BreakPoint
How did you learn LabVIEW?
@DianeS wrote:
And QUALIFIED LabVIEW programmers aren't exactly a dime a dozen. Now, are they?)
Don't tell this to someone in the NI sales department!
@for(imstuck) wrote:
@DianeS wrote:
And QUALIFIED LabVIEW programmers aren't exactly a dime a dozen. Now, are they?)
Don't tell this to someone in the NI sales department!
Set Shore Story Mode==True
Many a decade past I worked as an R&D Tech for a weather radar manufacturer. Some trouble with the current "Prototype-for-sale" unit had developed that required myself, Our Chief Engineer and the Chief Engineer for a subsystem supplier to collecively asess. Each of us proposed a threory of failure. The Supplier's CE said "Well lets all put $20.00 on the table- Closest theory takes all." 2 twentys were quickly slapped down. I went to the lab and printed a copy of my resume, I Slapped that down too! When challenged I said If they wanted me to play they should expect I was worth enough that someone should pay me so that I could keep a $20 in my pocket.
My raise came through a month later. Thanks Paul! God Speed.
Set Shore Story Mode==False
@Ben wrote:
@JW-L3CE wrote:
...Heh, good story. It sounds like it came straight from a movie script. I wish I could form my thoughts quick enough to pull off something like that. I usually think of the perfect response after I walk away from a situation.
Further Off topic: "Set Shore Story Mode==True"? Tsk tsk. Shouldn't a LabVIEW programmer use a state machine instead of sequential coding to tell their story?
"There is nothing new under the sun." Eclesiastes
One of the advantages of getting old is you can use the wise crack from the first experience when it happens again.
Short(no pun)-Shore story
While a at DEC we had Monday morning group meeting that often ran toooo long. Afterwards there would be a mad dash to the restrooms. I took up the primary possition and one of my bosses (Carl) took the postion next to me. Weilding a saved wize-crack I quiped ...
Ben: Sorry Carl but you will have to use the little kiddie facility.
Carl replies : That's OK, the water is cold anyway.
I suspect he had saved that one for just that occation.
Ben
"I just flip it over my shoulder first anyway..." is the best line I hae ever heard as a comeback to that! 
I had been working for a very large US Defense contractor, developing automated test for some of our products. The last two had been written in Turbo Pascal, which I hadn't used prior to the projects. The second program was pretty large (about 40, 000 lines of code) and actually had some pretty nice, but painful to create, user interfaces, displaying a FFT of our test signals, etc. The next iteration of this was about to start and in the initial meetings they decided to do it in HP Basic, feeling that not enough engineers new Turbo Pascal. The problem with that was that they "had" had a number of HP Basic knowledgeable engineers, but with a series of layoffs that was no longer true, and I had very little experience with it myself (I had none with Turbo Pascal when I started on that project). I really didn't want to use HP Basic, seeing it as a step backwards, but what was I to do. I happened to be reading some literature when I noticed an announcement that National Instruments (a company I was familiar with from using their GPIB boards extensively) was doing a demo of their new Windows version of LabVIEW. I really was totally unfamiliar with LabVIEW, thought the name a bit off putting, and prior to this it had only been available on Apple Macs, which were not allowed at my employer ("not real computers"). I asked my boss to allow me to attend this demo, it was being done in the hotel right next to our plant, and he said "sure, it is business related" (I had offered to take time off). I went, saw what looked really cool, brought back a handful of the demo 3 1/2" floppies (!!!) and talked about it at the next project meeting. The project lead, who want us to do it in HP Basic because not enough engineers knew Turbo Pascal, said "Hey, looks interesting, want to do phase 3 in this ... LabVIEW?" So we went from a language that not many knew, to one that no one did! That first project was a pretty ambitious one, interface with one of HP (now Agilent) most complex pieces of test equipment at the time, a "control systems analyzer" which was a sort of combination signal generator, spectrum analyzer, with both analog and digital inputs and outputs. I asked the NI sales guy if they had a driver for it and was assured that there would be one "real soon" which has turned out to be about the only "vapor-ware" I recall from 20 years of dealing with NI, but it ended up that my first project involved writing a much too detailed driver for that instrument. And as with so many who transition from a text based language to LabVIEW, the code was a mess of stacked sequence structures (they were in some of the example code!) and other bad methods. No globals, they hadn't been implemented in that version, which is why the "uninitialized shift register" construct is sometimes referred to as a LV2 Global. LabVIEW 2.5 wasn't very stable, would crash a lot ("insane error", aptly named!) but I hung in there. I was the only one there using LabVIEW (which kept me from being laid off through a number of rounds of lay offs, I left when I got a great contracting/consulting gig) so I didn't have any peers to either show me different techniques or vice versa, until I went to another facility of the company I worked for. Then I got an opportunity to go do some consulting/contracting and as the team grew I met other LabVIEWers, that had different styles, had discovered new techniques, etc. The LabVIEW community (really mostly on a bulletin board type forum) helped immensely, with people like Greg McKaskle joining in (he is one of the original developers of LabVIEW) and I ended up sharing an apartment with Mike Porter, who had really gotten a feel for the "Zen" of LabVIEW, was very knowledgeable, and more importantly was very generous in his assistance. So here I am, almost two decades into my using LabVIEW, still trying to learn something new about my craft every day. It has been a fun ride.
Landed an internship and have learn from NI tutorials and others on the discussion forums. I am still learning, and a lot at that.
I am also just going through the entire program and figuring things out.
