Marking 1 year since graduation!

It's 1 year now since I graduated and started work! So a good time for reflection.

What's my LabVIEW journey been like so far?

My first introduction to LabVIEW was in 2016 when I did a university placement at National Instruments. (Oops. NI. I guess I'm going to be doing that a lot.) While there I didn't write much code but it was great for learning about hardware and troubleshooting. There's not many places that will let someone who has less than 1 year of experience play with a PXI.

After that, back to uni. LabVIEW wasn't taught as part of my Mechanical Engineering modules, so I used it very little in my last 2 years of university - in fact, I didn't even have access to it while studying abroad! Interestingly, back at Loughborough we did have a 'Digital Image Processing' module that was done in NI Vision Builder for Automated Inspection. That module was awesome. 

You mean, I get credits for making the computer count the red smarties?

Eventually I got my act together and used LabVIEW in my individual projects, while also getting a part time job writing demo code for a small business. I really enjoyed this and decided that I would try and make LabVIEW my USP as an engineer.

Where am I now?

This month marks 1 year since I graduated and started working full time. I'd say I probably have LabVIEW open about 65% of the time now, while at work. Though unfortunately you don't get better at LabVIEW just by having it open. 

However, I'm lucky in that I get to work on code written by people who have been doing it much longer than I have - often large applications with ~100 libraries and a couple of targets. These experienced developers do nifty things with classes in property nodes and in-place element structures and all sorts. Looking at code written by others is a great way of picking up new techniques.

What next?

I've set myself some goals for the next year:

• Finish working through Tom's Actor Framework playlist
• Finish my Dots and Boxes game (in Actor Framework?)
• Perhaps try it using another design pattern as well so I can compare
• Do the Advanced Architectures and Managing Software Engineering NI online courses
• Read a book that will make me a better developer (haven't decided which yet, but there are several on my list!)
• Write more unit tests

And of course, there are other goals that I have for when I am at work, such as setting up the VI Analyzer part of the CI/CD pipeline. Super pumped for that, it's getting there! Hopefully I can look back in a year and feel like I've made good progress. 

"Ok Google, remind me in a year to look back at my LabVIEW goals".