2024 in Review

Another year is over. It is a good time to sit back and do a retrospective on 2024.

Sharpening the saw

2024 was a year for sharpening the saw. It's a metaphor from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It comes from lumberjacks chopping down trees. At some point, you have to stop chopping down trees and take time to sharpen your saw. 2023 was a great year, 2024 was much slower. As a result, I had a lot of downtime. It was not intentional and it was a good time to sharpen my saw.

Open Source Projects

I spent a lot of time working on side projects. I worked on 2 large Open Source Projects of my own: the Blue AutoFormatter and Approval Testing. I also added some new capabilities to my SAS-GCLI-Tools. Most notably I worked out all the kinks in launching GitLab Runner VMs on demand. I also contributed to Anton Sundqvist's LUnit and it's Parameterized Extension.

Collaboration

A big focus of mine is changing the way we collaborate when writing code. I've long been a big proponent of mobbing. This year I ran several Intro to Mobbing sessions. I ran sessions at both GDevCon and GDevCon NA. I also ran a couple sessions for the G Idea Exchange. They enjoyed it so much that they've started running their own mobbing sessions for some Open Source projects. That's a big win. I hope it catches on more.

I'm also very interested in promoting more collaboration among NI partners. Anton and I ran a Unit Testing Workshop together at GDevCon Europe. That went very well. I've also been collaborating on a project with Casey and his partners over at Zyah. I've been doing a lot of pairing as part of that, which I quite enjoy.

Curriculum

I took several classes from Emily Bache and Clare Sudbery over at the Samman Institute. I learned a ton about delivering learning hours and teaching TDD and refactoring. As part of that, I translated a bunch of katas into LabVIEW. I also refactored my Unit Testing Workshop into a series of learning hours, which I delivered in November. It went quite well. I plan on refactoring most of my workshops into a series of learning hours. I quite like the format and it allows for a lot of flexibility.

Mentoring

I got a lot of opportunities to practice delivering learning hours with Ashish and his team over at Arav. We've been doing a mix of learning hours, code reviews/QA sessions, and some pairing/mobbing. It's not exactly Samman Coaching and it is in that vein. I am very much enjoying it.

I also ran a DQMH Workshop for a team out of Sandia. It went very well. On the last day I had them mob together to create a template project that they could then take with them. That went really well. I quite enjoyed it and they got a lot out of it.

An Improved Relationship with NI

I have to admit that at the beginning of the year, my relationship with NI was pretty poor. The round of layoffs at the end of 2023 hit pretty hard and I was feeling pretty dejected. Also, NI Connect this year was a bit of a letdown.

However, in spite of all that, NI has made some promising moves. They put Eli, Sergio, and Norm in charge of community relations. They started some open-source initiatives with the Icon Editor and Actor Framework. They've returned to having Sales Area Managers (not exactly the local sales reps we used to have and a step in the right direction). NI is reengaging with academia now. NI also invited me and a few other consultants to their annual sales conference which was great. It was great to here about their vision and how consultants and other partners fit into that. It was also a good opportunity to talk to a variety of NI sellers. Overall I'm seeing lots of actions from NI that we haven't seen in the past. It's not perfect and I'm feeling pretty positive about 2025.

Improvements Needed

The big lesson I learned from 2024 is that I need to improve my sales and marketing pipeline. I also need to not take my foot off the gas when things are going well. In 2023 things were so good that I let my foot off the gas. That was a mistake. It's taken a while to get the sales and marketing back up and running.