The SAS Workshops Blog

Python , How to

Python node basics

I have been learning a bit about Python lately. I find it a nice complement to LabVIEW. Like LabVIEW it is very good for writing quick little scripts and rapidly prototyping things. Unlike LabVIEW, it is not strictly typed, which makes it rather interesting to me. A few years ago

Coding Philosophy

Workability versus right and wrong

Very early in my programming career, I was very dogmatic. I learned one way to do things and that was THE right way and anyone who didn’t do it that way was doing it wrong. I really wasn’t afraid to tell people that either. Obviously starting with “Your

How to , SCC

Setting up LVCompare and LVMerge

EDIT: Since I originally wrote this post, I have come up with a much easier way. I am leaving this post up for historcial reasons, but do yourself a favor and just go here There has been some discussion on LinkedIn and other places about how best to setup LVCompare

How to , SCC

Automatically Creating A Gitlab Repo

I’ve been working on streamlining some of my processes lately. I noticed that one of the one things that takes a little time is creating a new GitLabRepository. It just seemed like it took too much time. Here are the previous steps 1. Goto GitLab Webpage 2. Login 3.

How to , SCC

SSH keys and git bash

So when it comes to git I much prefer ssh over https. I can’t clearly articulate why, I just do. However one thing I noticed is that git bash was constantly asking me for the password for my ssh key. It got annoying so I did a little research

Book Reviews

Sales Bible

I used to be part of a business coaching group called EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey. It was a good group of people. One guy, Eric put me onto this book by Geoffrey Gitomer called the Sales Bible. He was enthusiastic about it, so I bought a copy. It sat on

How to , SCC , Coding Philosophy

Changing Git's default branch

In the wake of the protests surrounding George Floyd’s death and the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, there has been a lot of talk in the tech community about changing some of the terms we use. There was a lot of focus on moving away from using master and

Coding Philosophy

What does scalability actually mean?

So recently the question of scalability came up on an NI forum post. Stephen Loftus-Mercer (aka AristosQueue) made a very interesting point. He talked about how scaling can mean many different things to many different people. A solution that is scalable on one axis might not be scalable on another.

How to , Random

Right to Repair

A few weeks ago I noticed that the lightning port on my iphone 8 was not working very well. My headphones kept cutting out and the power cord would fallout of the lightning connector. I decided to fix it myself rather than take it somewhere. I had used iFixit before

How to , Software tools

Enhanced State Diagram Editor

I was talking to Fab a while ago and she put me onto the Enhanced State Diagram editor. Apparently it is one of Jeff K’s pet projects. It is a way to create a state machine by drawing the diagram in a special editor that automatically generates the LabVIEW

How to , SCC

Git Reflog

In a previous article, I talked about orphaned commits. First, let’s talk about why they are bad. They are bad because they will eventually be removed by git’s garbage collection algorithm, losing the data forever. The reflog is designed to prevent that (for a time). In my previous

Book Reviews

Endurance

This particular book had been recommended to me several times. It is quite popular in the outdoor recreation community and also in the business leadership community. To tie it into LabVIEW a little: I saw Scott Kelly speak at NI week last year. I was quite impressed, so I bought

How to , SCC

Navigating a git repository

Navigating the Commit Graph Sometimes we want to go back and revisit a particular commit in our project. We might want to do that for a variety of reasons: * Maybe a customer reports a bug in a specific version. We might go check out that tag to reproduce the bug.

Webinars

June 2020 Webinar

Technical Skills For Agile Development June 24, 11:00am MT Agile has a lot to say about how we manage the software development lifecycle, but it requires good technical skills to be successful. Often we get caught up in the software development lifecycle side of agile software development. It is

Book Reviews , SCC

Git For Teams

The traditional approach to teaching git is to start with the details of how git stores and indexes content and build upon that to get to the commonly used commands. This method does give you a really good understanding of what is going on under the hood. It does a

SCC , Software tools , How to

Git Tips For Beginners

Git is a great source code control tool, but it is not known for being user friendly. It’s actually a shame. The way in which git stores and references content is incredibly elegant, but it’s UI seems more of an afterthought. The command structure is not at all

SCC , How to

Git Basics

I am working on some new training material on git. I thought I would use a series of blog posts to kind explore some ideas and help clarify my thinking. Learning git can be difficult. I want this material to be approachable to beginners, yet still detailed enough that they

Coding Philosophy

Every Crisis Is The End Of An Illusion

So I read a book earlier this year called “The Secrets of Consulting”. It was a very good book. You can read my review here. There was one part of the book that I didn’t put in the review that really stuck with me. I have been thinking about

Book Reviews , Unit Testing

A Great Intro To Unit Testing

As many of you may know Fabiola De la Cueva and Richard Jennings came out with a new LabVIEW book this year (actually the 5th edition of an existing book) LabVIEW Graphical Programming. I have been meaning to write a review, but I have put it off because I haven’

Conferences

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

Coding Philosophy

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

Coding Philosophy , Resources

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

Coding Philosophy

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

Webinars

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

Coding Philosophy , Unit Testing , Kata

Importance of practice - Katas

So I have been listening to the maintainable podcast a lot lately. There is a lot of talk on there about doing coding katas. It also comes up a lot on twitter. I had never really done any. Then I took a udemy class on TDD in Python and it