




Workshops update
These are interesting times. Many of us are under mandatory shelter in place orders and the rest of us are practicing social distancing. Those of us who are fortunate enough not to have been directly impacted by the virus are nonetheless impacted by society’s attempts to stop its spread.

Art of Unit Testing 2nd edition
I originally bought this book on Fab’s recommendation. I had read the XUnit Test Patterns book and I liked it, but I thought it was rather large and cumbersome. It was 900 pages, so I was looking for something smaller and lightweight that I could recommend to people. I

Distributing Test Doubles and Mocks
One of the questions that came up in our recent Unit Testing Workshop was:
How do I distribute reusable test code such as Test Doubles and Mock Objects?
This question caught me by surprise. It wasn’t something I had really thought a lot about. I had typically just been

Unit Testing Workshop Lessons Learned
At the end of January, we ran a Unit Testing Workshop. It went well. We had 7 participants. They included a LabVIEW Champion, and several CLAs. Overall the reviews were positive, but it was clear that there were some things that could be improved for the next time.
1. The


Click Here To Kill Everybody
This is the second Bruce Schneier book I have read. It is every bit as good as the first. This book is a commentary on the current state of cybersecurity (and the future) for what Bruce calls the Internet+. The Internet+ includes everything connected to the internet; not just servers,

Why we sponsor GDevCon
We are proud to once again sponsor GDevCon again this year. GDevCon is an independent graphical developers conference held each year somewhere in Europe. This year it will be at CERN.
You might ask why is GDevCon important? We already have NIWeek, NIDays, the CLA Summit, and various CLD Summits


Philosophy of Code - Memento Mori
Another topic that came up in “Ego is the Enemy” is the Latin phrase “Memento Mori”. Translated literally it means “Remember you will die.” I kind of view it as the adult version of the millenial’s YOLO – “You only live once”. YOLO is all about hedonistic pleasure – do whatever




Philosophy of Coding: Planning
In this continuation of my philosophy in coding series, I want to talk about planning and the way we think about planning.
Start with the end in mind
Many of you probably recognize this phrase from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, Steven Covey does an exercise





Ego Is The Enemy And The Obstacle Is The Way
As I wrote in a previous post about philosophy and coding I was not always a big fan of philosophy. I viewed it as an academic pursuit, a bunch of eggheads sitting around thinking about thinking. I never saw the practical value. That is until a read a pair of


Automate the Boring Stuff With Python
* NI recently added Python Integration to both LabVIEW and TestStand.
* Danielle Jobe’s presentation at GDevCon last year and her hands-on at NI week this year were both on integrating LabVIEW and Python.
* I had a job this year where there was potential for more work to be done but