NI Week 2019 Recap

I had a great time at NI Week this year. As always it was a bit of a party, although this year I skipped the Spazmatics after party after party on Wednesday night since I had to present early on Thursday. The highlight was definitely hearing Scott Kelly speak on Thursday afternoon. He had some very important lessons and insights, but he was also quite entertaining as well. He could easily start a second career as a comic.

Monday

As usual, Monday started off with Alliance Day and it’s mix of technical training and business-oriented sessions. I saw a presentation on future plans for traditional LabVIEW and NXG. It looks promising.

Unlike previous years, this year the technical sessions started on Monday afternoon. I saw 3 very good presentations on Monday afternoon. Darren Nattinger gave a presentation about many of the new productivity features introduced into LabVIEW over the past several versions including many new features in LabVIEW 2019. Then I watched Peter Horn talk about how to lead coaching workshops. After that Chris Stryker did a great presentation on Clean Code, that every developer should be forced to watch.

Tuesday

There were many presentations on Tuesday, but unfortunately, I didn’t get to see any of them, as I was in a variety of closed-door meetings on various topics. The meetings were very valuable, but unfortunately, the cost was that I had to miss all the great presentations.

Of course, the LAVA BBQ on Tuesday made up for missing all the sessions. it was a great chance to catch up with lots of old friends and to meet some new ones. I had a very interesting conversation with a guy who was doing experiments on how to conduct surgery in space! That doesn’t happen every day.

Wednesday

Wednesday, I went to Danielle Jobe’s excellent hands-on session on integrating Python and LabVIEW. It was packed. After lunch, I caught Hoovah presentation on LabVIEW Reuse and Package Management. I thought I knew a fair amount about that already but I did learn some good tips and tricks. After that, I saw Allen Hsu’s presentation on building componentized applications which dovetailed very nicely with Hoovah’s. It definitely made me realize that I have to revisit ppls. My major revelation was that if I started using ppls, that then I could write unit tests on the built ppls, which is a pretty cool idea. I also liked the ability to distribute code via NIPM feeds.

The absolute highlight of the week was listening to Scott Kelly at the closing KeyNote. He ‘s a great speaker and had lot’s of great pictures from space. Wednesday night there was the traditional conference party. The Spazmatics played and did a great job.

Thursday

Thursday I had to get up early to give my presentation on Continuous Integration. It went well. The room was pretty full. Lot’s of good discussion. Joerg came up to me afterward with an idea that may solve my issues with dynamically launching VMs. After my presentation, I sat through Chris Roebuck’s presentation on CI. He uses a different approach than I do so it was interesting to see how someone else solves the same problem.