I saw Rebecca Geier talk at NI Week a few years ago. She was promoting her new book Smart Marketing to Engineers. I picked up a copy but didn’t get around to reading it until last year. I found it very insightful. The book starts off with some typical

This is a book I read a few years ago. It is a very useful book. It’s considered a classic in software engineering literature because it introduced the idea of code smells and because it gave names to a bunch of common refactorings. Code smells are things that indicate

The Alchemist by Paul Cuehlo is a great book that I highly recommend. It is a great reminder to chase your dreams and ignore the naysayers. It also reminds us that having a dream is not the same as chasing it. If you have a dream get up and follow

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

I recently read this book on code reviews by Giuliana Carullo. I quite enjoyed it. I wrote a review on GoodReads and on the LabVIEW Champion’s book recommendations. I thought I would just post about it here to help get the word out some more about this great book.

Nothing is private on the internet. Most of us understand this idea intellectually. We realize that we are being surveilled at some level, but most of us do not grasp the depth and breadth of that surveillance and what exactly it is used for and the implications. Bruce Schneier does

At GDevCon, Allen and I were talking about books we’d recently read and I was reminded about a book that I read last year called “Age of Wonder”. A friend had given it to me 5 years ago when I moved from Pittsburgh to Denver and it took a

Guns Germs and Steel is a very interesting and entertaining book. Similar to the last book I reviewed, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Gun’s Germs and Steel challenges the reader’s view of the world. It starts with a very simple narrative that we are all familiar with and then

I’ve had several very interesting conversations lately. I had a great conversation with Allen, Shane, Danielle, and Oli after GDevCon2. I had another fascinating conversation with Fab and few others after the CLA Summit. Most recently I had a conversation after Social Media Day Denver. All these conversations had

A year or two ago I was at a dinner at NI Week and I got to sit next to James Loftus. We were discussing artificial intelligence and he said “Oh you have to read this book called On Intelligence”. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is all the rage these

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

UML Distilled by Martin Fowler Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a standard way of graphically describing and designing software. If you are like a lot of LabVIEW programmers (myself included) and are a physicist, scientist or engineer by training and not a computer scientist, you may not have been exposed

We are all in Marketing. I know this blog is supposed to be about LabVIEW and automation, but if we’re honest, we are all in marketing. Whether you work for yourself as a consultant or if you work for an Alliance Partner or some large industrial company, you constantly

I recently just finished reading “A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW” by Jon Conway and Steve Watts.  The whole time I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think: “I wish I would have read this 10 years ago.  It would have saved me a lot of trouble.” Background