This book is slightly dated. The edition I read was published in 2005. That is before smartphones and social media became all the rage. Things have definitely changed since then. This book still has some value since it focuses on principles. The execution certainly has changed but the principles...

I am a big believer in personal development and growth. One of the things that often keeps us from growing is lack of awareness. There may be certain ways that we present ourselves or ways that others perceive us that we aren’t aware of. I did an exercise recently where I went around and...

As engineers we pride ourselves on problem solving. That’s what we do. However I find the use of the word problem to be somewhat problematic (pun intended).

When we use the word problem, typically we are referring to something that is not working. Often it was working, but for some...

In my previous post, I did a demo of the factory pattern. In it I showed how to dynamically load classes based on their path. One thing you may have noticed in that demo is that the classes stayed in memory even after the Test VI stopped running. If you missed it, go try it again.

I have written a bit about the GOF design patterns previously. Recently Tom McQuillan and I were talking about how it would be nice to have examples on how to implement the patterns in LabVIEW. To be fair, Elijah Kerry put together some great examples several years ago, but he...

I recently posted a book review for a book about learning Docker. I immediately got some feedback that I did not do a great job of explaining exactly what Docker is. This post is going to be a brief explanation of exactly what Docker is and particularly how it compares to virtual machines.

...

I saw post about a similar graph on social media recently. Someone posted it on twitter, but I don’t remember who. I thought it was interesting and that it would make a good topic for a post.

The graph above represents someone’s depth of knowledge. In this case it shows someone who...

I wrote a recent post about calling Python from LabVIEW. As it turns out you can also call Python directly from Test Stand as well. In TestStand 2019 a new Python Adaptor was added. Rather than create my own example, I will just point you to the shipping example. It’s pretty good. What...

Note: for more on Docker itself, see here.

Chris Stryker has recently put a lot of effort into getting LabVIEW to run inside of a Docker Container. This is really exciting news. I think this is really a huge step forward in improving Continuous Integration (CI) with LabVIEW. It...

For our local LabVIEW User Group we have a Slack channel. Someone on there recently asked for some advice about undoing a commit in Git. They were working on a project in LV2019 and someone had accidentally opened it in LV2020, made some changes, and then pushed them to the shared remote...

Simple is better than complex.
Straight wires are better than bent.
We read left to right, let’s wire that way.
BD cleanup is often better than a messy diagram.
White space is your friend as long as everything fits on one screen.
Subvis are also your friends. Use them.
THE VI is usually THE...

Be A Craftsperson

August 26, 11:00am MT

The way we think about coding and the way we approach it has a huge impact on our results. Approaching software from a craftperson perspective helps us to produce high quality valuable software.

Sometimes we feel like firefighters running around putting...