My NI Week 2009 Plans

I was inspired by Christina's NI Week post on her blog to post my tentative NI Week 2009 schedule, in case anybody is wondering where I'll be during NI Week. After each morning's keynote, I'm planning on helping out in the What's New With LabVIEW hands-on sessions at 10:30 in Room 18C each morning. After that, here are my plans (which are subject to change based on hunger, long conversations about LabVIEW, impromptu VI-writing contests, challenges from Guitar Hero robots, and many other possible NI Week-sanctioned distractions):

Tuesday

• LabVIEW Experts Panel: 12:00, Technology Theater. Maybe a LabVIEW Artisan will be allowed to hang out with LabVIEW Experts?
• Hack Your Car with NI-CAN: 1:00, Room 15. I've driven my car for months with the Check Engine light on, with no (visible) ill effects. I sure would like to be able to figure out why that light is *really* on.
• LabVIEW Scripting: 2:15, Room 16B. I'll be there mainly to help answer any specific scripting questions that might come up.
• New Software Engineering Tools in LabVIEW: 3:30, Room 16B. I honestly don't know what we're presenting on here, and I'm curious to find out.
• Challenge the Champions: 5:00, Technology Theater. I wrote some of the questions for this year's event (and not a single one of them has to do with Express VIs!).
• LAVA BBQ: 8:00, Stubb's. I *think* I can make it this year, but I'm not sure yet.

Wednesday

• Past, Present, and Future of Robots: 1:00, Room 17B. The dude that runs the Roomba company is presenting this one.
• Tools and APIs to Build on the LabVIEW Platform Hands-On: 2:15, Room 18C. I helped write a lot of the initial content for this, so I'm interested to see how it turned out.
• Memory Management in LabVIEW: 3:30, Room 16B. Dan H. is one of the foremost experts on the guts of LabVIEW. I've seen some of the content for this presentation and it should be great.
• Tips and Tricks to Speed LabVIEW Development: 4:45, Room 16A. I'm presenting this one, so I should probably show up. For those of you who came to my performance tips and tricks presentation at NI Week 2008, I've got a brand new set of tips and tricks up my sleeve this year. Don't miss it!

Thursday

• LabVIEW Coding Challenge: High Noon, Technology Theater. Who dares challenge me after my resounding victory at NI Week 2008? You have all had a year to practice with Quick Drop, so no more excuses! I'm looking at you, Jim. :)
• Web Services in LabVIEW: 1:00, Room 16B. I must admit, I know a lot less about web services than I should.
• Improving the LabVIEW Upgrade Experience: 2:15, Room 16A. I'm always telling people about great new LabVIEW features, so I should probably be familiar with issues people have when trying to upgrade so they can use those new features.

So if you made it this far, I have a couple of other things to mention about NI Week 2009:

• I plan on twittering frequently (with my new iPhone!) about what I'm doing and cool stuff I'm seeing at NI Week 2009. Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/dnatt if you don't already.
• The NI Week program incorrectly lists me as the presenter for Beyond the Basics: LabVIEW Debugging Techniques on Tuesday at 2:15. Actually, Tycho C., the author of the Desktop Execution Trace Toolkit, is giving that presentation.

The Diagram Cleanup Experiment

For many years now, I've taken pride in the appearance of my LabVIEW diagrams. One of my first tasks when I joined LabVIEW R&D several years ago was to rewrite the LabVIEW Style Guide, and more recently, I was very much involved in the reviews of Peter Blume's The LabVIEW Style Book. I cannot claim style perfection, but I can say that you would have to search pretty hard in all the code I've written over the years to find backwards wires, overlapping objects, uncommented code, or any other style transgressions.

However, that clean code doesn't come without a cost...a cost of time. It takes time to perfectly align objects, to minimize space to achieve optimal compactness, to align control terminals on the left and indicator terminals on the right. My kindred spirits in LabVIEW style know what I'm talking about here.

Speaking of time...for the past year, I've been enjoying how much time I've been saving with Quick Drop. I can safely say that the most constrictive bottleneck on my LabVIEW programming speed--palette navigation--is no longer an issue. But seeing as I'm always looking for ways to write more code in less time (which translates into more features for you!), I very quickly became aware of the next biggest bottleneck--clean diagram arrangement.

So I'm going to embark on a journey with LabVIEW 2009...one which is undoubtedly fraught with peril, but should ultimately benefit all LabVIEW users. I am going to throw my current method of incremental diagram arrangement out the window, and rely 100% on Diagram Cleanup to do the job for me. The way I see it, we've got a feature here that is supposed to give us clean diagrams. It's also going to have some pretty nice improvements in LabVIEW 2009. So instead of ignoring this great feature that has tons of potential, I'm going to use it, recognize its shortcomings, experiment with its customizable settings, and file CARs to make it better. I envision a day, hopefully not too far off in the future, where we can spend our programming time focusing entirely on programming, and not being distracted by aesthetics.