height>4</height>
```
To
```
<position x=1 y=2 w=3 h=4></position>
```

The whole project collapsed to a single point, catastrophic consequences as far as exception handling. A generic "fuck you" for no real reason other than the sheer malice of those beasts of burden who developed Blue Prism in the first place.

And I have two different versions of Blue Prism on dev and prod :)

> Blue Prism just stopped working

And that's how 12 time-critical processes in production just went out of the window for no fucking reason other than the sheer malice of those beasts of burden who designed BP in the first place :)

0 days since last catastrophic blue prism crash

A CASE AGAINST BLUE PRISM
Let's review one of the worst weeks I had with Blue Prism

Monday: Yay! Solved one of the problems we've been carrying around for a week before.

One of the robots suddenly became slow. Like, REAL slow. A process that would take 3 minutes per record now takes 45, and that broke apart all the following schedule.

There were no updates on the application server, the production machine, the robot, it just became slow. And not always slow; a process manually run from console room would work, a process in debug room would work, it's just the scheduled part that caused problems.

It turned out, BP didn't seem to like that particular combination of schedulation + process + machine. Moving the process to a different machine seemingly fixed that. IDK why.

Tuesday: One of our processes waits for a code to appear in the page, and when that happens, it memorizes this code. However, now it is always returning blank. Worked for months, now it breaks every single time.
After half a day of debugging a bug which DIDN'T HAPPEN IN DEBUG MODE YET AGAIN, at 11pm I decided to just place a nonsensical timeout in page before reading and call it a day.

WEDNESDAY: a scheduled process didn't start. "No sessions created". Thanks Blue Prism, very cool.

THURSTAY: This time, schedulation did start, but the process is "waiting". As in: it's 9:30 am, the process has been stuck in the same step since 6:00 am. Turns out, it blocked during a navigate stage; you need to send a string to clipboard using the standard BP action for that, then paste and click "enter", but for some reason the standard BP object sent "ORRCO" instead of "ORRICO" to clipboard, which obviously returned no results and then... the process just didn't feel like doing things anymore. No errors, no logs, nothing: just sitting on its ass. Because fuck you that's why.

Friday: another process uses a very moderate amount of scripts to work. Nothing really fancy, just a couple of lines of code to place in page some IDs and selector to help BP do its thing, otherwise selecting these elements would be a nightmare.

But

Failed while invoking javascript method:Exception from HRESULT: 0x80020101-> at mshtml.HTMLWindow2Class.IHTMLWindow2_execScript(String code, String language)

The same script -it's not dynamically generated-worked yesterday, the day before and the day after. But sometimes it will not. Why? The answer, my friend, is blowin'' in the wind

This rant goes very hard
Love from Italy :it::it::it:
I hate Blue Prism so much it's unreal

Friday
> Mister IHateForALiving, we have an automated procedure which downloads files from a website. You should update it and use the new webservice instead.
Sounds cool, just send me the documentation

> Oh yeah, have this example of a request
... Dude, this thing has 10 parameters. None of them are named, and 7 of them are actually nulled. How do I fill this thing?

> IDK
Oh, ehm... Let's ask the client then!

> NONONONO, we told the client this update was live at least 3 months ago, we can't begin asking questions now

Ouch. How much time do I have to make sense of this mess?

> The new supplier should take charge by the end of the month, I'd like this to be live by Tuesday

Needless to say, it's not going well, but that ain't none of my business

I'm working again with blue prism on a very very old SAP website. A hundred thousand nested iframes with a hundred thousand nested tables.

Please kill me, I long for the sweet embrace of death