LabVIEW Life Lessons #7 - Research First!

[swatts]

To save you some time in your busy schedules this article can be summed up in 8 words a comma and an exclamation mark.

Before you write any code, do some research!

See.. told you.

I'll now expand it just to fill the page with words.

For the lazy engineer there's nothing worse than discovering a toolkit after you've expended blood, sweat and tears to make your own. You may not end up using it, but it will save you time. I recall a conversation with an engineer who had spend 9 weeks creating a PIC relay controller that took a serial command and closed a relay...."um you know you can buy these for $60 don't you.....".

Take my tree control example found here the google search was "tree control database", this then leads on the second part of research for a software engineer.

Learn another language

There's a lot of info and ideas outside of the world of LabVIEW so look outside the community.

As a LabVIEW programmer you will benefit from being multi-disciplinary. So you can spend all your brain-power learning 100% LabVIEW and pride yourself in the knowledge of esoteric tools and techniques from the dark cobwebby corners of the LabVIEW IDE or learn enough to be proficient, then learn how to design databases and learn enough Linux to host stuff.

The second option will allow you to tackle enterprise level solutions out in the real world.

kun amo

Steve

PS mia ŝvebŝipo plenas de angiloj