Certified LabVIEW Architect Summit av CERN
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With high expectations from two years ago for me and one year ago for Martin Peeker, we went to the European Certified LabVIEW Architect (CLA) Summit 2014. It was an extra bonus that the location was at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, Switzerland.

Hosting the Summit was an old colleague of mine, Marcus Johnson. It was two days of really good presentations and some great networking. Besides LabVIEW community members from Europe and US, there were some influential developers form the LabVIEW Research and Development team from Austin. Besides good presentations from Stephen Mercer and Darren Nattinger from the NI R&D team, this gave very good opportunity to influence future LabVIEW development.

In total there where over 15 presentations. The presentations where on a high technical level focusing on LabVIEW as well as managing large software projects. I think Arnoud de Kuijper shared some interesting thought. One on the difference between a LabVIEW specialist and a LabVIEW architect. Another one on what aspects of software engineering to prioritize when starting of a new software project.  According to Arnoud, you can’t cover them all. Even if I don’t agree right away on the last point, it’s worth some thoughts. Odd Andreassen also had an interesting presentation on the LabVIEW framework build up at Cern.

The schedule was busy, but there were still room for personal discussions over coffee breaks, lunch and dinner. I really enjoy this part of the Summit as I get to meet the people from the community face to face. Even if we at DVel have a lot of advanced technical discussions, it’s great to also have it with people having different experiences and other ways of working than we do. I also enjoyed talking business and getting ideas of new ways of doing things.

As my group went of the see the CMS detector, I went on the bus looking for someone new to talk to. Since Jeff Kodosky, the man behind LabVIEW, was sitting alone I sat down next to him, after hesitating just one second. I found out he’s a really nice guy who’s very easy to talk to. It was great hearing the story of how they started their company and telling him about DVel.

At site, at the CMS detector, we got an interesting tour. It was exciting to see the 15 m high and 12 500 tonne heavy detector and hearing the story of it.

Unfortunately I and Martin had to leave before the third day of round table discussions. I will make sure I can attend this as well next time. To sum it up it was a great conference and I’m really looking forward to next year’s Summit, which will be hosted by Gabriela Tillman.

To read more about the Summit visit http://www.ni.com/white-paper/14362/en/.

Karin Hellqvist

CSO