Samuel Taggart

Samuel Taggart

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

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
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Hiding in Complexity

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
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The Value of Software Quality

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
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To Depend Or Not To Depend

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
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Zoom Workshops lessons learned.

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
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VI Week

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
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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
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Technical Leadership

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
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QBQ

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
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The Go-Giver

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
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The Go-Getter

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.
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Rhinoceros Success

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
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Who Moved My Cheese?

Who Moved My Cheese?

“Who moved my cheese?” is a very timely book given what we are all going through right now. It is a time of great change for all of us. This book is about how we think about and deal with change. It’s a short parable. It takes about an
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Agile Samurai Course

Agile Samurai Course

Last year I had read the book, “The Agile Samurai”. I recently stumbled upon a companion udemy course. The course is excellent. It more or less follows the book and provides good reinforcement. It provides a really good basic introduction to the ideas behind agile software development and an easy
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Corona Virus Reading List

Corona Virus Reading List

Being self-employed sometimes it is difficult to shut work off. You are very vested in the outcome and there’s always more to do. Working from home makes it especially difficult because there isn’t that physical separation of actually going into the office. Being stuck inside for this Corona
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Secrets of Consulting

Secrets of Consulting

Consulting is the art of influencing people at their request. Secrets of Consulting page v When I first started doing consulting, I thought that most problems were technical. Boy was I wrong! I quickly learned that most problems are not technical, but are people problems. If I had read “ Secrets
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April 2020 Webinar

April 2020 Webinar

Designing a Scripting Tool By Example April 29, 11:00am MT I keep repeating the same boring steps aver and over again. There has to be a better way. If you’ve ever felt this way, then this webinar is for you. As programmers we automate things. That’s what
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Unit Testing And Seams

Unit Testing And Seams

One of the topics I found very interesting form the Art Of Unit Testing was seams. I wanted to write a blog post to explore that a little bit. What is a Seam? Seams are places in your code where you can plug in different functionality … Art of Unit Testing,
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Getting Through This

Getting Through This

The last week or two have been pretty rough in general, and it doesn’t show signs of letting up. The best way to get through something like this is to take your mind off things by staying busy. James McNally made an excellent post with some ideas on what
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Workshops update

Workshops update

These are interesting times. Many of us are under mandatory shelter in place orders and the rest of us are practicing social distancing. Those of us who are fortunate enough not to have been directly impacted by the virus are nonetheless impacted by society’s attempts to stop its spread.
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Rebranding

You may have noticed that our domain name has changed and we are now branding ourselves as SAS Workshops. Rest assured we are still the same people (ie right now primarily just me, Sam Taggart) We are still doing the same thing we have been doing recently which is helping
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Art of Unit Testing 2nd edition

Art of Unit Testing 2nd edition

I originally bought this book on Fab’s recommendation. I had read the XUnit Test Patterns book and I liked it, but I thought it was rather large and cumbersome. It was 900 pages, so I was looking for something smaller and lightweight that I could recommend to people. I
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Unit Testing Workshop Lessons Learned

Unit Testing Workshop Lessons Learned

At the end of January, we ran a Unit Testing Workshop. It went well. We had 7 participants. They included a LabVIEW Champion, and several CLAs. Overall the reviews were positive, but it was clear that there were some things that could be improved for the next time. 1. The
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