GLA Summit 2021 Report

I had been looking forward to GLA summit for months, so much so that I booked the time off work so I could concentrate fully!

 

There were so many great presentations, but some personal highlights for me were:

• 10 or more things to know about LabVIEW events - Olivier Jourdan
  
  Even if you think you are familiar with events, I'd recommend giving this a watch.
  
  Before, I'd never really understood why you might want to use event callbacks, or how memory was managed with events. Olivier demos a super cool trick with dynamically registered UI events  - what a great use case. There was also a very comprehensive Queues vs Events comparison, with code examples side by side.
  
  Also, I should mention this presentation was not a PowerPoint, it was a LabVIEW project! Very creative.
  
  Now repeat after me, "do not fork the event registration wire"…

 

• Lessons Learned from NXG - Deborah Burke (Contributors: Greg Richardson, Eric Reffett, JR Andrews)
  
  I was surprised how honest NI were about what went wrong, especially about their internal development processes and the steps they took to improve them. It's fascinating to hear that they got an Agile consultant in to look at their processes - taking external advice is something I think we should normalise and talk about more, as it can be hard to change company culture and practices from the inside. Or admit that there is a problem in the first place.

 

• 7x7 - DQMH Sequence Diagram -Olivier Jourdan and DQMH Consortium (I think)
  
  This demo caused a collective 'oooh' - it is a brilliantly executed idea. 7 minutes of wow.

 

• Engineering Creativity on Demand - Nancy Henson
  
  This keynote was a totally different sort of talk, and I loved it. As an 'Eat that Frog' fan, I now have a list of books to get.
  
  I agree with Nancy that there is nothing more frustrating than coming up with an amazing idea then knowing that you have forgotten that idea by not writing it down.  I hadn't quite taken it as far as bathtub crayons though…

• Adoption of LabVIEW as a Mainstream Programming Language - Ram Gurung
  
  I have so many feelings about this talk. I think I need to write a whole separate blog post.

 

• The Summit Song - Oli Wachno 
  
  Every summit should have a song. :) It made an emotional end to an amazing summit - kudos to the organisers for all of their hard work.
  
  As the song says, "a new phase of learning has begun". I've come away with loads of ideas, book recommendations and tools to try out, and I'm sure I'll get even more once the recordings are up! In the near future I hope to spend some time further developing our CI/CD pipeline, so have saved some of the talks to watch later once I'm in 'doing' mode.

 

Hope you also had a good summit #LabVIEWFriends, fingers crossed I can meet some more of you person one day?