The SAS Workshops Blog

Sam On Joel , Coding Philosophy

Painless Functional Specs Part 2

Do you write detailed specs for your projects? What do you include?

Continuous Integration , Software Engineering , DevOps

CI/CD workshop

At SAS Workshops we believe in "Small Steps and Fast Feedback". Having a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is a large part of that.

Coding Philosophy , Book Reviews

Accidents in North American Climbing 2023

What can studying climbing accidents teach us about coding? It turns out a lot.

Business

Consultant versus Contractor

What is the difference between a consultant and a contractor? How do you pick out the good ones?

Coding Philosophy , Sam On Joel

Five Worlds

Is there one "right" way to do software development? or does it depend on the context?

Coding Philosophy

"We are uncovering" versus "We have discovered"

Are you still curious? or have you discovered "the way" to do software development?

Business

Must read/view for LabVIEW Consultants

If you are a LabVIEW Consultant, here are a few resources that are invaluable.

Book Reviews

The Right Stuff

If you heard Scott Kelly talk at NI Week several years ago, you may recognize this book. I finally got around to reading it.

Coding Philosophy

Worry About The Message First, Then The Handwriting

We judge LabVIEW code all wrong. Straighter wires and prettier icons are not the solution to poor design.

Interviews

Bug Hunters Cafe

I recently sat down Jason C. MacDonald at the Bug Hunters Cafe. We had a really great conversation about bug hunting in LabVIEW.

Coding Philosophy

The Value of Open Source

There is a lot of value in open source tools and it goes beyond just the initial problem they are designed to solve.

Coding Philosophy

Go slow to Go Fast.

Every time I read my kids the book, the tortoise always wins. Yet as adults we seem to have missed the lesson.

How to , Software tools

Publishing AntiDoc Documentation using GitLab Pages

I just discovered GitLab Pages recently. It has been around for a while, so this may not be news to anyone, but I'm sure it's news to at least one of my readers and I've found a somewhat novel use case for it, so I decided to do a blog post about it.

Book Reviews , Coding Philosophy

How To Make Mistakes in Python

I stumbled upon this book recently. It was quite good. I highly recommend everyone (yes even LabVIEW Developers) read it. It is very insightful. It's also free and very short at 76 pages and it reads fast. There really is no excuse. I very much like the title. I think

Coding Philosophy , Conferences

The Best Programmers Are Constantly Learning.

The best programmers are constantly learning and we only fully learn when we share. This is why we need conferences like GDevCon N.A.

Software tools , Announcements , Frameworks , Resources

Automatically Generate Sequence Diagrams

Sequence Diagrams are essential for designing, understanding, and debugging concurrent systems. Here is a tool to automatically generate them from running code.

Conferences

Should I go to NI Connect?

Since returning from NI Connect last month, I have gotten asked this question several times. There are a few things to consider before answering this question.

How Do I Get Started With CI/CD in LabVIEW?

Too many choices can be overwhelming. Where should you invest your energy? Why is the answer CI/CD? and How do you get started?

Continuous Integration , Software tools , DevOps , SCC , How to

Git SubModules and GitLab CI

I generally prefer using VIPM to share code, but sometimes submodules are useful. However, using them with GitLab CI can be tricky.

Announcements

Consultant of the Year!

I am very proud to announce that SAS Workshops was awarded the Consultant Impact award recently at NI Connect.

Announcements , Resources

The LabVIEW Experiment is 9 months old!

Nine months ago I started the LabVIEW Experiment. So far it has been very well received. I am very happy with the way it has turned out. We've had a lot of great guests and covered some very important topics. Nothing Good is Free Unfortunately, nothing worthwhile is free. There

Book Reviews

Waltzing With Bears

Risk management or crisis management, the choice is yours. This book will teach you proper risk management so you can avoid crisis management.

Software Engineering , Python

Software Engineering in Python

I recently took another Python course from Enthought on Software Engineering. I highly recommend it.

Book Reviews

Caste

Coding is much more about humans than technology. Understanding the human condition better makes you a better coder. This book is all about the human condition.

Coding Philosophy

Teaching Software Engineering to Scientists and Engineers

"It is easier to hire a scientist or engineer with domain knowledge and teach them how to be a software engineer than it is to turn a software engineer into a domain expert."