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. He had got hired onto a team with 2 CLAD level people who were running a test lab. They had no real process in place and his job was to bring them up to speed and implement some best practices. I asked him if he had looked at the COE website and he had not. After he checked it out he got back to me and said “Wow, this is great! It’s exactly what I needed.” I figured if he didn’t know about it, there are probably others who don’t know.
What is the COE?
COE is a designation given by National Instruments to rockstar LabVIEW teams that are killing it and implementing all the best practices in LabVIEW development. There is a process to go through to get certified. There are a bunch of checklists and audits. You don’t have to have it all together and figured out right now, they have a progression that you can work through. If that sounds interesting, you should check out the COE website and talk to Nancy Henson.
What’s in the COE for me?
You might be saying “Well I’m not interested in becoming a COE. I work by myself” or “Our team is just not ready for that. Why should I care about the COE?” The great thing about the COE is that it is all freely available. There is an assessment available, so you can see how you measure up. If there is something you need to work on, there’s tons of content around implementing all the best practices. There’s tons of content from Allen, Fab, Dr. Powell, Darren, Stephen, Jon McBee, and pretty much all the other big names as well some others you may not recognize. You’ll even find a few of my presentations up there. The presentations are really well organized so it’s easy to find exactly what you need. There are also videos available from all the SEPAD presentations at NI week.
If you are working with LabVIEW and reading this blog, you are probably interested in becoming more proficient. We all want to write more elegant code that solves bigger and better problems, and code that is more reliable and maintainable. The COE website has the tools to help you do all of that.
What if I need a little help?
If you get inspired by the COE website but would like some more personalized attention, please let us know. We would love to sit down with you and go over the results of the COE assessment, and see how we can help your team to grow, so you can realize your full potential.
