GDevCon Euro Review

I had a really great time at GDevCon this year in Stuttgart. Unfortunately, I got COVID afterward and it took me a while to recover. I just wanted to do a quick write-up of my experience.

NI R&D

By far the highlight of the conference was meeting Greg McKaskle and Chethan Ravindranath from NI R&D. I had some really good conversations with both of them about LabVIEW and other things.

CI/CD

There was a huge focus this year on CI/CD with two very good presentations on it. I really liked Niko's presentation, because he's basically doing what I outline here: https://sas-gcli-tools.gitlab.io except he is doing it for Azure.

Huddles

Huddles were GDevCon's take on Open Space. You had to reserve space ahead of time. I reserved 2 spots: One to demo mob programming and with Anton to talk about refactoring tools. Overall people seemed to like the huddles and they seemed to get good feedback.

Mob Programming

The mob programming huddle went well. We got way more people than I anticipated. The demo works well with 5-10 people. We had 40. So 10 people mob programmed and 30 people watched. It did get a little unruly at points and overall it went well. We talked about what we learned at the end and it seemed like people picked up on a lot of the lessons that I wanted them to learn. The crowd also seemed to really enjoy it.

Refactoring Tools

Anton and I co-chaired a huddle to talk about refactoring tools in LabVIEW. We spent a lot of time talking about both existing tools and tools that we would like to see. The top of the "tools we would like to see" ended up being a dependency viewer/checker tool. As an outcome of the meeting, we started a VIPM list of refactoring tools and started a channel on the LabVIEW Discord. We also discussed starting a recurring mob to work on the dependency tool. I have yet to set that up.

TMiLV

I didn't participate in any huddles other than the 2 I led. That is because during the other huddles I was either recording for This Month in LabVIEW or conducting my Unit Testing Workshop with Anton. For TMiLV Steve, Nancy and I recorded 2 episodes. You can check them out here and here. I got to talk to some people I had never met before like Greg McKaskle and Carsten Thomsen.

Approval Testing

I gave a presentation on Approval Testing. It went well. I think I got some converts. Immediately after the conference, I got a couple bug reports from Pete Horn. We also discussed Approvals during our Unit Testing Workshop (more on that in a bit).

Acqui Hiring

Fabiola gave a presentation on her journey recently of going from business owner back to employee. It was an interesting story. She previously had been a little quiet about what had been going on, so it was good to hear the whole story.

Sharing of ideas

Of course one of the main reasons to go to the conference is for the hallway discussions. They always spark some ideas. In particular, I got some good for my autoformatter project Blue from both Greg McKaskle and Felipe Silva.

Unit Testing Workshop

On Friday afternoon Anton and I ran a Unit Testing Workshop. Anton talked about LUnit and LMock and did a little demo. I talked briefly about Approval Testing and helped everyone to get it set up and to run through a few examples. I got lots of good feedback afterward. It was also reassuring that we managed to get 3 LabVIEW Champions to take the course.