Festive greetings my Glorious G-Programming Gorgeousnesses it's time to recap the year

Where has LabVIEW taken us this year???

Work

Lots of Laboratory Management systems for me, plus some cRIO data logging, Oscilloscopes, Oil filter test systems, materials research testers (various). For Adrian and Jon instrumenting up a truck to fire lasers into the sky, cRIO comms hacking on ships, quite a lot of pressure test systems, high speed bearing test system and jet engine test software.

We've also been ploughing through ISO9000 certification.

We lost our project management and hosting system to hackers, if you've been paying attention you will have read all about that and the rebuilding effort.

This year was more difficult than last year but we've really made some advances in areas important to us and the forecast for next year is rosy indeed!

Blog

20 articles this year, >50000 views and 400+ comments passed and I'm still enjoying writing it although I expect the articles will have a longer gestation next year, with help from Jon and all the wonderful contributors. A huge thank-you to everyone, hopefully we'll have some more great discussions and collective brain scratching next year. I need to find some more contrary opinions I think.

Twitter

I finally got a phone with some smarts and can now be followed on @swatzyssdc.

Favorite Tweet belonging to me so far has to be .....

As you can see I'm being highly professional in my approach to social marketing!

CLA Summit

I was privileged to present about process smells at CERN in Geneva and it made me smile for weeks afterwards. The other presentations were fantastic and worth the effort of getting a CLA. A truly inspiring place and I got lost in a casino car park after drinking a tower of beer amid a lot of giggling.

Here's the where we got shown round ---> CMS detector

Tower of Beer Beer Beer! It made me happy!

CSLUG

4 meetings this year and some excellent material covered, the May meeting coincided with the inaugural CLD summit in Newbury. Our December meeting was broadcast and put on youtube. This is available if you join CSLUG and follow us in Google+ (This is a protected site because we want some freedom in our discussions)

Subjects covered...

Recursion

Re-use

A lot of amazing applications

SQLite (including James Powells fantastic application)

Version Control

TDMS

And much more besides......

It really has become a nice forum and I don't have to present every time too . The distance people are traveling is really stunning.

Adrian and I popped over to SoWLUG(UK) in October and I even got a round of applause for my presentation (don't get those at CSLUG!)

Case Study

Adrian has written a case study on our comms hacking Data Collection System for Condor Ferries and it's spiffing, we have high hopes for this!

Anyways I made a Christmas Card, have a great holiday if it's one you celebrate, if not enjoy the empty roads.

Lots of Love

Steve Watts (Middle)

Adrian Brixton (Right)

Jon Conway (Left)

Collectively SSDC Ltd

Hello my LabVIEW Lovelies

This is a topic that has been floating around my head for too long now and I've been mulling it over to the point it has become a bit ironic.

I'll warn you now, there's no LabVIEW here, but there is one of the things that cause projects to go horribly wrong.

I have lots of ideas, here's one of my less stupid ones.....

Business Card Top Trumps

So rather than a boring old business card, you get to make your Top Trump business cards, where you pick your cliched business attribute from a set number (110% Max from a bucket of 300%, only I'm allowed 110% for everything as it's my idea!). And you don't just give them away, you have to win the card fair and square!

What a brilliant idea you may think and you'd be right, trouble is ideas are cheap and rightly so, they should be cheap! An expensive idea is a very bad thing. It's converting the idea to reality that is the expensive thing, it's expensive in time, energy, effort. It's the blood sweat and tears that makes an idea expensive.

So why is an expensive idea such a bad thing? it's because it makes it harder to give up on. Think evolution..lot's of ideas, throwing away the ones that don't work.

Let's apply this to the software design process. We spend ages writing a "complete" list of all requirements, we design our code to cope with future requirements, present it to our customer and they start picking it apart. We feel defensive having worked really hard on this, it is the pinnacle of our programming capability,  we have also added complexity to cope with imagined future requirements. Our ideas are expensive and the term I use here is design pride.

Writing a "complete" list of requirements is a proportionally similar effort similar to writing code in a high level language. As we've discussed before the accuracy of requirements usually survive to point of the customer seeing the software (sometimes using the software). Reality has a habit of throwing up a whole new set of requirements.

So how do we keep our ideas cheap? We need to expend the minimum amount of effort prior to presenting a design to the customer.

This also applies to other areas of life, good management encourages lots of ideas and assigns no blame to the ones that don't work out. Experimentation is good and should be done with the minimum of cost, if you invest $$$$$$ in a feasibility study it is unlikely that the project will prove to be unfeasible (so many death-march projects should and could have been killed early saving billions).

Cheap failure is fantastic way to learn.

Here's hoping you hit the G-spot (now that's what I should have called this blog!!)

Much better on the Randomness this time I think!

Much Love

Steve