F-penIT blog operator information

Thank you for visiting.

I’m F-pen, the owner of F-penIT blog.

I’m a Japanese IT engineer.

F-penIT blog is a blog that provides easy-to-understand information about UiPath and certification know-how, from the perspective of an experienced engineer.

In this article, I will introduce the profile of F-pen and the contents provided by F-penIT blog.

  • Please forgive me if some of the English text is a little strange.
  • Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

Profile of F-pen

F-pen
F-pen
Hi, I’m F-pen and I’m writing an article for F-penIT blog. I’d like to introduce myself!
Name F-pen
person’s origin Japan
Type of work IT Engineer
Occupation company employee
years of experience More than 15 years
Work Experience
  • Development of RPA (UiPath), formulation of operational rules, and building of integrated management products
  • Planning of new cloud business, new packages and services
  • Development, maintenance and project management of Java systems
  • Technical support and troubleshooting for VMWare, Apache, Linux and Windows
Area of expertise/technology
  • Development of RPA, formulation of operational rules, and construction of integrated management products
  • Building infrastructure using the cloud (Azure)
  • New service planning, promotion, and proposal to customers
  • System development and maintenance (Java, PHP, Shell, Oracle, etc.)
Qualifications
  • Project Manager
  • Information Security Specialist
  • Software Development Engineer
  • Basic Information Technology Engineer
  • UiPath Certified Professional (UiPath RPA Associate Certification)
Hobbies Watching sports (baseball, tennis, basketball)
Favorite thing to do. Gadgets, Appliances

 

F-Pen is a word coined from the combination of F and pen in First-Penguin.

First-Penguin refers to a person who breaks away from the pack and starts something new.

Unlike my namesake, I don’t have much of a venture spirit, but I do like to learn new things.

I’m also on twitter. If you want to follow me, please do!

 

F-pen’s background

F-pen’s school days

F-pen
F-pen
In high school, he took a public science and mathematics course, and in college he entered the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

When I was in college, I had an average college life with a little bit of academics, club activities, and part-time jobs.

I didn’t have a job that I wanted to do, so I narrowed down my search to system engineer by a process of elimination and received a job offer from an IT company.

sea otter
sea otter
In the 2000s, IT engineers were known as “3K” jobs (hard work, no way to go home, low salary) and were not that popular.
F-pen
F-pen
Today, in the 2020s, IT engineers have become a flowery profession with high job growth rates, and I feel the times are changing.

 

F-pen’s working years

F-pen
F-pen
Started working at an IT company in the mid-2000s.

I received two months of training in programming (Java) exercises and small-scale development projects, and after being assigned to a project, I had 10 months of on-the-job training (OJT) to gain experience in the field.

 

The OJT leader who looked after F-pen was a bit unusual, but I had a lot to learn from him as a senior with high technical skills.

Telework started in April 2020 at Corona Peripherals, and I am currently working mainly from home.

 

F-pen
F-pen
Since commuting time is directly allocated to disposable time, telecommuting is comfortable.

 

Failure Experiences and Lessons Learned

F-pen
F-pen
I have experienced many failures in my work and stock management. Here are some of my failures and what I have learned from them.
sea otter
sea otter
I’m going to make an offering for my many shameful failures.

Failure experience in system development and maintenance

No What I failed to do What I Learned
1
  1. Modify batches of systems running on WindowsServer and replace batches in production environment
  2. Changed the application that the target extension opens to avoid accidentally executing the script by clicking on it.
  3. Changed the application that the extension runs in, causing the batch to not work and causing trouble.
  • At that time, I had only done system maintenance in a Linux CLI environment, and I did not know that batch launch depended on the application to be executed by the extension.
  • Understand the differences between Linux and Windows operating systems.
2
  1. Program modification for Linux batches.
  2. In the target program folder, there are “XXX.sh” and “XXX_20201001.sh”, and the latest batch is “XXX.sh”.
  3. In fact, the latest batch was “XXX_20201001.sh”, which caused a problem with degreasing.
  • If the name of the latest batch is a name that could be either, be sure to check it.
  • To identify the old batch and the new batch, the name of the old batch should be “XXX_20201001old.sh” so that it can be identified by its name.
3
  1. Build general-purpose backup batches across multiple systems operated by your team.
  2. Incorporate backup batches into each system
  3. In a system handled by someone other than F-pen, the batch to be executed before the backup batch terminated abnormally.
  4. However, we have not explained to the person in charge of the system that terminated abnormally that we have incorporated the backup batch.
  5. In the middle of the night, the person in charge of the system that terminated abnormally called us to ask what we should do, but we could not decide whether we should re-execute the batch or respond the next day.
  • When integrating batches into the system across the board, explain the changes to the person in charge of each system.
  • Check the impact of incorporating the batch.
4
  1. A nighttime batch of the system that FP Corporation was in charge of ended abnormally, and the company responded the next day.
  2. However, the batch that ended abnormally was followed by another system’s batch, and a response omission occurred.
  • The batch linkage diagram for their own system existed, but the linkage diagram for the other systems did not exist, so there was no response.
  • We created a batch linkage diagram with other systems to prevent omissions.
5
  1. Using the cloud (PaaS) to build the system’s infrastructure in the production environment
  2. The default setting values in one PaaS service changed between the time when the procedure manual was created in advance and the time when the production environment was built, but they were set as they were.
  • The default value of the cloud service should be listed in the parameter sheet without changing it.

 

Experiencing Failure in Development

No What I failed to do What I Learned
1
  1. We developed the RPA program and confirmed that it worked properly in the development environment.
  2. When the program was deployed to the production environment and checked for operation, an error occurred during the process.
  3. The cause of the error was that the IE title of the system to be operated was different between production and development.
  • The operation should also be checked in the production environment in advance.
  • Fixed values whose values may differ between production and development should be regular expressions.
2
  1. When we reviewed the code of the person who was developing the RPA under F-pen, we found that the conventions were not followed at all (e.g., using val1 and val2 for variables).
  2. After the code review, development progressed, and when operational tests were conducted, errors were found.
  3. In order to solve the errors, we checked the source code and found that it was full of if’s and nested source code, which took a lot of time to decipher.
  • Do not allow people who have never programmed before to develop RPA at the level required by the system company. Or, conduct thorough code reviews.
  • If you compromise quality by prioritizing delivery, you will have to deal with problems or recreate the program, and you will lose the trust of the customer.。

 

 

Experiencing failure in planning

No What I failed to do What I Learned
1
  1. Belonging to the planning group, I improved existing products, started handling other companies’ products, and provided services for the company’s own group to services outside the company’s group.
  2. However, I was unable to plan new products and services for my company.
  • When planning a new service, ideas are not that important.
  • When planning a service, it is important to be passionate about your company’s strengths, what you want to solve, and how you want to solve it
2
  1. Send your company’s flyers by mail to a distant event site that will be held in a few days.
  2. Since the flyers were sent by mail, it took a long time for delivery and the flyers did not arrive in time on the day of the event.
  • Check the delivery time of the delivery method.
    Don’t overcharge for delivery.

 

 

Failure experience in stock management

F-pen
F-pen
Fire (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is currently in vogue, and F-pen has been longing for early retirement since before he entered the workforce.

I wanted to see if I could make a fortune in stocks and retire early, so I read books such as Masahiro Hosono’s world’s easiest to understand book on stocks and bought stocks with my first salary.

 

The first stock I bought was McDonald’s. I remember being a little shocked when I checked the stock price on my way home from work and found an unrealized loss of several thousand yen.

After that, I traded stocks until about 2010 after the Lehman Shock, but I lost several million yen in total and realized that I could not win with my way of trading, so I withdrew from stocks for a while.

 

Learned about stocks and economics on Youtube around mid-2019 and started fully investing in stocks and mutual funds again.

Due to the Corona bubble, I have enough unrealized gains to recoup past losses.

F-pen
F-pen
It is important to make acceptable mistakes because it is only through the experience of losing millions of yen in the past that I have been able to build an appropriate risk and portfolio.

 

 

Why I created the F-penIT blog

There are four reasons for creating the F-penIT blog.

  • There are few blogs that provide UiPath know-how, so there is a demand for it.
  • I want to provide information from an engineer’s perspective to people who want to become IT engineers.
  • I want to create a place where I can be recognized as an individual because I only have achievements through my company.
  • We want to improve our skills by doing side hustle.

 

Originally, I liked to have someone look at my creations on the Internet, so I published my diary on my own homepage when I was a student, and on mixi in my early working days.

In the 2010s, I wrote blogs about my impressions of watching sports.

F-pen
F-pen
I assume that individuals will also become more important in the 2020s, so I will run a website where achievements can be consolidated to me.

 

Content provided by the F-penIT blog

The following three contents are provided by the F-penIT blog.

  • Know-how related to UiPath
  • Know-how related to qualification acquisition  *Japanese only
  • What I would do if I were going from an inexperienced engineer to an IT engineer  *Japanese only

Since UiPath is handled by non-engineers as well, I will focus on writing articles for beginners to pre-intermediate users.

I write with an awareness that if you keep this in mind at least, the robot will work.

F-pen
F-pen
It is only a minimal description, so if you want to know more, please read the UiPath documentation portal.
sea otter
sea otter
I’ve included links to the documentation for each activity in each article.

UiPath is also accessed from overseas, so we translate the content created in Japanese into English and publish it.

 

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