Samuel Taggart

The official "Architect of Adventure". I help teams create healthy, human-centered software development processes.

Coding Philosophy

What does scalability actually mean?

So recently the question of scalability came up on an NI forum post. Stephen Loftus-Mercer (aka AristosQueue) made a very interesting point. He talked about how scaling can mean many different things to many different people. A solution that is scalable on one axis might not be scalable on another.

How to , Random

Right to Repair

A few weeks ago I noticed that the lightning port on my iphone 8 was not working very well. My headphones kept cutting out and the power cord would fallout of the lightning connector. I decided to fix it myself rather than take it somewhere. I had used iFixit before

How to , Software tools

Enhanced State Diagram Editor

I was talking to Fab a while ago and she put me onto the Enhanced State Diagram editor. Apparently it is one of Jeff K’s pet projects. It is a way to create a state machine by drawing the diagram in a special editor that automatically generates the LabVIEW

How to , SCC

Git Reflog

In a previous article, I talked about orphaned commits. First, let’s talk about why they are bad. They are bad because they will eventually be removed by git’s garbage collection algorithm, losing the data forever. The reflog is designed to prevent that (for a time). In my previous

Book Reviews

Endurance

This particular book had been recommended to me several times. It is quite popular in the outdoor recreation community and also in the business leadership community. To tie it into LabVIEW a little: I saw Scott Kelly speak at NI week last year. I was quite impressed, so I bought

How to , SCC

Navigating a git repository

Navigating the Commit Graph Sometimes we want to go back and revisit a particular commit in our project. We might want to do that for a variety of reasons: * Maybe a customer reports a bug in a specific version. We might go check out that tag to reproduce the bug.

Webinars

June 2020 Webinar

Technical Skills For Agile Development June 24, 11:00am MT Agile has a lot to say about how we manage the software development lifecycle, but it requires good technical skills to be successful. Often we get caught up in the software development lifecycle side of agile software development. It is

Book Reviews , SCC

Git For Teams

The traditional approach to teaching git is to start with the details of how git stores and indexes content and build upon that to get to the commonly used commands. This method does give you a really good understanding of what is going on under the hood. It does a

SCC , Software tools , How to

Git Tips For Beginners

Git is a great source code control tool, but it is not known for being user friendly. It’s actually a shame. The way in which git stores and references content is incredibly elegant, but it’s UI seems more of an afterthought. The command structure is not at all

SCC , How to

Git Basics

I am working on some new training material on git. I thought I would use a series of blog posts to kind explore some ideas and help clarify my thinking. Learning git can be difficult. I want this material to be approachable to beginners, yet still detailed enough that they

Coding Philosophy

Every Crisis Is The End Of An Illusion

So I read a book earlier this year called “The Secrets of Consulting”. It was a very good book. You can read my review here. There was one part of the book that I didn’t put in the review that really stuck with me. I have been thinking about

Book Reviews , Unit Testing

A Great Intro To Unit Testing

As many of you may know Fabiola De la Cueva and Richard Jennings came out with a new LabVIEW book this year (actually the 5th edition of an existing book) LabVIEW Graphical Programming. I have been meaning to write a review, but I have put it off because I haven’

Conferences

VIWeek Recap

#VIWeek was a huge sucess! Thanks to Steve and DSH for initiating it and Derek, Michael, and many others who picked the ball up and ran with it. And of course, thank you to all of the presenters. I saw many of the presentations, but not all of them. I

Coding Philosophy

Hiding in Complexity

I have this problem. I procrastinate. Not all the time, but often. The thing is you wouldn’t notice it just by watching me. I always appear to be busy. The problem is I often hide in complexity. The best example I can come up with is when it comes

Coding Philosophy , Resources

The Value of Software Quality

So I stumbled upon a few things recently: * a J.B. Rainsberger presentation about “The Economics of Software Development” * a video by Andrea Goulet that touches on some similar issues (thanks Fab for recommending!). * a video by Jessica Joy Kerr on “The Secret to Software Quality” To me they are

Coding Philosophy

To Depend Or Not To Depend

The whole idea of using open source libraries and whether it is even a good idea to include dependencies in our projects at all has been on my mind lately for a variety of reasons. I have been listening a lot to the maintainable podcast and there is a lot

Webinars

Zoom Workshops lessons learned.

We just wrapped up a set of workshops at the end of April. After each set of workshops, I like to take a look back and evaluate. It’s kind of like an agile retrospective. I was particularly interested in the results of this since it was the first workshop

Coding Philosophy , Unit Testing , Kata

Importance of practice - Katas

So I have been listening to the maintainable podcast a lot lately. There is a lot of talk on there about doing coding katas. It also comes up a lot on twitter. I had never really done any. Then I took a udemy class on TDD in Python and it

Conferences , Webinars

VI Week

I just wanted to make sure you were all aware of #VIWeek. As many of you are probably aware NI had originally postponed NI Week and eventually canceled it this year due to COVID19 and all the issues regarding social distancing. While it was certainly the right call, it has

Book Reviews

The Nature Of Software Development

This is a quick read by Ron Jeffries, one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto. the book really justs lays out how to do Agile Development, but not in a preachy way or a proscriptive way. It’s more of a high-level picture of what the whole process looks

Book Reviews

Technical Leadership

This is the second book by Giulianna Carullo that I have read. I read her book on Code Reviews last year. This book on technical leadership is also quite good. I will say that her sense of humor does not show up as well in this book. It is a

Book Reviews

QBQ

QBQ stands for the question behind the question. This little book is about the questions we ask ourselves in our head and about getting to the question behind the question and taking personal accountability. It’s about changing our inner dialog and asking questions that serve us instead of asking

Book Reviews

The Go-Giver

The Go-Giver is a great reminder that the key to success is giving. I know it sounds paradoxical. It certainly does to the main character in the book. He is a go-getter and he is chasing success, but not quite finding it. He is under a lot of pressure to

Book Reviews

The Go-Getter

You have probably heard the phrase “So and so is a real go-getter.” The implication is somewhat obvious – they go and get what they want. However, you might not know where it came from. It comes from a short story called “The Go-Getter” written in the 1920s by Peter B.

Book Reviews

Rhinoceros Success

This just a fun little book to read. You can’t take it too seriously. I think given what we are living through right now it is very timely for 2 reasons: 1. We could all use a good reason to laugh. 2. It is a good reminder that being