CLA Summit: Our visit to the 2016 Event

[AustinPeter]

This year, our very own Norbert Berki one of our Certified Labview Architects visited the National Instruments CLA Summit in Berlin on the 5th April for three days, meeting up with other CLA’s from around Europe to share and discuss ideas and best practice on behalf of Austin Consultants.

It was Norbert’s first time attending the CLA Summit event and here is what he had to say…

“As a first timer at the CLA Summit Europe Event I wasn’t sure what to expect. Stepping into the Conference Room on the first day I was amazed by how many people were attending and knew it would be a great event. In all there were 150 attendees from across Europe.

During registration everyone was given their own goody bag which contained the three day Agenda for the CLA Summit, a custom made jumper and a bottle of beer all made especially for the summit itself.

Over the two main days of the CLA Summit we spent plenty of time listening to key industry presenters discussing their technical expertise and collaborating with everyone about LabVIEW and other platforms such as TestStand and C#/.NET.

On Day 1, right after Cesar Verdejo and Tatiana Boye’s event kick-off talk, we started with Chris Cilino’s session on LabVIEW data containers, all aimed at sharing information to help make our lives easier with application data management. Chris started with using variant attributes for storing data and evolved this approach to creating his data container API. They essentially developed a typedef cluster like library that you can shape in run-time, which I thought was pretty cool.

We also got some ideas about Continuous Integration which is a recent software design paradigm as well as sessions about shared resources in Actor Oriented Systems and error handling strategies.

There was also a panel discussion session which included 5 LabVIEW architects from companies of different sizes. The main topic of the session was being an engineer who has partially or completely moved into a management role, One of the experts on stage given his thoughts on this was Head of Systems at Austin – Chris Thoroughgood!  The experts discussed many aspects of their daily tasks and answered questions from the audience.

At the end of the day we shot a group photo and had a nice meal at an authentic German restaurant.

Day 2 started with National Instruments Jeff Kodosky’s presentation on Channel Wires. The main motivation behind Channel Wires was to replace references in your code to make it more readable and intuitive. We also discussed topics such as building safety critical software and testing strategies.

The session I most enjoyed at the Summit was a code review session from Peter Horn. He volunteered to put some of his work (in the form of source code) up on the projector screen and let the audience share their thoughts. I believe there were many positive things pointed out in the code and many contributive ideas on how it could be improved.

All in all, it was a great event and a great city to host it in, I highly recommended attending next year’s CLA Summit.”

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