Samuel Taggart

Conferences , Announcements

Join us at the GLA

You may have noticed that we did not schedule a webinar this month. That is because I have been busy putting together a presentation with Tom McQuillan of Tom’s LabVIEW Adventure fame on the Gang of Four for the GLA Summit on November 9th. We’ve decided to redo

Book Reviews

How To Be An AntiRacist

Occassionally on this blog, I write about things that appear to have nothing to do with LabVIEW. This is one of those times. Although I do think this topic is relevant to anyone who works in a team setting, which is most of us. Most teams these days tend to

Software tools

Don't Waste Time Manually Writing Documentation

We all know documentation is important. Our software will likely need to be updated and upgraded at some point, oftentimes by another person who is unfamiliar with it. Even if we are the ones doing the updates we may not remember all the important details. That is why documentation is

Book Reviews

Good Content

You may be aware of our Virtual Coffee events. If you are not, just send me an email to sam (at) sasworkshops (dot) com and I’ll send you an invite. Several of us who attend the Virtual Coffee, also run our own businesses. Malcolm Myers was nice enough to

How to

PPL Paths

As some of you may know, we host a Virtual Coffee on Tuesday mornings. It started out as a part of our local LabVIEW User Group ALARM. A bunch of us ALARM members would get together every couple weeks in person for coffee. When COVID hit, we couldn’t do

Coding Philosophy , Community

DQMH Podcast Interview

I had previously mentioned the DQMH podcast. Chris just posted an interview that I did with him a few weeks ago. If you are interested in what we are doing here at SAS Workshops and learning more about how we can help you, then be sure to check it out.

Book Reviews , Linux

How Linux Works

This is a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a while. I started using Linux about 5 years ago when I started my own business. Starting out on my own required me to be my own IT guy so I setup a Redmine and SVN server. The

Coding Philosophy

Tech Debt Day

A friend of mine posted the video below and I was immediately struck by it. Guilty as charged. I am definitely a procrastinator in many areas of my life. If you watch the video until the end, you’ll find out that we all are on some level. Even if

Frameworks , Interviews , Community

DQMH Podcast

It’s offical! The DQMH podcast form Chris Farmer at Wired-in Software has been officially released! It’s exciting to have some new listening material about LabVIEW! It’s been a while since we have had a good LabVIEW Podcast. We used to have VIshots which hasn’t produced anything

SCC , Resources

Oh Shit Git

So, I have written a bit about Git lately. I’ve spent a fair amount studying and thinking about Git and how we use it. As part of that research I stumbled upon a really useful and humorous site called ohshitgit. Oh Shit Git covers 9 different common scenarios and

Software tools

Camtasia

I have been working on putting together some prerecorded online classes. I have been using Camtasia and Snagit a lot lately, so I thought I would do a quick writeup on them. I first discovered these tools when doing some videos for NI. That is what they had recommended for

Book Reviews

The Richest Man in Babylon

I have been listening to Dave Ramsey since I got out of college. His principles did help me to pay off all of my college debt and start off on the right foot. I have been listening to conservative financial advice ever since then. I had heard of “The Richest

Book Reviews

Guerilla marketing

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 are

Coding Philosophy

Practical Versus Theoretical

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

Coding Philosophy

The Problem With Solving Problems

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

Design Patterns , How to , OOP

Dynamic Unloading of Classes

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

Design Patterns , OOP

Gang Of Four Patterns in LabVIEW

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

Continuous Integration , Software tools , DevOps

What is Docker?

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

Coding Philosophy

T Shaped Knowledge

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

Python , TestStand , How to

Python Adaptor in TestStand

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’

Book Reviews , Continuous Integration , DevOps

Docker in Action

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 offers

SCC

Undoing A Bad Commit

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

Coding Philosophy

The Zen Of LabVIEW

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.

Webinars

August 2020 Webinar

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 out

Python , How to

Python node basics

I have been learning a bit about Python lately. I find it a nice complement to LabVIEW. Like LabVIEW it is very good for writing quick little scripts and rapidly prototyping things. Unlike LabVIEW, it is not strictly typed, which makes it rather interesting to me. A few years ago