When I did my MBA, I remember we had a class called personal development. It was based on Eric Berne transactional analysis and involved setting your medium term goal. Mine was to become the best intelligent automation developer.
A good intelligent automation developer is one that develops automations that are very impactful, that get palpable results in shortest time possible and keeps them running. Therefore, it involves having a great idea, and then the discipline to keep the bot running. And then it involves tracking the results, and assessing it periodically to gauge if the impact is still worth the support effort.
My first project was one which involved sending mass emails. As a blogger, I sent people I did not know my articles. I remember I have taken a list of first names and a list of last names, and I have built gmail address by adding a “.” between any combination of first and last name possible and I have sent my articles via email to all these addresses.
My second project, based on the now defunct Internet Explorer browser, was a web scrape of the biggest Romanian online newspaper, where I kept a blog for a few years, of all the blog articles titles and authors of all time. I am not sure if I did scrape all the articles in the end, probably not, but I have still a database of over 17000 articles, with their URL, author, title. As a fun fact, I did now a sentiment analysis on the titles of these Romanian language articles, and the sentiment is negative with acceptable 68% confidence. Are Romanians negative people or was the sentiment analyzer inaccurate? Also, I did a histogram of the authors, and the two most prolific authors were a theather critic turned into society commentator and a journalist whom I suspect is part of the Romanian intelligence community, both of them very old guys, and who were always ranked by the newspaper upper than me or any other blogger, therefore leading to my disatisfaction with the blog and turning away to a more lucrative way of spending my time. Meanwhile the blog section of the online newspaper was quasi overhauled, to my delight.
The third project was the one which you can still find here on the blog, I tried to map all the intelligent automation jobs, therefore jobs in my field, by collecting a list of 350 big companies with a careers page, and going to all these pages and extracting how many intelligent automation jobs are there. In this manner, I could capture the trends in hiring in my field. This is still valuable today, as I can basically run them again, and see how many job are there by keyword/job title. It is basically a labor market analyser if you think about it.
As other side projects, I remember some Amazon.com bot that collected the number of political science books, other passion of mine, by title, author. And another one, which still has value today, is to extact the apartments from a renting platform to analyze price trends in your city.
Intelligent Automation Product Owner 