Looking back at VI Week 2020

 

So I realise that VI Week happened a couple of months ago, but I didn't have a blog back then. Better late than never!

 

I attended a couple of the sessions 'live', and have caught up with others afterwards. The recordings were handy for when I was busy or at work... or when the meeting had reached full capacity. (Great to see that serial comms drew such a crowd!) 


It was surprising how different a 'live' session felt to a recorded session, with the messages pinging away and faces looking back at you on webcam. It felt exciting and personal. Next time I'd definitely try and attend more of the sessions 'live'.

 

Here are some things that stood out for me from the sessions that I watched:

 

  • Proper way to communicate over serial -  I've written a couple of serial drivers in the past, and this talk really helped me organise my thoughts by categorising serial protocols by their data format and response type. I'll be taking another look at the example code before I write my next serial driver.

 

  • DSH #VIWeek Pragmatic SW Engineering - I attended the full workshop last year before GDevCon #2. At the time I'd only been doing LabVIEW as my full time job for 2 months, and it was a great primer for going from solo to team development. So it was handy to get a refresher a year later, now that I have encountered many of the topics that were new to me before. 

    The presenters answered many audience questions including one that I particularly liked by Jason Scherer: 'Do you have any     recommendations on how to get developers to stop thinking of "my code" and "your code", and instead think of it as "the/our code"?' This one really hit home. I might write about this at length some time, though I don't pretend to have an answer.

  • DSH Soft Skills for Software Engineers Discussion - Something Steve said that rang true was that we have some of the most exciting and fun jobs out there. I also particularly liked the phrase 'the sourcecode is for people' (as opposed to for the machine) - a good reminder that there are 1001 ways to achieve a given output through code, but some will be more readable or maintainable than others. 

    Something that came up in discussion was the link between bugs and interruptions. On a personal note, the lack of distractions while working remotely has done wonders for my productivity when it comes to LabVIEW, so I hope that I get to carry on doing this for at least a proportion of the time during the rest of my career.

  • Philosophy of Coding - How to be a CraftsPerson - A reminder that it is our values (quality, testing) that influence our actions, which in turn influence our results. Sam advises that we take time to study, and be proud of our block diagrams rather than apologising for them.

 

 

A belated thanks to everyone who made this happen - the LabVIEW Community really is something.


Cheers,


Leah

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