Samuel Taggart

Samuel Taggart

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

Book Review - On Intelligence

A year or two ago I was at a dinner at NI Week and I got to sit next to James Loftus. We were discussing artificial intelligence and he said “Oh you have to read this book called On Intelligence”. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is all the rage these
1 min read

The benefits of Continuous Integration

In a previous post, I talked about various ways to earn technical interest. One of those ways was Continuous Integration or CI. I thought I would elaborate a little on the benefits of using CI to automate the boring stuff so you can detect problems early, streamline your process, and
3 min read

What are you designing for?

My upcoming webinar got me thinking about a recent conversation that I had with Fabiola about design decisions. It also reminded me of a few of Steve’s recent blogposts on Design Priorities and on Project versus API Design. My discussion with Fabiola revolved around the differences between the Actor
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Six Easy Ways To Earn Technical Interest

Steve Watts recently made a excellent blogpost about Technical Accounting. If you don’t follow Steve’s blog you definitely should. In this particular article, he coined the terms Technical Debt, Technical Investments, Technical Assets, and Technical Tax. Steve’s talk of Technical Investments, got me thinking about Technical Interest.
4 min read
April 2019 Webinar

April 2019 Webinar

Choosing a Framework – April 24th 11am-12pm MST So many choices DQMH, AF, DCAF, SMO, ALOHA, TLB, and I’m probably still missing some.  There are lots of LabVIEW Frameworks out there (and they all have cryptic acronymns).  If you are confused by this alphabet soup of frameworks, then this presentation
1 min read
Ergonomics 2

Ergonomics 2

The last post I made was about ergonomics as far as keyboards and mice. I had a few other things I wanted to talk about, but the post got rather long so I cut them out. Since that post was so well-received I thought I would add another post about
3 min read
Ergonomics

Ergonomics

There was a post on the LabVIEW forums recently about ergonomics. Someone on there was suffering from a repetitive strain injury in their wrist and was asking about vertical mice. They got a lot of varying advice and recommendations. It inspired me to add my $.02 here about my experience
4 min read
Update VMs on SSDs

Update VMs on SSDs

This post is an update to my previous posts on using Virtual Machines (VMs). Here are some links to those articles: * Using Virtual Machines Part 1 * Using Virtual Machines Part 2 In part 2 I included a section on where to store VMs. I mentioned that I was using a
2 min read
Design Patterns - A review

Design Patterns - A review

I recently finished reading “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” by Erich Gamm, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissades. Due to its popularity, the length of the title, and the fact that it has 4 authors, it is affectionately known as the “Gang of Four” book or GOF
4 min read
See us at NI Week 2019

See us at NI Week 2019

I am happy to announce that my presentation on Continuous Integration got accepted for NI Week 2019. Continuous Integration is a very interesting topic. It’s been gaining in adoption over the last couple of years. At some point in the near future, everyone who is serious about Software Engineering
2 min read
What goes wrong with software?

What goes wrong with software?

My friend Emre Tüzüner posted the following video on Linkedin recently.  It is “Uncle” Bob Martin talking to the Yale School of Management. If you have attended NI Week or the CLA summits lately you may have heard of Uncle Bob and the SOLID principles.  I thought it was a
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FREE Webinar Series

I’ve decided to put on a free webinar series this year.  I’m going to try to plan 1 webinar every other month.  I’m trying not to collide with NI week, the CLA summits, GDevCon, etc.  I don’t have all the dates set yet, but I do
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Goal Setting in the New Year

Goal Setting in the New Year

Since it’s a new year everyone is talking about goal setting. Because a lot of people struggle with goal setting, there are a lot of different methodologies out there. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past few weeks as I lay out some of my
4 min read
GDevCon2 Submissions due.

GDevCon2 Submissions due.

The first annual GDevCon last year was a raving success. See my review here. Because it was such a success, there will be a GDevCon2 on August 21st and 22nd in Birmingham. You have until Friday to submit your presentation ideas. Share your ideas and help make GDevCon2 a success!
1 min read
Business Book Recommendations

Business Book Recommendations

It’s January and the time of year where everyone starts planning for the year to come. If you like to read as I do, you may be making lists of books to read in the New Year. If you are, I’ve got a few books to recommend. These
4 min read
Rocket Book

Rocket Book

If you are looking for an inexpensive gift this Christmas season, I suggest you check out the Rocket Book.   They have a really cool video on their website that explains it all. Basically, it is a paper notebook.  You take notes on it with a special pen.  Then you use
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Events for UI Actor Indicators

Allen Smith and I have been working on a side project we called Events for UI Actor Indicators for a couple months (we’ve both been busy lately).  It started with a discussion at a CLA summit in Austin.  That prompted Allen to come up with an idea and then
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Ideal Development Machine

Ideal Development Machine

Since it is Black Friday, now would be a great time to go shopping for a new development machine.  There was a post on the CLA Forums about it. Unfortunately you have to be a Certified LabVIEW Architect to view the CLA forum.  So I though I would post my
2 min read
How to use VIPM effectively

How to use VIPM effectively

My friend Matt Richardson recently suggested I write a post about how I use packages in my workflow, particularly how I use VIPM. This is my response. Matt, hopefully I answered all your questions. What is VIPM? VIPM stands for VI package manager. It is a free tool made by
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AF Tester Now On GitLab

At the recent CLA Summit, there was a lot of talk about collaboration particularly about open source projects hosted on sites such as GitLab. I’m proud to announce that the AF Tester project that I’ve showcased in some of my recent presentations is now available on GitLab as
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LabVIEW Center of Excellence

LabVIEW Center of Excellence

I just wanted to take a moment and highlight the LabVIEW Center of Excellence (COE) website. I thought it was pretty well-known, but after the recent CLA summit, I realized not everyone knows about it.  I ran into a fellow CLA there who was telling me about his new job.
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GDevCon Videos Available

The videos from GDevCon are now available on their YouTube Channel Below is my presentation as promised.  Be sure to check out all the other ones as well.  You can check out my review of GDevCon here.