You Can Still Join the Bot Wars to Uplevel Your Skills

The Automation Anywhere Bot Games 2021 event has concluded. Winners were announced, developer heroes were made, laurels awarded—actually, cash prizes and swag are being delivered. If you participated, thank you. If you wanted to participate but weren’t able to, no problem.

You can still participate in what turned out to be the most popular part of the games: Bot Wars, the challenges. They’re available on demand.

 
A month of achievements

The virtual Bot Games 2021 consisted of two programs: a month-long hackathon and, as mentioned earlier, four weekly challenges known as the Bot Wars. Automation Anywhere has presented hackathons in the past. This year, participants were tasked with creating an innovative Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software bot that automated processes around the theme of “Helping employees return to a more productive and creative workplace.” Winners received cash prizes totaling more than $18,000.

For the Bot Wars, a new event, participants created bots to solve four challenges, one a week in August. Week 1 was about a front-office challenge, Week 2, a supply-chain challenge, Week 3, an HR challenge, and Week 4, an accounts-payable challenge. The rewards? RPA developers had the opportunity to test their bot-building skills and learn how to use our built-in packages as well as Bot Store packages to solve development challenges in new ways. They could share insights and achievements with fellow developers and get some exclusive Bot Games swag.

 
What prompted Bot Wars

The goal was to have an event targeted to experienced developers and created by the same. We wanted participants to experience different aspects of our software using different bots, different packages from our Bot Store—perhaps ones they hadn’t used before—and see how to apply those packages to solve the simulated challenges. 

We got the idea for the event when thinking about how people new to Automation Anywhere work their way up to become full-fledged RPA developers. That journey likely starts with some Automation Anywhere training and initial hands-on basic bot builds. But there wasn’t much opportunity for developers to experience a smooth “on-ramp” to more challenging builds. Bot Wars provides challenges that are increasingly more difficult, requiring the use of different packages, to enable developers a consistent environment to ramp up their skills—as you can discover.

How Bot Wars operates

As mentioned earlier, you can still participate in Bot Wars, available on our developer portal. You’ll be tasked to solve challenges with the bots you create—four challenges. You can develop one bot solution or more for each challenge. With each bot run, you’ll be scored based on how long it takes the bot to solve the challenge and the accuracy of the work. A tutorial is available for each challenge that offers one approach to help you get started.

Once a challenge is successfully completed, share your accomplishment and any advice about the experience on social media for the benefit of other developers. Based on the participants in August, the time commitment for each challenge is only a few hours as opposed to the hackathon, which, according to many participants, became almost a part-time job for the month.

 
What did August participants think of the Bot Wars?

Thousands of developers participated in the weekly challenges, while about 1,000 registered for the hackathon. The challenge pages proved so compelling many developers wanted to complete them even after working a full day.

For example, according to Anand Karn, RPA consultant at Quale Infotech, “We all used to take up the challenge and enjoyed it even on the night... Improving the solution every time by few milliseconds was just fascinating. And yes, we all have explored different ways of doing the same thing.”

Some developers explored using Bot Store packages for the first time. Waiyuen Tham, an RPA specialist at TDCX, said, “With the weekly #botstore highlights I’ve been enlightened with a few more custom packages that we can use during our daily bot development.”

See what participating in the Bot Wars can do for your fame, work, and career.