Every year, Test & Measurement experts gather at GDevCon N.A. to share what’s working, what’s broken, and where the community is headed. GDevCon hosts events worldwide, and this year DMC attended and presented at the North American conference in Chicago to share information, learn, and connect.
On the Agenda: Extending LabVIEW with NATS
I had the opportunity to present Extending LabVIEW with NATS, where I discussed how http://NATS.io‘s pub/sub messaging model can extend LabVIEW test systems beyond a single-language, single-executable architecture. The core idea is that monolithic test applications can be bulky and hard to manage, while tools like NATS allow for more modular software design. Check out the code here.
Sessions That Stood Out
There were many presenters and panels that stood out this year. Here are a few that stuck with me. You can also see these sessions as they’re uploaded to GDevCon’s YouTube channel.
- Open-source Wrapping: The Gift That Keeps on Giving (Chris Davis, Amentum): A look at wrapping open-source C libraries for LabVIEW for Redis and Kafka. These are great complementary tools to NATS.
- Shift-Left: Building Secure LabVIEW Systems from Day One (Sarah Zalusky, JKI): A practical look at security in LabVIEW architectures.
- MALpocalypse (Michael Klessens, Intel): A candid account of when measurement abstraction layers stop working at scale with validation constraints.
- Shaping the Future: AI and the Evolution of LabVIEW (Elijah Kerry, NI): An early look at Nigel, NI’s AI coding assistant for LabVIEW. Plus, lots of CI/CD tooling with LabVIEW containers.
- Our Build and Deployment Process: Using CI/CD and SystemLink (Sarah Morales, SRAM): A walkthrough of SRAM’s g-cli-based GitLab pipelines. SRAM’s approach validated the work DMC has done to automate our own pipelines with similar tooling.
Catching Up with Partners
Beyond the sessions, GDevCon is a great chance to connect with DMC’s partners. We participated in hardware and software demos from Pickering, Beckhoff, and NI. Most importantly, our partners give us insight into their project roadmaps. This allows us to be trusted advisors to our clients, knowing what to avoid for obsolescence and where to leverage new tools. You can check out some of DMC’s partnerships on our website here.
Final Takeaway
GDevCon N.A. is always a great place to learn what the test and measurement community is building, breaking, and fixing in production. The conference also gives us the opportunity to catch up with our hardware partners, and this year’s event did not disappoint!
We cannot wait to see what next year will bring.
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