Review of 2025 and some thoughts on 2026

[swatts]

Happy New Year

For all who celebrate using the Gregorian Calendar

I'm not going to take up much of your time with this article as I'm mainly writing it for the record.

So 2025 has left us and what a year it has been!

The World of LabVIEW, NI and Emerson

The re-invigoration continues and we should appreciate not only the people leading the charge, but the leadership that enables and supports them. I want to be in the position where I don't have much to say, and I feel that way currently.. from a British person this is the highest of all praise. 

SSDC

Recovery from our terrible year of 2024 took a few months to get going, it transpires that neglecting your sales/marketing effort has a long tail.. Work for me only started to pick up in July (luckily Adrian was busy). I don't cope well with not being busy and rather than knuckling down and sorting out some of my volunteer projects (namely CTI), I instead spent my time fretting and not being very productive... Seems I need to be busy!

Anyways I got some work, then more work, then even more work and now I'm completely swamped for the next year at least. So now I'm fretting about being too busy.. But worrying with money in the bank hits differently than worrying about having money in the bank.

Technically I've really enjoyed digging into Linux and MQTT this year. 

GDevCon

I'm hating being treasurer!, but GDevCon just keeps on delivering and this year in Brighton was our best European event in my opinion. It was just great fun. Joyfully we are now a family of 5, which is a huge achievement.

I firmly believe that community is actually one of the most important aspects of a language. It's a huge value add to have nice helpful people around for the type of work we do.

CTI (Community Training Initiative)

Most open-source projects have ebbs and flows and this is normal and good. I've been having a lot of fun writing drivers for the Grove system and I think this will be the key to opening up the hobbyist space. I'm now working on a mobile project and having fun doing that. Hoping to have a demo running in the first quarter of 2026. Hopefully this can act as a basis for robotic projects going forward.

The hardware and course materials have been used in the wild and this is great to see. I had a stand at GDevCon in Brighton demoing the CTI hardware and the various demos and projects, the response was amazing. It really made me feel we were going in the right direction.

I've really enjoyed making I2C drivers.

TBoL (The Business of LabVIEW)

When I started in the world of LabVIEW Consulting we absolutely did not talk about how our businesses worked. We were all on our own. This has really changed in the last few years and the TBoL group led by Malcolm Myers is a great example. We meet every couple of weeks and talk about the business aspects of running a LabVIEW based business. This year it felt like we were all making a positive difference to each others lives.

DSH Workshops

A quiet year for me on this front, I'm more interested in developing courses than giving them, in fact I would go as far as to say that I'm not keen on training people formally. My new jobs take all my time now, so I doubt if you'll see me in teaching mode in 2026. Luckily there are 3 people in DSH Workshops that are way better at teaching than me..

I did enjoy the business consultancy stuff we did, and I felt we made a real difference. It's a bit of a niche tho'.

What's to come in 2026?

Will 2026 be the year AI comes crashing down? I suspect it will. Cost related decisions are already beginning to impact adoption. Human-made is now being touted as a positive. I am no longer a lonely sceptic.

Will this cause a tech down-turn? I suspect there will be an over-correction, but I also think our industries have suffered with all the investment money being ploughed into stupid AI projects. I think it will be similar to the telecoms bubble in 2002, which was terrible for about 6 months and then all the projects that were held up for 6 months came back.

LabVIEW is 40 years old! For all 40 of those years people have been saying that it will be replaced by text-based languages and yet it is still here. I'm fairly sensitive to this argument, because I was building test systems in Pascal and Visual Basic before LabVIEW... where are they now?

At SSDC we are pretty much booked up going into 2026 with over £160000 of open orders, hopefully that will take us through any economic turbulence.

Technically the only unfinished business I have from 2025 was to get a headless Linux LabVIEW app template done and I have a lot of CTI documentation to do for the drivers and examples I've been creating.

I have a stepper motor drive, a higher resolution thermal camera module and a 0-20mA DAC module coming... I'd also like to sort an E-Ink display.

So what are you excited about working on in 2026?

Lot's of love