The SAS Workshops Blog

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Ergonomics

There was a post on the LabVIEW forums recently about ergonomics. Someone on there was suffering from a repetitive strain injury in their wrist and was asking about vertical mice. They got a lot of varying advice and recommendations. It inspired me to add my $.02 here about my experience

How to

Update VMs on SSDs

This post is an update to my previous posts on using Virtual Machines (VMs). Here are some links to those articles: * Using Virtual Machines Part 1 * Using Virtual Machines Part 2 In part 2 I included a section on where to store VMs. I mentioned that I was using a

Design Patterns , OOP

A Business Case For Applying Design Patterns

This is my fourth article in a series on the Gang of Four book on Design Patterns. I thought four was an appropriate number of articles. Here are links to the first 3 articles: 1. Design Patterns – A Review 2. OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 1 3. OOP

Design Patterns , OOP

OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post on GOF Design Patterns in the Actor Framework. I found a lot of examples, so I decided to break it into 2 posts. You can access part 1 here and my review of the GOF Book here. Part 1 showed examples found

Design Patterns , Frameworks , OOP

OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 1

Last week I wrote a review of the GOF Book on OOP Design Patterns. This week I would like to share some examples of these design patterns in action, so you can go look at them and see how they are implemented and used in LabVIEW. When I took Allen’

Book Reviews , Design Patterns , OOP

Design Patterns - A review

I recently finished reading “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” by Erich Gamm, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissades. Due to its popularity, the length of the title, and the fact that it has 4 authors, it is affectionately known as the “Gang of Four” book or GOF

Conferences

See us at NI Week 2019

I am happy to announce that my presentation on Continuous Integration got accepted for NI Week 2019. Continuous Integration is a very interesting topic. It’s been gaining in adoption over the last couple of years. At some point in the near future, everyone who is serious about Software Engineering

Coding Philosophy

What goes wrong with software?

My friend Emre Tüzüner posted the following video on Linkedin recently.  It is “Uncle” Bob Martin talking to the Yale School of Management. If you have attended NI Week or the CLA summits lately you may have heard of Uncle Bob and the SOLID principles.  I thought it was a

Webinars

FREE Webinar Series

I’ve decided to put on a free webinar series this year.  I’m going to try to plan 1 webinar every other month.  I’m trying not to collide with NI week, the CLA summits, GDevCon, etc.  I don’t have all the dates set yet, but I do

Goals

Goal Setting in the New Year

Since it’s a new year everyone is talking about goal setting. Because a lot of people struggle with goal setting, there are a lot of different methodologies out there. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past few weeks as I lay out some of my

Conferences

GDevCon2 Submissions due.

The first annual GDevCon last year was a raving success. See my review here. Because it was such a success, there will be a GDevCon2 on August 21st and 22nd in Birmingham. You have until Friday to submit your presentation ideas. Share your ideas and help make GDevCon2 a success!

Book Reviews

Business Book Recommendations

It’s January and the time of year where everyone starts planning for the year to come. If you like to read as I do, you may be making lists of books to read in the New Year. If you are, I’ve got a few books to recommend. These

Random

Rocket Book

If you are looking for an inexpensive gift this Christmas season, I suggest you check out the Rocket Book.   They have a really cool video on their website that explains it all. Basically, it is a paper notebook.  You take notes on it with a special pen.  Then you use

Software tools , Frameworks , OOP

Events for UI Actor Indicators

Allen Smith and I have been working on a side project we called Events for UI Actor Indicators for a couple months (we’ve both been busy lately).  It started with a discussion at a CLA summit in Austin.  That prompted Allen to come up with an idea and then

Random

Ideal Development Machine

Since it is Black Friday, now would be a great time to go shopping for a new development machine.  There was a post on the CLA Forums about it. Unfortunately you have to be a Certified LabVIEW Architect to view the CLA forum.  So I though I would post my

Software tools

How to use VIPM effectively

My friend Matt Richardson recently suggested I write a post about how I use packages in my workflow, particularly how I use VIPM. This is my response. Matt, hopefully I answered all your questions. What is VIPM? VIPM stands for VI package manager. It is a free tool made by

Software tools

AF Tester Now On GitLab

At the recent CLA Summit, there was a lot of talk about collaboration particularly about open source projects hosted on sites such as GitLab. I’m proud to announce that the AF Tester project that I’ve showcased in some of my recent presentations is now available on GitLab as

Resources

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.

Conferences

GDevCon Videos Available

The videos from GDevCon are now available on their YouTube Channel Below is my presentation as promised.  Be sure to check out all the other ones as well.  You can check out my review of GDevCon here.

Conferences

CLA Summit 2018

Friday marked the end of the 2018 CLA summit in Austin. It was 2 and a half days full of presentations and discussions. Kudos to Jon McBee and Jeremy Marquis for running the summit and leading the discussion.  Stephen Loftus-Mercer also helped in the organizing, but he was sick and

Conferences

GDevCon 1 Review

This last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the first annual GDevCon in Cambridge. This post is about the presentations I saw and my takeaways.  I apologize for the length, but there was a lot of content crammed into those two days.  In order to do

Coding Philosophy

Proficiency

I always like to challenge myself. Lately I’ve been challenging myself by running ultramarathons.  As you might imagine this requires a bit of training. These training runs give me plenty of time for reflection. The other day as I was on a training run in the mountains, I kept

Conferences

GDevCon is almost here

In case you haven’t GDevCon is taking place September 4th and 5th in Cambridge.  What is GDevCon? It is the 1st ever independent graphical developers conference. Check out the website.  There is a list of speakers there. I think you will be quite impressed. They’ve gathered a lot

Conferences

Videos from NIWeek 2018

As many of you may know I had the privilege of speaking at NI Week this past May.  Nancy Henson helped to organize a Software Engineering, Processes, Architecture, and Design (SEPAD) track.  She enlisted Mark Balla, Jon McBee, and a few others to help video the sessions. There were a

How to , Software tools , Resources

Using Virtual Machines Part 2

This is second of a 2 part series on using Virtual Machines for LabVIEW development.  You can check out part 1 here.  Part 1 discusses why we use virtual machines.  This article will discuss a little more of the how.  I’m not going to give away all my secrets,